Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

I really appreciate reading stories like this. For budding startups like mine, we need every available resource at our disposal on technology choices. I also think articles like this will encourage Google's engineers to keep making GAE a better platform. AFAIK, Google is also notorious for eating their own dog food.

I was a bit taken back by the criticism on the last app-engine article. Quite frankly, sometimes you don't realize you the limitations until you hit them despite what the manual says. ("Every one's job is easy but your own.") If you haven't used GAE, you don't realize how easy it is to just get up and get going. It's absurdly simple. However, when you hit limitations you might encounter the sunk-cost fallacy, and that might propel you to keep working around its limitations.

Is it getting fashionable these days to blame Google App Engine? I am reading lots of horror stories about GAE!!

By "people", are you referring to Google? If so, I agree -- not having technical support available is a deal breaker for a system of that scale, especially if outages are as prevalent as the author claims.

I think it's just that developing for GAE is just so different from developing on a typical LAMP stack that there inevitably a fairly steep learning curve. That combined with the (well documented) limitations you just have to find new ways of solving problems. The fact that this author thinks that other article was a "good read" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in what this guy has to say.

I don't know if developing on the App Engine is still as bad as it was before. Maybe it's changed in the last few months that we've been on EC2

From what I've heard, things have dramatically improved from how they were a few months ago.

I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment.

Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine-patch or django-norel working. Those also suck.

There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way.

Nope. Abandon your old frameworks. If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy.

Yeah, there are problems with App Engine. It has downtime and things slow down. So does every other hosting platform.

App Engine is getting better all the time. I've been working with it for about 6 months, and nearly every month there is a new release with great new features that make developing apps for the platform better. The new 1.4 release has tons of great features that will make working with App Engine easier, like reserved instances and warming requests.