by Keith Cowing, February 4, 2009

Cloud computing environments are going to have a profound effect on web hosts, startup companies, and Internet architectures. High Tech Weekly happens to run on Google App Engine and the user experience has been wonderful. I'm building a new web service, with very different requirements than HTW, and am searching for the proper cloud. Here are the three front runners at the moment and a few pros and cons for each.

Google App Engine

Pros:

• Super easy to use.
• Good analytics tools.
• Ridiculously cheap usage fees (free for development and even modest traffic).
• Database is easy to work with and extremely scalable.
• No need to touch the web server.
• Deployments and version control work like a charm.
• Great API's (Image, MemCache, Mail).
• Supports Gmail logins for authentication.
• Active user community for Q&A, help, feedback, etc.

Cons:

• Not very portable (design will be Google-dependent for now).
• Database is not built for large reporting or queries with > 1000 results.
• No cron jobs (ability to run scheduled tasks).
• May not have the credibility yet to run enterprise apps.
• Currently only supports Python.

Microsoft Azure

Pros:

• .NET environment is very robust.
• Supports Microsoft SQL Server (Great reporting).
• Easy to scale.
• Don't need to touch the web server.
• Will likely be aimed at supporting enterprise apps as well.
• Supports LiveID's for authentication (such as hotmail accounts).

Cons:

• Still in beta.
• Only supports .NET.
• Deployments are slow.
• No proven apps yet for reference.
• Waiting for a user community.
• Pricing hasn't been announced (though it's supposed to be "competitive").

Amazon Web Services

Pros:

• Most mature product of the bunch.
• Direct access to a machine (full control of web server and all applications).
• Good user community.
• Reasonably priced.
• Lots of flexibility, not locked into any particular development environment or programming language.

Cons:

• Have to deal with the web server (can be a pro or a con, just depends).
• More expensive than App Engine (not sure about Azure yet).
• Slightly longer setup time.
• A little more difficult to build persistent storage (if not using their proprietary database).

There are other options as well, but for now it's important to have a household name behind my infrastructure. Salesforce (Force.com) happens to be out of my desired price-range (and a little too high-end for my needs). I'm very interested to see how Azure plays out over the next year. Most of the negatives are simply due to the fact that it's brand new. For now I'm leaning towards using Amazon Web Services and building everything in .NET so that it can later be ported to Azure if there is ever a major reason.

Tags: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurship, Webhosting, Startups,

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