Wowza on the Google App Engine

[system]

Google’s App Engine was introduced at Google’s I/O event in May last year as a Python-only app hosting environment, but it was stated that other languages would follow.

At this year’s I/O, May 27-28th, it is widely expected that Java support will be added to GAE:

Java Coming Soon to Google’s App Engine

This will be an adapted version of Java and modifications would be required to port Wowza, is that something that the company would be interested in?

Personally, I think Wowza on GAE could be huge. It is a more locked-down environment than, say, Amazon EC2, but the advantage is that it is much easier to set up, it scales with much finer granularity, saving money, and it does so automatically, making planning much easier and saving downtime.

GAE gives a generous free daily allowance of 10 gigabytes in, 10 gigabytes out and 46 hours of CPU time enough to keep most small projects going until they take off. After that daily allowance, cost per gigabyte is $0.10 in, $0.12 out and CPU time is $0.10 per CPU hour. Storage is $0.15 per month.

Even without the free allowance, equivalent to $6.80 per day, Google seems much cheaper than Amazon for bandwidth out and pretty much the same for everything else. I have no idea how an of GAE CPU time compares to Amazon’s $0.10 Small instance, but I’m guessing that it will be beefier.

Wowza would be one of the most interesting things happened on the newly Java-energized GAE, it would bring a draw a lot of interest and, hopefully, customers to Wowza.

Java on GAE won’t be happening until next month but it would be interesting to hear opinions on this.

[donnacha_donnacha]

Oh, actually, it has already been officially announced, last night:

Official Google Blog: New features and an early look at Java for App Engine

… along with a bunch of videos explaining everything.

Please take a look and let’s discuss whether it might be possible to port Wowza onto GAE.

[Charlie_Good]

This is very interesting. Something we will look into and report back when we have a plan or a more firm opinion.

Charlie

[Sam_Gendler]

I don’t think it is possible. I just did a little reading on it today, but much of the functionality necessary to build a server process simply isn’t possible on app engine. Any AppEngine ‘application’ can only consist of short lived http requests on port 80 and 443. You can’t create your own threads or listen on your own socket and you can’t have a long lived process or the AppEngine environment will kill the thread it is running in. There is no file system write access, so all streams would have to be stored in the google datastore, which probably has size limits and will require that each movie being streamed live entirely in memory on the server.

But since costs really arent much different from ec2, why not run the webapp that will serve up the flash player on AppEngine but have the player connect to a wowza instance running on EC2, where you can easily include the load balancing module which definitely will not run within google’s limited java functionality.