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Chandra Krintz is the CTO of AppScale Systems, an open source, cloud platform that mirrors all of the Google App Engine's APIs. You can use AppScale to run any Google App Engine application on your own private cloud infrastructure.

Since, according to Krintz, APIs aren't protected by copyright, companies like AppScale are free to reverse engineer the internal functionality of Google's App Engine. They don't have complete visibility into how features are implemented, but they can test their service by running a variety of different applications to see if it produces the same results. AppScale is also a Google Cloud Platform technology partner, so get some insight into future changes.

AppScale started as an academic research project. Chandra was interested in answering a couple of questions: How can you profile application workloads in order to make them run more efficiently? How can you simplify the application development process?

In order to test some of their theoretical performance innovations, they decided to mirror Google's App Engine. That provided them with a large set of existing applications they could use to test their ideas against real application workloads.

She also talks about some of the other features they've implemented, including auto-scaling, fault tolerance and elasticity, automatic failover and migration of running workloads.

AppScale hopes to make it easier for more and more people to get involved developing applications. They support a number of languages commonly used for web services, including Java, Python, Go and PHP.

• Read about Puppet Enterprise support for Google Compute Engine.