21st
Google App Engine Getting Awesomer
Google App Engine is becoming super exciting! The team recently released “Task Queues”, a utility that allows you to run a slow process independent of web requests, which must always be fast. This is the same basic functionality as Amazon’s Simple Queue Service, but Google’s implementation carries none of the overhead of setting up or scaling large queues of tasks, as SQS does. With SQS, one has to write a custom daemon to read from the queue, and scale that daemon on new EC2 instances as your queue length grows. In GAE, all this administrative work is handled for you.
Google’s approach is fundamentally far superior to Amazon’s and will prove a no-brainer once the technology becomes more mature, unless Amazon changes direction. I can’t wait for Google to loosen up some of their usage restrictions, such as support for long-running tasks, big data storage, and more flexible python libraries.
Until then, I’m sticking with Amazon’s alphabet soup (AWS, EC2, S3, SQS) and looking for ways to make migration to GAE as easy as possible when it becomes viable.
