Yep. Everything I've ever taken up in life I'm still doing X years later. I've never ever transferred a job to someone else, outsourced a task I learned, or hired someone to do what I do. Nope. 100% of the time I'm doing everything I ever used to. Still. WTF?

I think most cell phone service is shitty and overpriced, but it doesn't mean anyone can just set up a competitor - it's extremely capital intensive to compete at that scale.

Yeah, I forgot that GAE never goes down.

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231001916/google-app-engine-cl...

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not...

Reddit is one of the top 1% of the 1% in terms of traffic. I suspect GAE would probably have trouble with Reddit on a global 24/7 basis. Perhaps not as much as Reddit's having themselves at times, but nothing's perfect. And I suspect Reddit's pocketbook wouldn't be able to afford the marginal benefit GAE would provide.

* reddit on GAE would have no options if they ran into a feature which is too expensive on the GAE architecture. Reddit on EC2 has been able to change their backend architecture dramatically to deal with growth and new features — that's a really powerful thing to give up since it means you aren't limited to GAE's lowest-common-denominator functionality.

* Even assuming reddit could affort to spend kilobucks per day on GAE, how many good sysadmins and developers could they hire for that same amount of money? At their scale, the answer is a LOT of people - and that gives a lot more flexibility since money going to GAE is a sunk cost which scales linearly with traffic whereas people generally give better than linear returns.

This is not true at all. It's very easy to run a hybrid with parts of your application in other parts of the cloud. I do this. There's even a remote API stub so you have direct access to the full suite of GAE APIs from servers in EC2 or whatnot.

There are certainly limitations to what you can run inside of GAE, but there's almost always a good way to work around it while preserving the benefits of scalability, multi-datacenter reliability, etc. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but it's great for most common web applications.

The only real difference is that gae forces you to code for scalability while aws leaves with possibilities to shoot yourself in the foot, which reddit apparently does.

I'll say they're getting better now--for a while they were a major PITA for AWS folks.