Google's App Engine lets you build, deploy, and run Web applications on Google's infrastructure. But what if you wanted to create a Google App Engine experience in your own data center? Work is under way to make that possible.One technology company is working on a way to provide "a complete wrapper around App Engine," with the goal of recreating the App Engine environment outside of Google's data center, according to Google product manager Pete Koomen. "It would let you take an App Engine application and run it on your own servers if you needed to," he says.

Koomen declined to name the company involved, but my sense is that it's just one of several options that will become available. The subject came up in a discussion of public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds that are a public-private combination.

One approach is described in this article on the App Engine site written by German software engineer Andi Albrecht and published in October that walks developers through the process of porting an application written for App Engine in Django, a Python framework, to other environments. "The helper application provides a Django-based implementation of the App Engine APIs and its aim is to minimize the effort of porting your App Engine application to run anywhere using Django," writes Albrecht.

Koomen points to other efforts to create an open source "compatibility layer" that bridges Google technologies such as BigTable with non-Google technologies as evidence that Google supports the concept of hybrid clouds.

IT pros should keep that in mind as they weigh their options for putting workloads in the cloud. While it's possible for startups and SMBs to push most or all of their applications into the cloud, that becomes harder to do in larger companies. Hybrid clouds will be the reality for many, so it's time to start thinking about just how you'll create them.