[yeukhon]

I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :(

This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road...

I still think CE is really good for computations.

[enneff]

App Engine is not just a place to run your code. It has a nice deployment system with the ability to flip between versions instantly. It provides a few great pieces of core infrastructure: the datastore, task queues, and memcache (there are many others, but those are the essentials). The SDK gives you a stand-alone development server for testing locally. If you want to build web apps (or a backend for mobile apps), App Engine is a great way to go.

Compute Engine is for all the other stuff that you can't run on App Engine.

Incidentally, the datastore is now available as a stand-alone service, Google Cloud Datastore: https://developers.google.com/datastore/ This should benefit Compute Engine users.

[hrjet]

I like App-Engine and now that there are open-source, API compatible alternatives, there is no lock-in to worry about either.

The biggest drawback for App Engine is lack of async support. The only ways to scale are: multiple-threads (slow) or multiple instances (costly).

[enneff]

Or you can use Go and get high performance concurrency in a single-threaded instance. The best of both worlds. ;-)

[alooPotato]

Can you explain this a bit more? Specifically what async type tasks can you not perform?

[rbanffy]

The main difference, for me, is that with EC2 (and GCE), my team manages the servers. With App Engine, it's Google's Site Reliability Engineers who do it.

[thrownaway2424]

Compute Engine is not for scientific experiments, or at least not specifically. Perhaps you are thinking of Exacycle? http://research.google.com/university/exacycle_program.html

[bad_user]

I'm not sure about Google's CE, I don't really know what it can do, but Amazon's AWS has had for some time auto-scaling capabilities by means of auto-scaling groups coupled with their ELB load-balancer. We used it and it worked out great.