

Windows Azure vs Amazon EC2 vs Google App Engine - vnchr
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/791447/windows-azure-vs-amazon-ec2-vs-google-app-engine

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javery
I hate seeing EC2 compared to Azure or GAE - it really doesn't make sense. Do
you want to manage your own instances or do you want to just push up an
application? Make that decision and then decide between EC2/Rackspace or
GAE/Azure

Also, Heroku is missing here - I would use that before Azure or GAE.

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goodness
You can use EC2 in somewhat similar ways to GAE. They have Elastic Map Reduce
(which runs the MapReduce side of Hadoop) and SimpleDB/S3 for storage.
SimpleDB is even one of the backends that Django nonrel supports. The only
real instance you have to manage is the web/app server. Amazon also offers a
level of free service:

<http://aws.amazon.com/free/>

So I'd say they are at least somewhat comparable.

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th0ma5
It is important to note that this feature started today, and is only available
to new customers.

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kenjackson
This post is a bit old. And, for example, there were some changes with Azure
announced last week at PDC, like the VM roles. But this article is a good
baseline.But definitely make sure to look up the latest on the various
services before making a decision.

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TomOfTTB
I'm not even sure it's a good baseline. For example one of the discussions
involves EC2 and .Net and the main criticism of EC2 is it doesn't support
Windows 2008. Anyone who knows EC2 will tell you that hasn't been true for a
while and that's kind of an important distinction.

I don't keep a close enough eye on App Engine to know about it but as someone
who knows Azure and EC2 both of those are mis-represented here and that makes
this next to useless imho.

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gluegadget
I just thought you might want to know that web applications hosted on GAE are
not accessible to Iranians, and presumably to people of other countries in
OFAC sanction list.

Google responds with a "403 Forbidden".

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paolomaffei
"On GAE Mail just works. At the time of writing, Azure doesn't offer SMTP out
so you need a 3rd party server. "

Eh, not really, since GAE IP addresses were abused by spammers, mails go out
but how many of them hit the inbox?

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smhinsey
In my experience you need to use a third party vendor like SendGrid regardless
of what cloud platform you use. This is probably increasingly true of
traditional hosts as well.

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js2
See also [http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/26/end-to-end-
perform...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/26/end-to-end-performance-
study-of-cloud-services.html)

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vnchr
Reposted from Programming SubReddit by user PanosJee:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dzegn/windows_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dzegn/windows_azure_vs_amazon_ec2_vs_google_app_engine/)
(I'll delete mine repost if he posts)

~~~
vnchr
OP on Reddit didn't mind (I asked him). But give credit where credit is due.

