Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2 | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2

putrats.com

23 pointsjehna111 comments

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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?

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

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)

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

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...

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

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