Russia’s go-to search engine, Yandex, has launched a free and open-source challenge to Google’s App Engine called “cocaine”.
The open-source platform as a service (PaaS), allows creation of custom cloud-hosted web apps, such as the Google-owned Panoramio location-based photo service, supporting C++, Python and JavaScript programming languages, with Java and Racket support in development.
The tool is available for download on GitHub, and can be installed on most custom hosting web servers, providing an automatic scalable platform to manage custom web apps and their processing demands.
The difference between Yandex’s cocaine and Google’s App Engine is that Google’s offering solely provides web app hosting on its own servers.
Cocaine can be run on personal web hosting anywhere in the world – and crucially, following the NSA revelations – not necessarily routed through the US.