Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2

[jehna1]

http://putrats.com/blog/1

[davismwfl]

I don't think the comparison is equal.

You are comparing PAAS to IAAS, but AWS does have Elastic Beanstalk which would be a more direct comparison e.g. PAAS. Like App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk handles the auto scaling without having to setup and understand all the details around EC2.

[pacala → davismwfl]

Google has Google Compute Engine for their IAAS layer. https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine/

[jehna1 → pacala]

Yes, and the ManagedVM will work as a kind of middle-man between GAE and Compute Engine to give greater flexibility on configuration.

For now, it's only in beta.

[jehna1 → davismwfl]

You are quite right. Amazon does have different set of products that would also cover the pros of App Engine.

I think the comparison is more of "PaaS vs. IaaS" than "AWS vs Google Cloud Platform".

[davismwfl → jehna1]

Yep, that seems fair. You made a number of valid points, looking at it from a PaaS vs. IaaS.

[spindritf]

Personal note: I found the GAE quotas don't even count the static requests (static HTML + CSS). So this site should never cost me anything.

And there are five free SNI slots, too, right? So... you can host a static site available over ssl completely for free on GAE?

[lehtu → spindritf]

Almost. SNI slots are free - Yes, but still you have to buy the SSL certificate from somewhere (cheapest are something like $8/year - https://www.ssls.com)

[jehna1 → lehtu]

And since SNI isn't legacy-compatible, Google itself recommends to "detect browsers that do not support SNI and recommend a browser that supports it"

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/ssl#server_name...

[spindritf → lehtu]

If you can use any CA, you can get a free certificate from StartSSL https://startssl.com/

[Zaheer → spindritf]

Another note: You can host a static site on Heroku for free if you like as well. I have multiple on there.

[jehna1 → spindritf]

Practically yes. I probably should add the SSL also and make a post of it.