Google App Engine VS Amazon Web Services

Last night, the search engine giant, Google announced its App Engine product which is a rival service of Amazon's Web Services. Here's more coverage on it at Venture Beat. It's too early to say how much of a threat they are to Amazon based on unknown pricing factors and the duration of the lack of support in other languages besides Python. However, I must say that my knees would be a little shaky at this point if I was Amazon.

It seems that a lot of startups now-a-days are leaning towards running their apps on Amazon's, and now also Google's infrastructure for just a fraction of the cost of dedicated hosting or co-location. Easy and cost effective scaling is also a reason why these services are so popular. All in all, from a pure business perspective, I really don't see much of a compelling reason to not go with them especially when it also dramatically reduces infrastructure maintenance costs. However, it goes without to say that there are yet also some cons to this type of hosting. What I see as cons or more specifically, barriers would be that you are subject to their security practices, downtimes, and customization policies. Now, what I would really like to do is to be able to give these services a whirl on my own to see how it feels. My extent of experience in this area has really only been Amazon's S3 which I don't even play much with because where my engagements use S3, someone else is in-charge of the management of it. The other thing that I am really interested in is to hear the personal opinions and reactions to this new hosting paradigm from authorities that are in the colo/DH business.

With all that said though, something inside of me still prefers to run my own servers and manage my own infrastructure probably largely due to my IT and security background. The ability to customize my system architecture and retain data on dedicated locations has always been a perk that I valued more than anything else. I am also concerned about the compliance related implications to using something like AWS and GAE. I would even go as far as to argue that the extra cost of hosting your own infrastructure ends up being a worth while investment in the long run. We'll have to see if I will change my mind though as AWS and GAE matures over time.