It's still in beta, but you might also consider something like DotCloud ( http://www.dotcloud.com/) as a possible compromise between the ease/limitations of GAE and the flexibility/challenges of EC2. They handle a lot of the system administration and scaling issues for you, but you have more flexibility than with GAE. In fact, it actually runs on EC2. There's a web2py deployment tutorial: http://docs.dotcloud.com/static/tutorials/web2py/. Several Python specific hosting services are starting to crop up as well (all in beta): pydra.com, apphosted,com, ep.io, stable.io. Anthony
On Thursday, February 17, 2011 9:07:54 PM UTC-5, James Hancock wrote: > Wow, > Thank you so much for the great responses. I really love the community here > at web2py. From the discussion so far I feel I would rather go with GAE at > this point, but I do have one worry, and that is going along with the line > of, "If the app fits GAE" go with Google. How do I know if it fits our not? > > My app is in the music industry space and is going to have a lot of > potentially large audio files. Back-ups of the raw data(Really Huge!) can be > handled in another way, but sending music files compressed to mp3s to > clients is a must. GAE does provide the BlobStore and I think that would be > sufficient size wise. > > Would web2py+GAE allow me to manage all of those Blobs of audio? > > In the end I just need to sit down and try it a few times, but any tips > would be appreciated. I really don't want to have to spend as much time on > the server set up and maintenance. GAE is attractive that way, allowing me > to focus on making my app, or the part the user sees, as good as possible. I > have a hope, but I do recognize that you can only work with what works. > > This looks promising of course. http://code.google.com/apis/storage/ > > Thanks Again, > James Hancock > > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Jonathan Lundell <jlun...@pobox.com>wrote: > >> 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. >> > >
