Where Google App Engine Spanks Amazon’s Web Services: S3, EC2, Simple DB, SQS

First off, I loooove Amazon Web Services (AWS), and we make heavy use of S3, EC2, Simple DB, and Elastic IPs for LittleShoot. We run everything on Amazon, but that’s about to change.  I’ve been in the App Engine beta for about a month, and despite all of the astonishing ways AWS makes building web sites easy, Google App Engine makes it far easier. Here’s why:

1) Google App Engine Has Better Scalability  

Google migrates your application across its infrastructure automatically as needed. With EC2, you have to manually detect machine load and bring instances up or down accordingly. You need to set up load balancing and clustering. While Amazon gives you far more control, it’s also far more work.  With Google App Engine, it’s all done for you.

2) Google App Engine Has a Better Database

Google App Engine’s Big Table blows Amazon’s Simple DB out of the water, and that’s coming from a big fan of Simple DB and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Simple DB thankfully yanks developers out of the relational database mindset and automatically replicates data across machines for scalability. You do have to learn a completely new query syntax, however, and, as this blog has noted, sorting is not officially supported. Simple DB is also still in beta.  

With App Engine, you’re using the same database, Big Table, Google engineers use to power some of the busiest sites on the Internet. Billions of queries have been hammering out kinks in Big Table for years. You know it will scale.  What’s more, App Engine’s “GQL” gives developers a familiar SQL-like syntax, lowering the learning curve compared to Simple DB.  Big Table also supports sorting.  Perhaps most significantly, Simple DB costs far more. While Google’s final pricing announcement later this year may change, today’s announcement didn’t mention any difference in price for data stored in the database versus anywhere else. On Simple DB, that data costs $1.50 per GB-month. On App Engine, it appears to cost $0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month. Wow.

3) Google App Engine is Cheaper 

Beyond the database, App Engine gives you the first 5 million or so page views per month for free.  That’s a lot of page views. It doesn’t put you up with the Internet’s top dogs, of course, but at 5 million page views you should be making cash. App Engine is free precisely when you’re building your company and keeping costs low is the most important. If you go beyond that 5 million, Google’s I/O event today will reveal newly announced prices that are remarkably similar to Amazon’s current offerings. They both price everything per GB or CPU-hour, and the numbers are barely distinguishable. That first 5 million page views and the apparent huge disparity in database storage pricing are by far the biggest differentiators, both dramatically tipping the scales in favor of Google.

Conclusion

For building scalable web applications quickly, App Engine beats AWS by a surprisingly wide margin.  Note, however, this refers specifically to web applications. For anything custom, you need Amazon. Because App Engine only supports Python, you also need Amazon for running any non-Python code. While this is a significant difference, many good developers are facile with multiple languages and can move rapidly between them.  Amazon’s flexibility makes it win out for many applications, but not for the most common application there is: web sites.  App Engine is more of a “domain-specific cloud” for web applications, but it’s shockingly good at what it does.  

Oh yeah, and it’s cheap.