Wow, Thank you so much for the great responses. I really love the community here at web2py. From the discussion so far I feel I would rather go with GAE at this point, but I do have one worry, and that is going along with the line of, "If the app fits GAE" go with Google. How do I know if it fits our not?
My app is in the music industry space and is going to have a lot of potentially large audio files. Back-ups of the raw data(Really Huge!) can be handled in another way, but sending music files compressed to mp3s to clients is a must. GAE does provide the BlobStore and I think that would be sufficient size wise. Would web2py+GAE allow me to manage all of those Blobs of audio? In the end I just need to sit down and try it a few times, but any tips would be appreciated. I really don't want to have to spend as much time on the server set up and maintenance. GAE is attractive that way, allowing me to focus on making my app, or the part the user sees, as good as possible. I have a hope, but I do recognize that you can only work with what works. This looks promising of course. http://code.google.com/apis/storage/ Thanks Again, James Hancock On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Jonathan Lundell <jlund...@pobox.com>wrote: > On Feb 16, 2011, at 4:40 PM, howesc wrote: > > for me it's all about the cost (both time cost and money cost), and there > is no comparison (if you can work with the GAE bigtable). > > 1. web2py does a good job of working with BigTable, so once you get out of > the habit of joins, many apps will just work without much change in your > coding. > 2. ec2 really is just like a private server, you still have to install the > server, configure it, create the machine image, deploy, monitor, update etc > (time expensive) > 3. GAE just runs. upload your app with a simple script (or press a button > if you use the mac GAE launcher) and it just runs. no server to setup, > monitor or deploy > 4. GAE truely auto-scales. as more requests are made it just services them > (until you reach your self-imposed budget limits) > 5. AWS EC2 needs to be monitored for traffic and it is up to you setup and > turn on additional servers (time and maybe money expensive) > 6. AWS is paid by machine minute, GAE is paid by CPU cycles used. so > always-on for AWS is at least $14 a month with a micro instance, GAE can > serve 1000's of pages a day for free. > 7. GAE background tasks is much harder than just writing scripts and cron. > so if you need background services EC2 might be better. > > if you are curious, the iphone app starmaker (http://starmakerapp.com/) > talks to a web2py GAE backend, but uses EC2 for some heavy audio processing > (the website will migrate to web2py soon), and > http://www.elizabethscanvas.org/ is complete web2py on GAE. > > > (nice work) > > I want to emphasize #2 above (while agreeing with all the rest). Keeping up > to date is a must these days, for security reasons, and it's a royal pain. >