On Feb 16, 2011, at 4:40 PM, howesc wrote: > for me it's all about the cost (both time cost and money cost), and there is > no comparison (if you can work with the GAE bigtable). > > 1. web2py does a good job of working with BigTable, so once you get out of > the habit of joins, many apps will just work without much change in your > coding. > 2. ec2 really is just like a private server, you still have to install the > server, configure it, create the machine image, deploy, monitor, update etc > (time expensive) > 3. GAE just runs. upload your app with a simple script (or press a button if > you use the mac GAE launcher) and it just runs. no server to setup, monitor > or deploy > 4. GAE truely auto-scales. as more requests are made it just services them > (until you reach your self-imposed budget limits) > 5. AWS EC2 needs to be monitored for traffic and it is up to you setup and > turn on additional servers (time and maybe money expensive) > 6. AWS is paid by machine minute, GAE is paid by CPU cycles used. so > always-on for AWS is at least $14 a month with a micro instance, GAE can > serve 1000's of pages a day for free. > 7. GAE background tasks is much harder than just writing scripts and cron. > so if you need background services EC2 might be better. > > if you are curious, the iphone app starmaker (http://starmakerapp.com/) talks > to a web2py GAE backend, but uses EC2 for some heavy audio processing (the > website will migrate to web2py soon), and http://www.elizabethscanvas.org/ is > complete web2py on GAE.
(nice work) I want to emphasize #2 above (while agreeing with all the rest). Keeping up to date is a must these days, for security reasons, and it's a royal pain.
