Google’s new App Engine looks like an all-in-one version of Amazon’s cloud computing stack with a few differences. Here’s how things stack up:
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Google’s App Engine | |
|---|---|
| EC2 virtual server, use any language. | Dynamic webserving, using Python |
| S3 persistent storage | Google File System (GFS) – data storage |
| SimpleDB – database | BigTable – database with queries, sorting, transactions using SQL-like language |
| Send mail using exim / sendmail / whatever on EC2 | Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email |
| Add EC2 instances as required | Automatic scaling and load balancing |
I’ll need to dig in a little deeper to this before I can declare an outright winner, but I do like the first app I played with – the humble To-Done app pictured below:
Learn more about it from Google’s official blog, Techcrunch, SAI and many others.