Google’s AppEngine was quite promising from the start. Automatic scaling and load balancing without having to think about the administrative side is extremely nice.
But that’s about it. There’s a couple of things which make AppEngine a bit cumbersome to recommend for a new application, all of which are well served by Amazon EC2+ELB+ES:
- Lack of SSL for your custom domain
- Can’t use many django pluggables out of the box because of RDMS dependencies
- Some would say naked domains, but ELB can’t do naked domains either, so this is a wash.
- Can’t use other off the shelf software, like wordpress, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like AppEngine, and for small apps I’m going to stick with it because of:
- Cost – the free instance can’t be beat. You’re at an automatic $100/month with EC2.
- Little to no infrastructure admin needed – mainly just some DNS.
- You can run Django 1.0 with either app-engine-patch, or the django-helper.