Having administered a small (4 machine) cluster for a minor web app, I appreciate what it takes to do the job properly. EC2 takes hardware out of the equation, but you still need to know your OS, middleware and database like the back of your hand, and you need to continuously manage it. Scaling databases is another issue, and is not for the faint hearted.
And then along comes Google offering a managed environment, and a proven scalable datastore - at virtually no cost. There is undeniably a learning curve to effectively use the datastore, and there are system limitations that can be frustrating when you first encounter them. In some cases these will preclude using Appengine exclusively, but as another poster mentioned, you can fairly easily build hybrid systems with other servers. I'd strongly recommend hiring someone familiar with Appengine to advise you about where you might strike problems, and how you might work around them. We decided a year ago to build a new business on Appengine, despite the pre-release tag. I'm now sure we made the right decision - we can concentrate on the application and the business - what we do best - and leave the system, database and network admin to Google. The app has proven very popular, and we are in the process of launching in North America. If it hits Oprah, I'll be guzzling champagne - instead of trying to figure out how to replicate databases across EC2 instances. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
