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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

I know there's google people floating around HN, does anyone know what the priorities are like as far as adding more services is concerned? I've been planning on launching on AWS, but I'd prefer google. But there's still tons of services google doesn't offer (or I can't find reference to at least). It is basically just alternatives to EC2, S3 and the database thing right now right? Are there plans for replacements for SQS, SNS, SES, route53, cloudwatch, etc?

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It's been years since Google actually released something useful on GAE. All while AWS has blown it away with an array of new systems e.g. SWF, EMR, Glacier, Transcoder.

I always liked what Google was getting at with GAE i.e. a simpler, more cohesive AWS. But it just doesn't seem like Google has its heart in it. And we all know what happens to products like that at Google.

> It's been years since Google actually released something useful on GAE.

Do try to keep up: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNot...

When it comes to my (virtual) infrastructure, I want to go with a platform that's stable (including in terms of price), well-tested by others who have similar needs as me, and has a lot of documentation / articles / questions online. And I would never go with a platform that doesn't have all other services that I may need (as you mentioned). Why wait for google replacing SES when you can just go with AWS? MHO, obviously!

Google's offering is significantly faster, and is marginally cheaper is it not? I've had relatively poor experiences with the quality of documentation/articles/questions for AWS, I still haven't managed to get a simple s3 setup working to allow people to upload files through their browser for example. I'm not waiting for google, we're not ready to launch yet. I am just wondering if google will have some of the extra services by the time we are ready.

GCE seems like another "me too" product. The PaaS thing didn't work out so well for Google or Microsoft. When they realised AWS was much more popular with IaaS they simply set about copying AWS. They are years behind AWS and by the time they catch up with what AWS has today the world would have moved on to bigger and better features.

So many new "me too" clouds, Azure, Rackspace, HP, even Oracle, and now Google.

I'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations.

Here is the run down on the runtime services available in the Java SDK (I think that it and Python are the most complete, not everything is available for Go last I checked): https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis

This is a good supplement: https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips

So queues and email are in, messaging might be served by Google Cloud Messaging or the recently announced Trello partnership. I don't think anything quite like CloudWatch or Route53 is available.

I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor so I wouldn't expect them to be entirely equivalent. On the other hand more control over the runtime lets them offer things that are entirely out of scope for AWS (channels).

As far as updates, the blog shows the the SDK gets new features fairly frequently: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/

>I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor

Yeah, I have no intention of using GAE, they don't support haskell anyways. GCE is the direct equivalent of EC2, they have an EBS and S3 equivalent as well. I that core puts them in a pretty direct competitor position.

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