Having worked for a SaaS company with 500K users and +500M items in its database, the cost of just managing your infrastructure are enormous.
Recently, I have been working on two unrelated projects, but both of pretty similar sizes. One on AWS, the other on GAE. AWS is rented virtualized servers with good SaaS support (elastic load balancing, etc). But nothing, I mean nothing beats a good PaaS offer like GAE if: 1) you can fit your business domain into a schemaless, (almost) join- less, really really hard to use with transactions datastore like Big Table and 2) can deal with the current cold startups (if using Java) and the 30 seconds thread limit (but the Task Queue API pretty much solves that). More so if you're a startup where money is tight. If you can just work on features, press a button, refresh you browser and there it is, for millions to use with automatic, unlimited scaling... that's priceless. But beware, all is not easy on GAE and many pitfalls await. You need to know what you are doing and be carefull. Good luck with the startup! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine for Java" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine-j...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine-java+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java?hl=en.
