Jeff,
I may borrow this section for talks with VC's " GAE apps are difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to port because GAE provides services at a much higher level than IaaS companies. If you write to a lower-level platform, you need to invent all those services *yourself*. This is not without CONSIDERABLE opportunity cost - it takes a lot of work to run, maintain, and scale datastores, memcaching systems, appservers. You need DBAs, you need sysadmins, you need security engineers, you need build engineers. It all adds time and cost and risk." Et All, VCs often talk about "a bet on a bet". It is my belief that Google will be a big player in the Cloud space and that part of that will be building out GAE to compete with Amazon. I picked GAE specifically because GAE leverages Google's knowledge of the things they do best, but more importantly it leverages what Google does better than anyone else. Rather than betting that I can hire a team of smart people to manage my infrastructure, engineer my database, and give me world wide points of presence I just pay an extra 2 pennies a Gig transferred, and they do it for me. That's an easy decision from a cash flow perspective. VCs are Anti-Google right now, so to those saying "does a VC really decline you funding because you aren't on EC2?" yes. Google lost a whole lot of friends with their recent changes to the Openness of Android, and the conditions of it's use. There is a fear, founded or not, in the VC community at the moment that Google will "become Apple" and that they will only let certain apps play on their network, in their search results, and on their platforms. We see this reflected in the recent changes to the rules for Google Search, Google Adwords, Adsense and Android. For a VC this is scary. You may be right in thinking "there are a million other things scarier than Google making changes" when calculating the risk to a start up, but for a VC you look at how many risks there are to failure more than the risk of each of those things happening, because you can only measure known risks, not unknown risks. Lastly, is perception. How much of the chatter on this forum is about if we should move to HR, or if MS can be made to work. How much is about if there is a way to know if some warning light went off at Google when there is down time? Do you remember the thread about me saying that if you are going to switch from one app to another on a domain managed by Apps for Domains, that you should have a paid account and a CSR on the line when you do it? Try to find how to get your Apps For Domains Pin, and how to get someone on the phone at Google. I failed to mention that the CSR I talked to doing that moved didn't know what an "appengine" is and I had to have them find someone who did. If you have ever had a Google Docs outage, or if you were one of the 150k people who had their email disappear 2 months ago in the Great Gmail Failure of 2011, you can see how people would not trust Google with their enterprise/mission critical applications. Azure sucks in so many ways, it is more expensive, it has more downtime, and it doesn't scale up and down as quickly as GAE. But my projects on Azure run just as well on a Windows Server farm, and when things go Boom I can get a live human on the phone in 2 minutes. If something needs a Kick I can get it. No digging through the forums to find out which URL I need to file a ticket on, no wondering if someone dealt with my ticket, a real person on the phone says, "I have taken care of that for you Brandon, is there anything else I can do for you? No? Well we apologize that this happened and I have issued you a credit for today's services. You have a great day and thank you for using Microsoft Azure". EC2 is cheaper, if you can get all the products you need set up, and talking to each other it runs like a champ, and is very portable. We moved from Storm On Demand, off to RDS, and then we made a sand box on Storm On Demand because it was cheaper and we didn't need the redundancy, and then I pushed the button and moved that sand box to my laptop as a 2 virtual machines. EC2 Support has a Thick Indian Accent, but they are smart and they do answer the phone. Ikai, Nick, Wesley, and the rest of the Googlers in this forum are great... And I'm sure they'd be happy to give us all their personal cell phone numbers so it would be easy to get problems resolved.... But then they'd get nothing done. Google's always been in the business of avoiding technical support by building tech that just works... and that is a Great philosophy, but it makes people in the investment world crazy, because when bad things happen they want to know who to blame and when they will be fixed and how it will never happen again. -Brandon -- 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.
