Steven's Weblog

For one of my current projects, we’re investigating two ‘cloud computing’ services for hosting, Google AppEngine and Amazon EC2. It’s getting pretty interesting to learn about the good and bad points of the platforms, see them evolve, and imagine what’s going on behind the scenes to make them work.

My highest-level impressions so far are:

• they’re both going to provide more hardware, bandwidth and reliability than you could imagine building in your server room, unless you happen to have billions of dollars to spare
• EC2 is the easier to wrap your head around if you have significant experience in building servers from the metal
• GAE is the easier to wrap your head around if you have no experience in web applications or server building
• GAE (when it starts charging) scales smoothly, costwise, from zero up. EC2 has a ‘pay-for-what-you-use’ model, BUT, if you want to do anything at all and have it available 24×7, you have to pay for your instance 24×7 even if there’s no traffic, so you’re looking at at least $72/mo. Not a problem for a well-funded project, but for someone diddling around with a little idea and paying with their own credit card, it’s going to be a problem.
• EC2 is all kinds of flexible, GAE is all kinds of simple. GAE does force you into a new programming model if you’re used to LAMP or the like, but everything else becomes super-simple once you get past that. Scaling, server maintenance, geo-distribution, etc. are all just done for you, whereas with EC2, you get the raw tools to deal with those problems, but you have to patch it all together. There are tools out there to help with that, of course, but EC2 itself is not enough.

We’ll see how the services progress and how my understanding of the capabilities and tradeoffs progress with them…