| I think no discussion of GAE's future should ever miss these very important options: http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/index.html http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf So even if Google shuts down GAE, you could transition without too much trouble. Regarding the question itself: GAE is just a friendly face on top of Google's internal systems, and Google is deploying all of their new stuff onto it directly for ease of maintenance. GAE is also well charged so that Google is making a profit off it, so they have no reason to shut it down. The big issue is if you are a small developer who cannot shell out huge amounts for usage charges. Google is targeting GAE more towards Corporate and the kind of budget a large business has, rather than towards a guy in his basement doing hobby work. The charges are still pretty low though, but it's not unlikely that they may raise in future. Conclusion: Deep pockets? Go for it, you can't really find a better scaling option for the cost. Want free hosting? Not a good choice, look elsewhere. Indy dev who wants to pay very little and is willing to optimize caching to lower costs? Solid choice, you can get the charges very low for even high demand sites. Keep a sharp watch on billing trends, and test out your site on AppScale / CapeDwarf to make sure you can transition off quickly if billing gets out of hand. |
What are some better alternatives? And why are they better?
I've used GAE for some toy apps and a few websites with low traffic. It works great.