App Engine vs. Azure | The Coffeehouse

May28th2018
May 28th, 2018

Appspot.com App Engine with the Java and Python GWT API using Appengine API with JDO and datastore and possibly the Wave API vs. Azure using, well, whatever it is that Microsoft runs?

Which do you think is better and why?

Which costs less?

Why would you pay to license Visual Studio when the App Engine GWT Eclipse plugin is free and better documented?

App Engine has tons of hooks into Android and iPhone with Wave and maps. Android also has a free SDK and Eclipse plugin.

Which one has better hooks in Mobile platforms?

As a developer do you ask these questions or go along party lines like a hardened politician?

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

Visual Studio is not a programming language. C# is very well documented. But thanks to Visual Studio you often don't need to dig into the documentation because the way the UI exposes the APIs it is self-documenting. Visual Studio is also not something you need to licence and the price tag starts at free (Visual Studio Express Edition 2008).

Personally I wouldn't develop on this whole cloud fad at all... I'd just rent some PHP or ASP.net space on a hosting farm and run my application that way.

PS - I thought the Wave API was still VERY young and being heavily developed?

May28th2018
May 28th, 2018

In reply to ManipUni

#Oct 4th @ 10:12 AM

The Wave API is actually mostly the Google gadget API, and some new robot API functionality, so most of it has been around. The off site Google Wave API for embedding Wave into your own applications is not yet complete and lacking though. You may have noticed that Google used a template from Dreamweaver CS3, the tropical one, in the thumbnail illustration on the right hand side of this page. LOL

The Wave protocol, used to build your own Wave style SMTP server is pretty complete at this time, and Wave is simply an extension on the existing XMPP protocol, which allows for templating.

contextfree

Which do you think is better and why?

Whichever one supports my use cases. Which is currently neither, unfortunately. (Our app + services are .NET based and could definitely benefit from flexible scaling in theory -- we are a small company with not much budget for our own infrastructure, and our workloads are very uneven -- but it depends on some legacy third-party native code that won't work on Azure, and replacing those parts ourselves is "nontrivial".)

May28th2018
May 28th, 2018

In reply to contextfree

#Oct 4th @ 5:47 PM

The problem with cloud computing from a business model perspective is that most companies that get to the point of using that many resources, can also afford the hardware and bandwidth to make it work in house.

This is also true of services like EC2 and Cloudera.com which aim to offer Map/Reduce and raw distributed computing in the cloud on demand to businesses.

Most bandwidth providers provide burstable bandwidth, and most companies have to use virtualization to even get close to the maximum use of resources on the machines they do have, much less outsource that on a rental basis with metering.

To try to rent it to them is patronizing them on a grand scale, so we'll see if the marketing can overcome the actual demand.

App Engine and GWT have been around for a while to the tune of an only limited success. I understand that MS has their platform exclusivity, but I don't think that will make it more attractive at all.

There are some *really* smart people out there that are doing next gen cloud platforms, but they have not yet emerged. We will have to keep an eye out for developments on this front.

contextfree

In reply to May28th2018

#Oct 4th @ 6:02 PM

In our case the resource that needs to be burstable is computing power, not only bandwidth. But maybe we're unusual in that the services we provide sometimes involve large batch jobs (that can run for days). You seem to be thinking about this from more of an interactive web-apps point of view.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

I love Windows Azure because it allows me to use all .NET libraries that are available out there... There is no such thing as in only a subset of APIs is supported and only these work. I used the entity framework, WCF and a lot of other stuff in my solution by simply using (and referencing) it and deploying the whole solution to the cloud. I think that is kind of really cool. Smiley

Next I used SQL Azure as my database. I used a simple wizard to copy my existing SQL Server database to SQL Azure. Changed the connection string in my application to point to the SQL Azure database and I was done. Kind of sweet, isn't it Wink

exoteric
I : Next<I>

In reply to May28th2018

#Oct 4th @ 6:02 PM

Being next-generation, how could they possibly have emerged - we're still at current-generation Wink

And obviously this could not possibly come from Microsoft Tongue Out

The people who invented DyadLINQ, a generalization of MapReduce over LINQ.

magicalclick

I haven't tried Azure yet, but, I think if I want to start my own company, I would do it on Azure. I have experienced tons of HW issues in my company, like Air Condition was broken, HDD in warning, manual backup, lack of fail over server else where, and other issues. It is certainly cheaper to host your own servers, but, in the same time, you have to deal with it too. I am a software engineer, I hate to deal with HW, so I would rather give MS to manage my HW (including hiring security guard).

It is like web hosting site, but you have more control and features in Azure.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to contextfree

#Oct 4th @ 5:47 PM

Are you certain that Azure doesn't support native code? Also, Azure is a computation service as much as it is a hosting environment for web applications (and not just ASP.NET...).

What Azure has, but is not necessarily marketed effectively (it isn't "sexy"), is "computational pay for play" in addition to flexible scalability. At least, this is the direction I would keep my eyes on as we progress into the cloudy future... I think a distributed service that provides n-scale compute power is something to consider seriously. Azure is a great place to look. If it doesn't provide what you need, then please do let us know or contact the Azrue team directly via their blog.

C

contextfree

In reply to Charles

#Oct 5th @ 3:54 PM

Yeah, I know Azure supports native code in some cases, but ours is an especially ugly scenario involving lots of non-xcopy-deployable stuff including drivers. The problems this causes of course go far beyond not being able to deploy to Azure, and we're slowly disentangling ourselves, but it will take time ...

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to contextfree

#Oct 5th @ 5:03 PM

I know it supports native code. There is even a flag in the role configuration file that deals with allowing native code for the role. It's probably tricky to run drivers and stuff but Azure does definitvely support native code!