Google and VMWare team up for Cloud Portability

At the Google I/O 2010 conference, Google and VMware announced they were co-operating on several projects which they hope will ease development of cloud applications and improve portability, at least between the respective companies cloud offerings.

There were a number of specific announcements made by the companies. Google's App Engine will now support Java applications based on the open source Spring framework running on Google's cloud. This should allow applications developed on private or public clouds such as VMWare's vCloud and vSphere 4 to be deployed onto Google's App Engine. The SpringSource Tool Suite, an Eclipse-based development environment, will be enhanced to allow users to select any of these deployment options. SpringSource's Rod Johnson described their goal as ambitious, "a single download that will provide all you need to build Java applications with optimum productivity".

SpringSource and Google will also work together to combine Spring Roo, VMWare's open source rapid application development tool, with Google's Web Toolkit (GWT). In demonstrations at Google I/O, the developers showed the live creation of an expenses application with near real-time updating between mobile devices. Finally, Google's Speed Tracer will be integrated with VMWare's Spring Insight technology to allow developers to test end-to-end performance of cloud applications.

Google also announced Google App Engine for Business, a enterprise offering combining service level agreements, security, support and extended functionality, to allow enterprises to deploy applications to Google's cloud with more confidence. Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms said "Developers are looking for faster ways to build and run great web applications, and businesses want platforms that are open and flexible,” adding “By working with VMware to bring cloud portability to the enterprise, we are making it easy for developers to deploy rich Java applications in the environments of their choice.”

(djwm)