Enjoyable Deployments! Google App Engine's best feature

Wow, i have deployed several versions of this blog now to update a few things, and am completely blown away at how enjoyable and easy doing deployments with App Engine is.

Here is the command to upload a new version, and the output at the command. Note how it recognizes and only uploads changed files which is nice.

$ appcfg.py update potlatchblog/
Scanning files on local disk.
Initiating update.
Cloning 23 static files.
Cloning 31 application files.
Uploading 2 files.
Closing update.
Uploading index definitions.

I am immediately jealous and wish deployments were this easy elsewhere.
Items I am NOT having to do in order to deploy:

• Logging into remote server via ftp, and copying entire folders/files up.
• Creating change script's for DB, and uploading and running on DB.
• Figuring out which files are new and need to be deployed.
• Restarting web servers.
• Configuring and setting up Database.
• Configuring and setting up load balancing, web servers, different routes for static files.

That is a lot of work that i am NOT doing, wow. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the industry follows suit. Chris Anderson created "AppDrop" an amazon EC2 image that will host the apps developed on the SDK. Rightscale.com has easy deployments for Amazon EC2 images, including a specialized one for Ruby on Rails. Certainly Capistrano for Ruby (can also be used for non ruby apps) has raised the bar on helping with deployments, but certainly any applications that depend on traditional databases, load balancing, and web servers still require a lot more configuration than Google App Engine right now. Jumpbox.com released a virtual machine with the Google App Engine SDK installed for development purposes as well, but would not seem suitable for production to host that container somewhere else as the SDK uses flat files without indexing.

But, the service that seemed closed to me is Mosso, the new Rackspace "in the clould" service. It seems to provide the auto-distribution to many machines type concept although it doesn't appear that their DB's do the same.

This I think will continue as a trend, the ability to remove all of the setup/configuration/deployment/scalability from application development to be hidden behind a service! Yes!! Keep it coming and keep the competition going!