And the second part of your question: Azure vs. GAE. I'm not aware of any formal white papers that exist on this subject; although, I'll wager cash money that Microsoft has a couple in the pipeline somewhere. I work with both. I earn my salary being a happy trilobite in the Microsoft ecosystem, so I have the C# and ASP.NET skills to take good advantage of Azure. I'm also a hopeless Google fanatic, and I got on-board with GAE on day one.
My analysis: Azure and AppEngine are more like each other than any of the other cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon's EC2. They both give you a new programming model -- a sandbox -- to work in that encourages you to architect your applications in a way that allows them to take advantage of the instant, no-effort, on-demand scaling that is the real, compelling advantage of the Cloud. They both give applications fairly generous free quotas that give the developer and extremely-low cost-of-entry, enabling him of her to build and deploy an application without up-front and.or monthly cash outlays. If you are lucky/smart your application can be generating enough revenue to more than cover its costs before you have to start paying for resources. The main decision point between the two platforms comes down to the technology that you want to use to build your web application. Do you have access to C# and ASP.NET skills? Azure is a good choice. Do you have a Python/Java open source guru handy? AppEngine is a winner. A secondary decision point might be your choice of development platform. The Azure SDK will install and run on Vista or Windows Server 2008, and you will need a Visual Studio 2008 license. On the other hand, you can build AppEngine applications on Windows (XP, Vista, 7, etc), MacOS or Linux. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
