Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud

jamie found a post laying to rest one potential criticism of Google's App Engine, that of the danger of lock-in to the platform. Waxy.org points out a hack called AppDrop, written by Chris Anderson, that provides a container for Google App SDK applications, running entirely on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Here's Anderson's AppDrop page and his blog post announcing it.

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Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahah. I love this complaining. OMG, lock-in through competence!! So you should only choose mediocre, poorly scaling services because they are a dime-a-dozen, and therefore interchangeable.

Interesting...

[SanityInAnarchy]

The main irritation I have with EC2 is that it's too low-level, but it does mean it can run just about anything, including App Engines.

App Engines will not, however, be able to run EC2. (Kind of obvious, if you know anything about either of them.)

However, I think you lose the main benefit of using App Engines if you put them on EC2 -- that being that Google gets to worry about scaling. With EC2, you have to do everything yourself, including detecting load and deciding whether or not to fire up another instance. With App Engines, you just upload your app and watch it go, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Put App Engines on EC2, and you suddenly have to build an infrastructure to support it.

So it's nice to know your app is portable, at least, but I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting this, other than as a way to keep Google on their toes -- if Google really does start to be evil, this is a nice way to port away from them.

doesn't remove lock-in

[nguy]

The emulator appears to work by downloading big chunks of the runtime environment from Google. That doesn't remove "lock in", because Google has both legal and technical means for stopping that.

What is needed is either an open source implementation, or for Google to release the runtime in open source form.

Re:Not even close

[LS]

Oops. Ok, I guess that's not a problem. You still can't run apps on their system. Not as big a deal though.