Google's App Engine Platform

Google has recently announced the Google App Engine platform and there have been several discussions on the internet comparing Google’s offering with Amazon’s EC2 service.  The service provided by Google is different than Amazon; Google is not providing the raw computing power like Amazon instead it providing API that customer can use to develop their own web-scale applications and run them on the Google infrastructure.  Several bloggers have written about Google App Engine and provided comparisons with Amazon EC2.  The two blogs that I found interesting are Google vs. Amazon EC2 by Dan Farber and Tim O’Reilly’s Blog on Google App Engine.

From the CIOs and IT leader’s perspective, i.e. folks who already have datacenters and internal applications and are looking to cut costs, improving innovation and time to market, and increasing capacity by having a place where they can run their current applications and new applications which are not built using Google App Engine API, Amazon EC2 is a better fit. The downside of Amazon EC2 is that Amazon currently only support Linux servers, there is no native support for Windows servers and one has to use an emulator to run Windows software on Linux servers.  There is company called Flexiscale in Europe which is providing similar services as Amazon for windows servers.