An ode to Sharkon

In addition to introducing Compute Engine in GA this week, we launched a new website for Google Cloud Platform and a new set of Cloud Platform logos:

Now, none of this changes anything for you. New logos aren’t going to help you serve more requests-per-second (good news, you can already top 1 million). And they aren’t going to allow you to scale your caching capacity indefinitely or reduce your datastore costs (good news, dedicated memcache in App Engine already does that). And they aren’t going to provide you with an analytics tool that lets you query terabytes of data in seconds (that’s what Big Query is for).



But, they do allow us to reflect on what we have been able to do over the past 5 years with Google Cloud Platform.



In April 2008, when we launched Google App Engine, we introduced the first modern Platform as a Service. In fact, the term barely existed at the time. And, given that we were launching a new product, we needed a new icon. The marketing team decided that what App Engine needed was an engine. And because it was Google, the engine should be in the shape of a ‘G’. So they did what marketers do, and made a bunch of versions of this idea:



There was only one problem: none of the people who had built App Engine actually liked the logo. It didn’t represent the next-generation technology that they were building. In fact, it looked like a combination of a printing press (which Gutenberg first started tinkering with in 1436) and an internal combustion engine (conceived of by Huygens in 1680 and first built by Rivaz in 1807). It didn’t reflect a product that allowed you to deploy an application with one-click, scale it effortlessly to serve millions of users, and fundamentally change how web applications are developed.



So, three of App Engine’s early engineers went back to the whiteboard. Literally. Rafe Kaplan, Alon Levi and Brett Slatkin thought about what the product should look like. And it wasn’t a printing press. And it wasn’t an internal combustion engine. And it wasn’t shaped like a G. These are some of the concepts that Brett sketched on the whiteboard in Building 44 at the Googleplex in Mountain View:




The team was much happier with these; they felt like they were inspiring. And these whiteboard sketches were sent to a graphic designer who came back with three concepts for a final logo:

Well, no one really loved these either. In the words of one member of the App Engine team, “A looks like a fan, B looks like a washing machine, and C looks like a washing machine with fins.” So, to cut a long story short, they did some more revisions, and eventually Google designer Micheal Lopez landed on a logo that everyone (well, most people) loved:

It evoked both the power as well as simplicity of App Engine. To Rafe Kaplan, the new icon looked like a shark, so he called it ‘Sharkon’ - a name that quickly spread among the team.



And, for the past 5 years, Sharkon has been the face of App Engine. It’s found it’s way into many forms - whether made into a plush doll, knit into yarn, painted using acrylics by artist Nan Washare, done in a single brushstroke of calligraphy, poured into latte art, or made into a punch-card reader when we announced on April Fools Day in 2009, that App Engine would be supporting Fortran:





Over these 5 years, a lot else has happened. App Engine has grown to support new runtimes, including Python, Java, Go and PHP. And, we’ve introduced a host of other cloud computing products, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery and others. Together, this family makes it easy for you to take advantage of the scale, speed, and consistency of Google’s infrastructure. And, these services work great together - so that you can truly take advantage of an integrated Cloud Platform.



The new App Engine logo is designed to fit in alongside the rest of the Cloud Platform family, while still paying homage to Sharkon. These new logos represent the toolkit in your garage. They’re the nuts and bolts with which you can create just about anything. So, pick up any one of them (or all of them) and start building.



Oh, and watch this space. We’ve got more exciting announcements coming up - the kind that go deeper than a logo refresh.



-Posted by Benjamin Bechtolsheim, Product Marketing Manager