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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

What about the cost of Google lockin? Can you imagine App Engine going offline like GMail did this morning?

Make me feel uneasy.

This can happen anywhere, with any hosting solution as long as you don't have physical access to you servers. AWS, Linode, Slicehost...they all can go down.

At least with AWS you have availability zones.

Personally, anything I code against these APIs, I make as encapsulated/swappable as possible. Downtime aside, I am worried about being cancelled or if someone goes out of business or if someone starts offering a piece of the puzzle that will save me a signficant amount of money. Got to be able to adapt as fast as possible.

Fortunately, Linux lock-in is not something that keeps me up at night :-). This is the beauty of IaaS (VMs) vs PaaS (framework X).

You can have physical access to your servers and still watch them go down. Your upstream bandwidth provider had a technician trip on a power switch. Your city suffers a Katrina-level disturbance in normal operating conditions. etc, etc Its all a matter of what risks you tolerate.

Anecdote: Google Search has had more downtime in the last 400 days than my main Slicehost slice. This demonstrates to me two things: a) Slicehost is awesome and b) you are the weakest link, whether "you" are Google's whole engineering team or one guy coding from next to a rice paddy.

There's always a degree of lock-in to any setup. That said, you can minimize lock-in by going with Django as much as you can and providing an abstraction layer to whatever APIs you use. Open-source key-value stores are popping up everywhere, so non-Google-hosted App Engine frameworks will probably appear in the next year. (AppDrop provided a fast check on porting App Engine SDK to EC2.)

Haven't heard of AppDrop - thanks! I can't wait for Ubuntu 9.10 and other projects that make building your own cloud easier. That'll bring a much need dose of competition to the market.

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