Re:Developers: Will you ditch Amazon Web services for Google...
by mdasen on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @10:38AM
(#202109)
No. Google's AppEngine just isn't great for small sites (and by small I mean anything under reddit/digg sized).
Why? Because AppEngine makes you program in a way that will infinitely scale - which is a lot harder. You have to denormalize all your data, manually calculate everything, etc.
If you want to become the next big thing, you won't do it with AppEngine. Why? Because the advantage that you and your buddy have as a two-person team is that you don't have to worry about instantly having millions of users. AppEngine is what people like Google have to start out with. So, if you have an idea, you can beat bigger players out of the gate because you can start small. You can use things like joins to make your application easy to code.
If you forgo that advantage, you just aren't going to be agile enough to compete with large teams.
Why? Because AppEngine makes you program in a way that will infinitely scale - which is a lot harder. You have to denormalize all your data, manually calculate everything, etc.
If you want to become the next big thing, you won't do it with AppEngine. Why? Because the advantage that you and your buddy have as a two-person team is that you don't have to worry about instantly having millions of users. AppEngine is what people like Google have to start out with. So, if you have an idea, you can beat bigger players out of the gate because you can start small. You can use things like joins to make your application easy to code.
If you forgo that advantage, you just aren't going to be agile enough to compete with large teams.