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Prediction: Python to overtake Rails at startups

April 8, 2008

The image “http://www.gilesbowkett.com/images/python.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. Google App Engine, the search giants answer to Amazon’s web services, is breaking onto the scene in a big way. Google’s service provides all the building blocks necessary to launch a web application - the Google way that is. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will note that the infrastructure offers quite a bit for free for startups including:

The first 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

So you can launch your ‘idea’ for free. No need to pay anything - until you surpass 5 million pageviews per month (thats a lot). The catch? Your software needs to be written in Python instead of Rails. Oops. Guess what startups who have no coding history will choose? Rails or Python? Unless Google opens up to Rails I suspect we will be seeing more and more Python applications. What do you think?

(note: Kevin always liked Python better than Rails)

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups ·

Comments »

They’ll add other languages later, but I am curious how long it will take and why they went with Python. Any thoughts?

Comment by stacey higginbotham — April 8, 2008 @ 8:57 am

Stacey, I assume it has to do with the fact that Google hired Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language back in 2005. Google’s App Engine will work with other Python frameworks: EZT, Cheetah, ClearSilver, Quixote, Django and CherryPy.

Comment by Alexander Muse — April 8, 2008 @ 10:16 am

I don’t know if I would launch a new idea on Google. Besides giving away all my user/customer information (Google requires this as part of signing up), I’d also get stuck with their proprietary stack with no trivial way to migrate out of it.

Comment by Magnus — April 8, 2008 @ 12:58 pm

Rails aaginst Python that is, huh?

But why do I get the feeling that Google’s just flexing its muscle, or what?

I highly doubt that today’s ‘it’ sites convert to Python so I’m sure GAE would provide support for other languages. But then companies like Morph
already does this for Rails … so no need to wait for Google to add
Ruby/Rails support, and they have a free developer account so you can
host your app until it gains traction.

Best.
alain

Comment by friarminor — April 8, 2008 @ 4:59 pm

A good deal of Google code is written in Python. It is reasonably performant for what it does and is well supported and implemented. If you’re interested in how Google uses it internally (warning: a bit long and technical), this blog post has a good breakdown:

http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

This move is in line with their support for the language, which is why they hired Guido, too. I agree that it’ll be interesting to see if Python gets any extra buzz from this on the developer side. One other thing I have to note is that the Python strategy seems to provide many more well known options in web frameworks (some noted above) than Ruby (Rails).

Comment by Hippy — April 8, 2008 @ 6:17 pm

I generally read your posts as soon as they come across since I’m in Dallas. Unfortunately I got to this one a bit late, but it was nevertheless very interesting to read your post in my feed reader, come here to comment and see that one of our customers has beat me to it!

My original message was simply going to be that you don’t need to switch from Ruby to Python to take advantage of a “cloud” platform that abstracts the underlying infrastructure (like GAE vs. AWS). Our Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces allow you to deploy your Ruby on Rails applications to a an elastic, cloud platform, using standard Ruby and Rails tools and your regular development environment and methods.

Alain is correct that we give developers a free account to deploy your Ruby on Rails applications and, if they gain traction, to instantly move to production and scale from there.

Frankly, there is enough chatter on the limitations of GAE that nothing else needs to be said. In my opinion, Google entering this space simply verifies that the market for Platform-as-a-Service is legitimate and that we are in the right place. For us, that right place also means a focus on Rails, since it is such a hot technology.

Comment by Lincoln Murphy — April 10, 2008 @ 10:31 am

Good stuff, thanks for all of the comments. :)

Comment by Alexander Muse — April 10, 2008 @ 11:11 am

Prediction: Google will add more languages to AppEngine once the platform matures. AppEngine isn’t, however, the answer for every startup. It’s run in a sandbox, doesn’t support all the good python libraries/modules and most of all you can’t get root. Startup hacker-types loving getting root access. AppEngine seems to be great for the smaller teams with very limited resources. The more tech-savvy groups with specific needs will remain with a custom ec2/s3/sqs/simpledb solution. Besides, who do you contact when your AppEngine-hosted app goes down? It’s not like they have a dedicated support team like the Amazon folks on their AWS forums. I once got a personal call from an Amazon support person when I posted a question about FPS on their forum. just my thoughts..

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Prediction: Python to overtake Rails at startups

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