I'm going to deploy my application on one of them, and have no idea which is better.
+3
A:
Amazon's Cloud services, at this time, are much more general and flexible, while Google App Engine essentially fits some specific classes of applications that can live within its specific limitations (those limitations are being gradually relaxed, as GAE adds features and allows you to pay to exceed certain quotas, but that does not mean GAE will become a completely general-purpose platform the way Amazon's services are).
If your app can live within GAE's limitations, then GAE presents advantages: free up to a certain quota, almost no system configuration / administration overhead, etc. But if you need total flexibility -- for example, if you want to code part of your apps in C or C++, and that's just one of many examples -- then GAE is not suitable, while Amazon (for a price, in both money and sysadm overhead) can accomodate you.
Alex Martelli
2009-06-20 15:59:56
But I don't see why Amazon EC2 is related with "cloud",it seems just like ordinary vps..
Shore
2009-06-21 00:17:13
You can provision as many instances as you want, *dynamically* -- big ones, medium ones, in-between -- rapidly start them up, rapidly tear them down, keep them as long as you want (and are willing to pay for;-) -- what "ordinary vps" do you know, that lets you do THAT kind of little trick, hm?-)
Alex Martelli
2009-06-21 02:55:21
Is there any data support for this?Sometimes 1000 remarks can't compete for 1 data.
Shore
2009-06-22 02:50:36
There's a teraword of information and documentation about each service, and it's easy (and, for app engine, free) to sign up and try both yourself. You can just as easily read all sort of analysis by the usual industry analysts, e.g. at http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/Comparing-EC2-App-Engine-Azure. What "data support" are you looking for? And, I'm STILL waiting to hear about the "ordinary vps" you think are just like EC2 (dynamic provisioning and everything) -- cat got your tongue?-)
Alex Martelli
2009-06-22 03:05:05
Thank you Alex.I've learned much following your link.BTW,is there a cloud-computing market sharing chart available?
Shore
2009-06-23 19:54:44
Alex Martelli
2009-06-24 02:04:21
hope this link helps,but I'm not so trusting it though:http://www.istrategylabs.com/buzz-monitoring-google-vs-microsoft-sentiment-analysis/
Shore
2009-06-24 15:44:24
@Shore, thanks, interesting brand-comparison approach -- not that it can say much about market share (plus, Amazon's been selling ec2 for a while - s3 is just a storage solution, so they're comparing apples to oranges;-).
Alex Martelli
2009-06-25 01:43:52
A:
If you've already written your app, and just want to deploy it, I'd have to say AWS is your best bet. AWS is a platform (or rather, EC2 is), and deploying an existing app is easy. App Engine, on the other hand, provides an entire development environment, at a much higher level of abstraction, which has significant advantages when it comes to scaling, but requires you to have written your app to work on it.
Nick Johnson
2009-06-20 19:08:20
I don't see why Amazon EC2 is related with "cloud",it seems just like ordinary vps.What do you think?
Shore
2009-06-21 00:17:55
An individual EC2 instance is more or less the same, yes. The 'cloud' is a factor because you can provision and turn up and down as many instances as you want with very short notice.
Nick Johnson
2009-06-22 07:47:22