Final GAE vs AWS architectural decision

Question

I know this has been asked one way or another before, but most of the main issues to do with GAE stability seem to have been asked around the end of 2008, early 2009, or aren\'t

Answer 1

I've never worked with AWS-EC2 so I'm going to share my knowledge just on the Google App Engine side.

1. Google App Engine is not meant to be a CDN; though it can serve static content through its powerful infrastructure providing caching close to the users, it does not guarantee the same kind of high quality and high availability service of a real CDN because it's not part of its duties.
   Further data:
   • Maximum size of a file using the BlobStore service: 2 Gigabytes
   • Maximum size of a static file: 10 Megabytes
   • Currently App Engine always returns 200 status for static files even on Conditional gets (you have to rely on third party caching library like cirruxcache for example).

2. Recently Google App Engine team has shut down the App Gallery for one simple reason: too many Toy Apps!
   Google wants to counteract this tendency showing successful businesses case studies; here are some of them:

   • BuddyPoke (viral Facebook app with 65 million installs)
   • WalkScore (serves 3 million request a day to thousands of real estate partner sites)
   • Webfillings
   • Snapabug
   • Optimizely
   • Ubisoft Facebook TikTok game

   Other interesting case studies here

3. "We are well aware of downtimes and reliability issues, and are working hard to solve them: Improving App Engine reliability is our number one priority" was recently said by a Google Developer Relations Manager here.
   App Engine is still in beta and is an evolving platform so you have to be prepared to deal with downtimes and issues.

4. Google App Engine team has just launched a preview of App Engine for Business providing 99.9% uptime service level agreement and premium developer support available.

Here is my opinion for what it's worth:
I'm aware that it's a tough call; having read a lot of articles about GAE I have mixed feelings about it because you can go from the recent catastrophic Carlos Ble report to the happy experience of Flower Garden or Gri.pe.
App Engine for Business looks promising and I would consider it in the case of a serious business project plan. The fresh SDK 1.4.0 is huge and it clearly shows that the Team is really pushing hard to fix some annoying issues (Warmup requests) and relaxing some limitations (10 minutes process on TaskQueue).

Last thing to consider: if you are going to have big numbers, the Google App Engine Team will probably take your app as a successfull case study to follow with a boost of free and powerful Hype.