How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine.

(Credit: Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet)

Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google's cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google's infrastructure:

What if you realized that you didn't want to host your application on Google App Engine anymore? Good luck; almost everything you are given access to is proprietary--that means all your data is locked into BigTable in a format that isn't like a traditional relational database. It's also very tempting to use the APIs Google provides to interface with things like Google accounts.

On top of that, you will be using the "Webapp framework" that Google built that makes writing Python applications really nice--but good luck porting that to another language or putting it on a machine of your own.

On the other hand, Google is just trickling out its platform-as-a-service with support for Python. Support for other languages will follow. Whether Google would support other databases in its cloud remains to be seen.

[simonwardley]

The innovation in Google App Engine is in the provision of an open SDK. The open SDK can be reimplemented by other providers to create equivalent environments and moves us closer to a more portable utility computing world.

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/run-rabbit-run-rabbit-run-run-run.html

[thurston24]

This was a boring article. When do get flying cars?

[thurston24]

This was a boring article. When do get flying cars?

[kgkiran]

what is GWT/Gears etc. to do with Cloud?

[kflak]

This is sad. First, it is barely an article, really just a graphic and a quote from another article.
Second, whoever created the graphic has no clue. To start with Google App Engine just launched and is in beta, so it can hardly be considered 'leading' cloud software platform yet. Then there are the Social Graph API, Google Gadgets, Google Gears, GWT and Mashup Editor, none of which have anything to do with the App Engine and could be used just as well with the Amazon platform. Hopefully, CNET will find a writer with a clue to write a real comparison and maybe throw in some other alternatives such as Joyent which powers a good chunk of the facebook plugins.

[simonwardley]

Dion's graphic and his comparison of the Google environment to Amazon, has certainly ruffled some feathers. Not only can the client capabilities that Dion identifies be re-used from other environments, but the open SDK for GoogleAppEngine can be re-implemented on Amazon's environment. The importance of this is critical, because the open SDK is itself the first truly open sourced standard that we have seen released into this "platform as a service" world. The provision of such open source standards is the first step in solving the lock-in and portability issues with SaaS.

Google has got the jump on all the other providers who have basically sat on their laurels for too long. Good article, neutral and well written. Dion's graphic despite ruffling feathers is spot on.

[babylon2233]

Very bored article....GWT, Gears and GData have nothing to do with Google App Engine as you can use it anywhere. Think before you write.

[chrysaleides]

I guess, Dan simply grew tired with all that GAE buzz. Pros, cons, lock-ins, SDK and Python. Oh, scratch Python because we all know they're going to slither their way to include all languages eventually and that includes RubyonRails. Watch out Morph eXchange and other small PaaS players.

Best.
alain

[perkin22]

Wow, talk about missing the target on this one. Hey, it GAE supports most of Django and your own coding, WAF is provided for convenience. For application programmers, a datastore is very easily abstracted (like Django does) to make the code portability trivial to other database enviornments. Dumping data from big table and moving it to SQL is trivial. The relationships in your diagram make little sense. What the heck are talking about here?

Maybe web application software frameworks and cloud computing require a different expertise that the Digital Camcorder reviews. If you don't really understand what your are reviewing, maybe it would be best to review something else? (I am trying to be as polite as possible).