

What bothers me about Google’s AppEngine - moorage
http://matthewpaulmoore.com/post/48621135502/what-bothers-me-about-googles-appengine

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dragonwriter
_AppEngine is a highly opinionated product; "use our approved stack or use
another provider."_

Its a PaaS rather than a IaaS, so its naturally somewhat opinionated, but its
not like Google doesn't have a wide-open IaaS offering. Its more "use the
stack we provide for you in our PaaS or build your own stack on our IaaS" than
"use our stack or use another provider".

 _That’s compounded by the fact that the majority of applications on Google’s
AppEngine are going to find themselves being forced to also use Google’s
BigTable implementation. Well, that’s a pretty huge investment on the
developers’ part, because BigTable isn’t really a standard that’s easily
deployable on other cloud providers._

Developers don't use BigTable directly, they use the Datastore API. There are
third-party open-source implementations of the AppEngine Datastore API that
use backing stores other than Google BigTable, which can deployed on the IaaS
of your choice.

 _If anything, AppEngine is more accurately compared to Amazon Elastic
Beanstalk, not lower-level services like Amazon EC2 or Amazon OpsWorks._

Yes, AppEngine is a comparatively high-level, PaaS cloud offering. Google's
IaaS equivalent to EC2 is Google Compute Engine.

This article basically seems to be complaining that App Engine is bad because
it doesn't have the wide open flexibility of an IaaS offering like EC2, which
is an odd complaint, because AppEngine is a PaaS, and Google offers an IaaS if
that's what you are looking for.

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cyberpanther
Don't forget you can use App Engine with Google's Cloud SQL which is basically
MySQL.

App Engine is definitely more limiting just not as limiting as you think. And,
what you fail to mention is what you get in return for these limitations. You
get a system that scales with no configuration or maintenance necessary. Even
Elastic Beanstalk needs to be configured and maintained because it is more
open.

App Engine is really a web developers dream platform. It is just a matter of
whether your app will work with its limitations.

