Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Azure and Other Cloud Services

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What platform is the best to build an application for cloud computing? Google App Engine? Amazon EC2 and their other hosted services? Microsoft Azure platform? The following tips and recommendations are based on several articles and presentations telling how to navigate the cloud wisely and choose the right platform for particular applications.

The big heralds of Amazon's offering are flexibility, configurability and pay-only-for-what-you-use model. Many pharma companies - Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson - have tried and liked AWS. If you are craving control, are already set on a database model and have a ton of data to import, go with Amazon - their command-line access is heavily praised.

Unlike Amazon, Python-centric Google App Engine starts out free, and only costs after you get a lot of traffic and use a ton of computing resources. GAE/J supports Java and JRuby. Google offers ease-of-use and a large degree of automatic configuration, although they do want you to use Google's database vs MySQL or PostgreSQL. If you are a Python and Django junkie and do not like C extensions, go with Google.

Rackspace’s Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. Mosso does not yet support Java applications. SpringSource, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive suite of products for powering the entire build, run, manage enterprise Java application lifecycle.

The Globus Toolkit is a collection of software solutions to many science and engineering applications. Univa UD is utilized in some science and high-throughput engineering environments too.

Microsoft Azure platform is aimed at C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Windows and other Microsoft-tool-loving developers.

Likewise, IBM platform provides access to IBM middleware such as DB2. Informix and WebSphere.


IBM cloud presentation:


I attended this talk earlier last year, it was presented for the Silicon Valley CTO group. Went through it again today.

CommunityOneEast 09 - Running Java On Amazon EC2

View more documents from chris.e.richardson.

Check also these videos on Google App Engine