choosing platform as a service

Question

Hy guys,

I am currently doing the architecture of a small start-up. Due to budget constraints and trying to avoid as many problems related to deployment and scalability as possible I decided to go for a PAAS related to one of the Cloud solution providers out there. I am currently balancing between the well known Google App Engine and the SpringSource CloudFoundry. I've read articles describing each choice but I want to hear more pros and cons from the stack overflow community.

Some of the topics I need a little bit more info on are:

• Does AppEngine work well with the Spring stack? I've read an article about an announced collaboration between SpringSource and Google to allow a better compatibility between Spring libraries and the AppEngine platform. I guess that for the ORM(Hibernate) tier the answer is obvious. I think the impedance mismatch between ORMs and AppEngine Bigtable storage is huge.

• Is CloudFoundry reliable and used in production often?I know that AppEngine has gained some mommentum until now.

• Does any of the above platforms provide a way to write an application that is PCI commpliant? If not what will be the solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

small start-up... budget constraints... deployment and scalability

If you're a small start-up with budget constraints, seriously don't worry yourself now about future scalability. Worry about your small budget. When/if you get to that bridge, you can cross it then.

Remember that whatever PaaS you choose, you have to learn the api for that PaaS. Sometimes this may lengthen your time to deployment rather than help it and wear out your budget even more. If you're fairly confident about a stack like LAMP or the Microsoft one, you should try to see first if you can build it faster with the technologies you're already familiar with.

Not an answer to all your questions but something to think about.