Windows Azure vs Amazon EC2 vs Google App Engine | Hacker News Reader

Windows Azure vs Amazon EC2 vs Google App Engine

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48 pointsvnchr17 comments

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.

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.

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

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

Out of curiosity, why? I recently made that comparison and came to the opposite conclusion, but based primarily on price.

GAE's 5million page views/month + 500MB storage for free is an unequaled price point. Basically, it's free until you get real traction.

I am language-agnostic for that particular project.

I haven't looked at GAE that much, but my main complaints are the language restrictions and the lock-in around developing for their platform. You can take an app written for Heroku and switch it your own hosting pretty easily - I don't think you could do that for GAE (I could be wrong though).

What about appscale? http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

Ah, all true. The app I have in mind won't ever need to be moved, so those constraints are acceptable.

The problem here is that Amazon/Rackspace/other VM infrastructure providers actually do market them as application platforms, not platforms to run VMs.

Nobody really cares that you have OS underneath all this, all people want to do is run some application on top of it. So all educational materials etc. instruct you to use VM as a foundation to run single app, not use it as a traditional server with multitude of services.

The end result is the same, except with EC2 et al you have to deal with traditional sysadmin tasks yourself.

I don't know if I'd say the end result is the same - I haven't found an application-centric provider (ie, Azure, Heroku, GAE) that I can perform traditional data-warehousing with yet. I do a lot of database heavy work in Postgres, most of which relies on database user functions to keep things performant, and Rackspace Server / EC2 are the only methods I've found that I can actually do this.

Sure, I have to do some basic sysadmin maintenance, but I'm also not running Facebook here. Some basic monitoring and a few shell scripts and I have a reliable system that serves my clients needs.

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.

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.

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".

"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?

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.

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

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

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