EC2 Vs. App Engine Vs. GoGrid Vs. AppNexus

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."

Comments

The definition of cloud computing is still vague

[strider2k]

Even after reading the wikipedia article on Cloud computing, I still can't give a good definition of it. I know the general concept but if a non-tech person asked me to describe it, I'll give a blank stare.

Wow

[BasharTeg]

Finally, a burst of common sense on the latest hype. Hosted servers have offered many of the benefits you get out of "cloud" computing for years, without locking you into a particular vendor or platform. With virtualization, you should be able to build your own images and farm them out to hosting companies, using your technology and platform of choice. Clustered ESX and SANs already give us the resource scalability we need for most systems, partitioning finishes the job. You can just pay a hosted server company to host your vmware image on their ESX cluster and scale up your storage as needed on their SAN. The key is that YOU build a scalable design.

I highly doubt a majority of businesses are going to lock themselves into one hosting provider's specific development platform just to take advantage of hosted servers that push themselves into the next layer.

OK, but let's look at the big picture

[dedazo]

Comparisons are OK, but let's look at reliability. EC2 is not the same as S3, but the recent fiasco with S3 and SQS should give people pause before considering using any other Amazon cloud services. Two of my clients were hit with this over the weekend.

I don't know what kinds of volumes (traffic and hosting) Google AE is handling at this point, but at this point I think I would trust Google more than Amazon. One of the issues with the S3 downtime for many people was the fact that Amazon itself (and all its properties) continued to run perfectly while all the sites that hosted images and other content with them failed. Does Google use its own infrastructure to host AE? I don't know, but if they do I'd trust them a hell of a lot more than AWS.

At this point I'm thinking I'm not going to recommend AWS anymore.