For a one-man shop like me, GAE has been a godsend in many ways. I've also deployed toy apps to AWS and Heroku, Azure and OpenShift just to give them a spin, but I'm certainly no expert, and I don't doubt that some or all of these are "better" than GAE, but they all take more time and effort. On none of these other services was I comfortable that I'd set things up properly to suddenly scale. What if your big break comes and you get written up in the NYT or make the front page of HN? All is for naught if 100,000 visitors show up one day instead of 100 and you can't handle it. GAE relieves me of this particular anxiety.
AppScale relieves me of the fear that Google drops GAE or raises their prices too much, and having observed Google over the last 5 years, this is a real fear. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that AppScale and Google are in cahoots on this.
There are other Google headaches as well. Support is very hard to come by, even with credit card in hand. Compared to Microsoft support it might as well be called nonexistent. And the Google account "system" is completely perplexing to me. My sites just use the old-fashioned username/password scheme, and I try to just ignore Google's because I don't understand it and neither do my customers.
The ease of administration trumps all of that for me though.
AppScale relieves me of the fear that Google drops GAE or raises their prices too much, and having observed Google over the last 5 years, this is a real fear. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that AppScale and Google are in cahoots on this.
There are other Google headaches as well. Support is very hard to come by, even with credit card in hand. Compared to Microsoft support it might as well be called nonexistent. And the Google account "system" is completely perplexing to me. My sites just use the old-fashioned username/password scheme, and I try to just ignore Google's because I don't understand it and neither do my customers.
The ease of administration trumps all of that for me though.