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Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud
jamie found a post laying to rest one potential criticism of Google's App Engine, that of the danger of lock-in to the platform. Waxy.org points out a hack called AppDrop, written by Chris Anderson, that provides a container for Google App SDK applications, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Here's Anderson's AppDrop page and his blog post announcing it.
Thank you for the link to this "Matrix" movie! I had not heard of it.
On a related note, amazon adds permanent storage functionality to EC2:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html
The main irritation I have with EC2 is that it's too low-level, but it does mean it can run just about anything, including App Engines.
App Engines will not, however, be able to run EC2. (Kind of obvious, if you know anything about either of them.)
However, I think you lose the main benefit of using App Engines if you put them on EC2 -- that being that Google gets to worry about scaling. With EC2, you have to do everything yourself, including detecting load and deciding whether or not to fire up another instance. With App Engines, you just upload your app and watch it go, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Put App Engines on EC2, and you suddenly have to build an infrastructure to support it.
So it's nice to know your app is portable, at least, but I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting this, other than as a way to keep Google on their toes -- if Google really does start to be evil, this is a nice way to port away from them.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html
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"Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud"
Not only would this sentence have been incomprehensible 10 years ago, but almost every single word in it would have been as well!
These aren't boring times, people.