Google Appengine - First Impressions

By : shabda

Google launched their EC2 competitor, Appengine yesterday, and all hell broke loose. And in about 24 hours, the 10,000 accounts were used up. Currently it is tied to only working with python, and Django 0.96.1 works out of the box. <!- - more - ->

The Good

• Python powered. Django works out of the box.
• No sysadmining chores.
• Promise of infinite scalability with no configuration. (Ah!)
• Free for now.

The Bad

• Python powered, if you want to use ruby/java/php, sorry you are out of luck.
• Your code is tied to Google. You might be able to reuse most of your code, but the DB/ORM sepcific code, ah you are out of luck. And if you are building database backed websites, well most of your most complex code talk to ORM.
• Too magical. Explicit is better than implicit. On the dev server I do not know where my data is stored. If I change the data model, the changed models are available immediately. But well, how do you do it?
• Free for now, and no way to pay for when your usage out grows the free quota limits.