On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Alan Williamson (aw2.0 cloud experts) < [email protected]> wrote:
> But for all of Google's hype, there are major short comings with it. My > biggest concern, which is being realized now, is vendor lock in. Exactly. I've been thinking about this a lot the last several days and to me the big advantages of GAE, and specifically OpenBD on GAE are: * It's free for small apps (at least at the moment, but I haven't checked the new pricing model since they went out of preview mode) * It's easy -- application-centric model, lots of cool APIs (authentication, inbound email, IM, etc.), upload and go. Very appealing. * It could be a decent way to promote CFML outside the traditional CFML community, specifically with apps for non-profits like Enlist. Drop onto GAE and go, nothing else to set up or manage. But, of course there are significant cons as we're discovering so really it's a matter of hours in the day and spending them in the best way possible for the project at large. It'd be nice if someone from Google would say "yes, this is a transition period out of preview mode and things will stabilize significantly soon," but I doubt they can make that commitment publicly even if it's true (which it may not be), and as the saying goes "stuff happens," meaning even if they have the best intentions they may still have to make breaking changes in the future for any number of reasons. As for the "free" aspect--it really is unbelievable what you can get for cheap VPSes these days, and the options in terms of vendors are huge (everything from small companies to Amazon and Rackspace). So in the case of something like non-profits who don't have budget for expensive IT infrastructure, OpenBD applications could still be made relatively drop and go as a WAR of course. With a traditional VPS you lose the GAE APIs and the Google infrastructure, but most non-profits can afford a few bucks a month for a VPS as long as someone's willing to work with them to get it up and running. And as Alan was saying, at least then you have full control over things and can move as needed, instead of being on GAE, having something break, and having absolutely no control over if or when things get fixed. That's where my mind keeps going on this. So I'm still equivocating on this obviously, just wanted to throw those thoughts into the mix. -- Matthew Woodward [email protected] http://blog.mattwoodward.com identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. as attachments. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html -- official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
