Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have.
So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they maybe might be overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes of downtime since 2000.
With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good thing for developers.
Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single box could serve using standard tools?
I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.
Can't people just say "Hey look, here's a new product which IS USEFUL to somebody out there on earth and a damn nifty one at that." That somebody in Google App Engine's case is a hacker who wants to quickly try out his hobbies without worrying about all the mess that comes with managing a web host.
But no. We must compare. And we must make noise. Lots of it.
Perhaps it gives us a way to figure out which blogs / sites to NEVER visit.
edit : The article that the author links to is clearly over the top too so I think this post is partly a very angry reaction to that article.
I just had a thought. Suppose that, hypothetically, several months ago a service very much like the Google App Engine had been released by a small YC company. And suppose that, hypothetically, that product was nearly out of beta and was already hosting apps on a scalable platform with a standard set of open-source APIs and minimal sysadmin hassle?
What level of press hysteria would this product be getting, do you think, relative to this semi-complete beta from Google that doesn't yet have a clear pricing or scaling model?
Would anyone on the Heroku team be willing to comment on the record? ;)
[Note: I haven't used Heroku enough to really compare it to Google App Engine. However, nobody has used Google App Engine enough to really compare it to Heroku...]
"Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications. Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know."
No doubt a $6/mo. account at Dreamhost will scale better than Google.
"Great post. Windows web hosting is still king and that will not change anytime soon. Web hosting has grown such a loyal following that it still going to be very popular. Most of the time businesses will choose Windows web hosting over everything else because of the respect they have for Microsoft and the products they produce."
WTF?
And anyone complaining about static files and cron jobs doesn't understand that those don't belong on your application server anyway. Google is providing scaling for the application server and the data storage. Static files and cron jobs can be easily scaled. Database servers not so much.
