Is Google App Engine Silently Gaining Traction?

Built for hosting Web applications, App Engine services more than 500,000 daily page views, but App Engine’s 8.2 percent usage rate, based on a Forrester Research survey of developers in late 2009, trails far behind Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which has nearly a 41 percent share. Microsoft’s newer Windows Azure cloud service edges out App Engine, taking a 10.2 percent share. Forrester surveyed 1,200 developers, but only about 50 of them were actually deploying to the cloud.

The initial traction gained by Google App Engine was with Web 2.0 boys and newbies trying their hand with their projects. There were some serious social apps built on top of GAE but the traction among the developers was very slow as pointed out by the survey. After the initial days, Google announced the support for Java with enterprise developer community in mind. We didn’t see any large scale adoption of Google App Engine by Java developers initially. However, two things happened after that which seems to be evoking interest towards Google App Engine among the developers.

Google announced the roadmap for App Engine for enterprises. This was the first step taken by Google targeting the enterprise market. It was followed by a partnership with VMware where they announced support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine. They touted it as an easy way to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers could build Spring applications in a familiar and productive way and have the flexibility to choose to deploy their applications in their current private VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud partner clouds, or directly to Google App Engine.

These two announcements brought in renewed interest among developers and the announcement by Google that they will offer support and strong SLAs were attractive enough for enterprises and developers in smaller organizations to consider Google App Engine as the platform for the deployment of their apps. This trend is now confirmed by a report released by Elance, one of the top talent sourcing company, where they announced that there is a large increase (to be specific 10X increase) in demand for developers developing apps for Google App Engine. With this increase in demand, Google App Engine has even moved past Amazon Web Services as the cloud platform in demand.

The IT category however remains the top performing job category with a 44% increase in provider earnings in Q2 year over year. Fueling this growth are companies embracing cloud computing platforms and mobile devices that need to tap into highly skilled and qualified work teams. After making an entry into the top 50 skills in Q1 2010, Google App Engine, the cloud-based application development platform, showed the single largest increase in demand with over a 10x growth quarter over quarter. With this increase, Google App Engine (#37) moved past Amazon Web Services (#40) as the cloud platform highest in demand in Q2.

With Microsoft pushing hard on Azure, we are in for some good competition. If this trend holds universally, we can see that a trend towards platform services exists moving developers away from the IaaS offerings like EC2 consistent with what I say about the future of platform services. I think the next two years will be interesting to see how the market develops for platform services, in general, and Google App Engine, in particular. What do you think? Will enterprises ever take Google App Engine seriously? With today’s vFabric announcement, how serious VMware will be in their support for Google App Engine?