Running your own GAE server

Question

The question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2505265/how-difficult-is-it-to-migrate-away-from-google-app-engine triggered me to think about this issue again.

I have read of someone running, production-wise, Google app engine development version on their own server.

My questions are:

1. Are there any security issues running GAE development on your own server in production mode and exposing it to the www? If so how to mitigate them?

2. Can GAE dev be run on Amazon? Is it possible to port my GAE apps running on Google servers to a GAE running on Amazon, without code changes, but without changing any reference in using other gdata services such as google docs, youtube, gmail, etc.

3. How to configure GAE dev server to use my own hadoop? Or to use Amazon's hadoop?

Answer 1

I don't think you really want to expose the gae development server to the www - many things aren't going to work as you expect, like performance, sending email, and authentication.

If you want to run a ported version of the production server on your own hardware you probably want to look at AppScale http://code.google.com/p/appscale/wiki/Deploying_AppScale_1_3_via_EC2

I've never used AppScale, there may be other options, but that is the one I know about.

You can choose what backing store to use for the DataStore, but it will not be the same one Google provides in their hosted version as far as I know. You're also going to have to spend a lot more time managing servers on EC2 which is not necessary if you use google's hosted service.

Answer 2

Note that GAE is not a production server. I don't understand why you want to run GAE yourself. The goal of GAE is to allow web app developers to concentrate on their applications and do fail-over and scaling for them. When you want to use EC2 e.g. for compatibility and lock-in avoidance instead, why don't you use standard Apache/Tomcat instead?