I sat down today to investigate whether Google App Engine would make a reasonable platform for a small business. To get an idea of the scale imagine that the goal was to implement the web presence of a regional estate agent.
This is well within the realms of what a traditional Django + Postgres stack can handle, so it is worth considering what advantages a hosted solution such as GAE or Microsoft Azure has over it.
My primary interest is in removing some of the administration that goes with the traditional stack of
Virtual Machine (I use Bytemark. My friends use them. Bytemark are awesome.)
Apache (or lighttpd/nginx)
<Your application goes here>
Django/Turbogears/Ror
Postgresql/MySQL
Now, everything that isn't the actual value-adding, money making part of the application is a pure waste of resources.
Scalability? This application doesn't need scalability past what I can get for £5 grand from dell.com, but there is real potential value to be had removing the need for me to write apache config files. It isn't that I can't write config files, just that customers don't pay for them.
So with this background I decided to give Google's cloud offering a trial. I went to a great presentation by a guy from MSR about the Azure platform. All I can say is that Microsoft are targeting exactly this market and their demonstration rocked. Remember how Visual Basic became the most successful language ever? Azure is like that. Unfortunately I don't run windows on my desk, so I'm locked out of that party.
Back to GAE. Every web framework these days is optimised for the first 10 minutes of the experience, and this is no different. Within a few minutes I had an application hosted at appstot.com , so decide to make it a proper application and put it behind my own domain name.
Ok, so I have to prove I own the domain, which is weird because if I don't own the domain how would I point it at Google?
Do I have to host a small file, like with the search webmaster stuff? No I have to sign up with Google Apps, which costs $50. Eventually I find that there is a non-business free version with some restrictions. Will that do? I don't know.
But Google Apps wants to take all my corporate email and stick it on their servers. I don't want that. I want to run a website.
Very quickly you see Google's lock-everyone-in attitude take hold again. Will App. Engine be the same price tomorrow? Will I still be able to keep my corporate email out of their prying eyes tomorrow if I go down this route? Since moving away from the platform would be madly expensive, that is a risk too far.