My first impressions on AppEngine
I’ve been thinking about what AppEngine is. I’ve read some of the docs and watched some of the youtube videos. I agree with Don MacAskill’s impressions. Google has taken a very laser-focused approach.
Valleywag thinks that if Youtube was built on AppEngine, it would have been easier to integrate into the Google family. The problem is that you can’t build Youtube on AppEngine.
Without a grid, you can’t queue jobs for transcoding. At this point, you couldn’t do transcoding on the fly because if your web app runs for too long, it gets killed. You’d still need a farm of servers to do that heavy lifting for you. If building a new Youtube was my goal, I’d probably use AppEngine for the front end and have an EC2 based grid for working with the media.
People seem to be comparing AppEngine to the Amazon Web Services suite, but I really think it maps a lot closer to what Mosso is doing. Both allow you to upload web apps to their cluster. You don’t get to see the details and you don’t really get to tune anything. The difference is, Mosso gives you a few more options.
