To use App Engine, you need a Google Account. Once you have your Google Account, you can enable App Engine services by entering in your cell phone number and carrier on the App Engine setup page. Google will send you an SMS with an access code you need to enter into the website. This activation scheme is Google’s way of restricting you from creating multiple App Engine accounts.

When you have received your code via SMS and entered your activation code, you can begin creating applications. The following appears after you have activated your App Engine account.

When you click “Create an Application” you can enter an application alias where your new application will be hosted on the appspot.com domain.

If your alias is available, you can then create an application and deploy to your new cloud application. In this example, we created the alias “pearlcompanies”.

Since we’re running in a windows environment, our next step is to setup Eclipse and the Google Plugin for Eclipse to deploy to our cloud application. We used Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) in our example. After unpacking the Eclipse folder contents, we tell Eclipse where to get the Google Plugin. We add the available software site “http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.5″ to our Eclipse Preferences.

Download and Install both the Google Eclipse plugin and GWT and App Engine SDKs.

After installing the Google SDKs, we can create Google App Engine projects (Web Application Projects). The nice thing here is that we can run the cloud application locally and verify it before deploying remotely to the cloud. The Google SDK comes with the components necessary to simulate the cloud environment.

Once we have our web project, we can begin creating our WAR package for deployment into the App Engine cloud service. The current App Engine supports Java and Python environments, but in this example we are going to use the Java runtime. Since we’re demonstrating deployment here, we are not going to use any servlets, but simply an HTML front-end. After changing the index.html page in our web project, we click the App Engine icon in the Eclipse toolbar.

After clicking the icon, we are prompted with the deployment wizard which has our Google account credentials and a link to the App Engine project settings. Click the project settings and enter the Application ID and version for the application (use the alias we setup previously).

Click ‘Ok’ on the properties dialog, and then enter your login credentials. Once you click ‘Deploy’, your application will be pushed into the Google App Engine cloud. You can view and manage your applications that are live in the Google App Engine site.

You can view the clone of our Pearl Companies website which we deployed to pearlcompanies.appspot.com. Please let us know about your App Engine experiences. We look forward to using this new powerful platform.

After typing in the word Cloud and running my search, I had 2 engines that had the first result taking you to Wikipedia to talk about Cloud computing. The other search engine still took you to Wikipedia, but it was talking about the visible liquid droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere that we all know and love. Which one was that you might ask? Go try it for yourself and see.

The fact one search engine out of those three did not list Cloud computing as result number 1 actually surprises me a little. These days everyone is talking about it and looking at how their organization can potentially benefit from moving certain services, or applications to the cloud. Plus, people don’t get that much revenue for advertising cumulus clouds. I’d say cloud computing services are more likely to be profitable.

With cloud computing though comes one challenge. Especially as a service provider, how much storage do you need if you’re offering these hosted services? Well, obviously it has to be wicked scalable, the cheaper the better, and reliable! Tough combination…cheap, and reliable? Ya, I said it…. I found a blog post the other day from a company called BackBlaze (http://backblaze.com ). They’re just your basic online backup company that provides services to individuals that want to backup their important files and not worry about hard-drive armageddon. Now, don’t confuse BackBlaze with a company like Ubistor (http://ubistor.com) that specializes in online backups but are tailored a lot more specifically to businesses. Same idea, different markets.

Moving forward, BackBlaze realized that to offer this service, they need scalable, cheap, and reliable storage for their customers. Using a little ingenuity, I’d say they were able to meet those requirements.

WARNING: CAPS LOCK EXCITEMENT – 67 TERABYTES for around $8,000!!! Wow. Now, before we all rush out to buy everything on their B.O.M… read the article in its entirety before blowing your paychecks and buying up lottery tickets.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

There are two ways I’ve found to connect to SQL Azure. The first is using sqlcmd, a command-line utility and the second is using SSMS query window. Unfortunately, there is no current support for using SSMS “Connect to Database Engine”, but Microsoft is getting much closer to creating rich support for their new cloud-based storage with the latest CTP.

Here is a sample of using the sqlcmd utility. You can substitute your login for <loginname> and your server for <servername>

sqlcmd -U <loginname>@<servername> -S <servername>.ctp.database.windows.net -d master

There are limits to the current SQL Azure CTP for long-running queries and idle connections (e.g. five minute timeout), but overall you can get a good taste for the cloud model. There will be latency associated with using a remote database instead of a local network database, but Microsoft is recommending that you also host your web applications on Windows Azure to get the best performance.

One improvement that I hope to see that will help secure these public endpoints is some sort of whitelist (think about how some web services are secured today) to restrict which users can access the SQL Azure databases open on TCP 1433. Some users have already mentioned this potential security flaw.