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Comment by mmelin | Hacker News Reader

Wow. The benefits of Google App Engine without the limitations? Sure, an app on GAE is probably cheaper in terms of monthly expense, but factor in the development costs for a Java team unfamiliar with App Engine and Beanstalk is probably a far better investment.

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no, with different limitations I believe, e.g. no cool google storage, but only SDB or RDB (which may be ok anyway)

If you can use JDBC or SQL in your Java app with these Amazon solutions and not have to learn a new datastore API that's a pretty huge advantage.

Sure... until your database is your bottleneck.

Exactly, which for many apps will be quite a while or will never happen.

AWS is not without it's "cool" storage: SimpleDB, S3, RDS. Not to mention, being within AWS with full control of your machines, you can setup any database you'd like.

To me, the limitations of App Engine are things like having to use a crippled version of the programming environment (as you don't get your own computer, so they've neutered things down to something "safe") and a bunch of limitations on CPU time, request length, and background processing.

(edit: I had somehow read what you said to mean, "no, but with these new limitations", so arguably I should just delete my response here, but I think that a specific list of things might be valuable still)

On the pro side, GAE gives you a pretty big free quota - http://therealurl.appspot.com handles >1m requests/day for about $4 a week.

I agree. It's definitely meh without a useful and truly scalable database. That's the hard part. SimpleDB isn't particularly useful, and RDB isn't particularly scalable.

Don't worry, by the time you'll be so big that you scale out of RDS, you'll be able to build your own datastore.

Use MongoDB. It's web-scale.

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