1. Migrating an Enterprise Application to
Google App Engine – Journey Notes
Narinder Kumar & Vikas Hazrati
11/11/2010

2. Agenda

Starting Context and Goals

Evaluation Criterias

Migration Journey

Problems and Solutions

Current State

Conclusions
2

3. How we started

Standalone Web Application for Employee
TimeSheet and Invoicing Management

Has been in Production since 2007

> 6,00,000 downloads

Hugely successful in SME's
3

4. Pain Points

Enterprises not keen in maintaining the
Product in-house

Rolling Out New Features / Patches was
long, time-consuming and Error prone

Had to maintain multiple development
versions for supporting specific
requirements

Limited Reach
4

5. Possible Solutions

Cloud Approach

Java Web Start
We decided to take SaaS route
5

6. Cloud Alternatives
6

7. Evaluation Criteria - 1

Technology Prespective

Support of different Frameworks

Ease of Development & Deployment

User Community

8. Evaluation Criteria - 2

Business Perspective

Cost

Maintenance Overhead

Time To Market

Vendor Lock-In

Data Security & SLA's

9. Evaluation Criteria - 3

Future Trends

Feature Offering Pipeline

Collaboration and combined offering with
potential partners

10. Preferred Solution
10

11. Why GAE ?
11

12. GAE – Technology Perspective

Does not impose new Language / Framework

PaaS

Everything is ready for use

Lot of widely used frameworks are supported

Several useful Services available off the shelf

Eclipse Plugin, Good Local Simulation & Testing
Support

Restrictions Imposed by Platform
12

13. GAE – Business Perspective

PAYG Model, No initial set up cost

No set-up and subsequent Maintenance
effort

Shortest Time-To-Market cycle

Clearly defined Data Redemption paths and
improving further

Recent Introduction of SLA's, should
improve further

Replication & Failure
13

14. GAE – Future Trends Prespective

Heavy and continued Investment from
Google to make GAE an attractive platform
for Enterprise scale applications

Recent Tie-Up with VMWare to jointly offer
solutions

Introduction to SLA's

Addition of New Services in the portfolio
14

15. 15

17. JPA is not the same JPA
17

18. JPA specific examples
entity groups transaction restrictions
no m:n
query restrictions relationship
Each entity has a path of parent-child relationships from a root
entity to itself
18

19. Framework Support
19

20. Framework Support
20

21. Multi-Tenancy
21

22. Multi-Tenancy
22

23. Memcache
23

24. Memcache
24

25. Memcache
25

26. Memcache
26

27. Lock-In
27

28. Avoiding Lock-In
28

29. Cold Start Problem
29

30. Cold Start Problem
30

31. Cold Start Problem
31

32. Where are we today ?

Application Successfuly migrated to GAE

Currently running in Public Beta

Beta Users are happy and given good
feedback

Client is happy taking the first step towards
SaaS application
32

33. Conclusions

Development effort during migration was
not huge

Significant Cost Savings

For End Users

For Product Development Company

Reduced Time-To-Market

Reduced Maintenance

Wider Audience
33

34. SaaS is here to stay and grow
34

35. www.inphina.com
http://thoughts.inphina.com