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Comment by codeslinger | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused: given the quota problems and serious constraints of the real App Engine, why would I want a clone of it that I also have to maintain and manage myself? Isn't the value-add here that I get SysOps and all that for free with GAE? Isn't the cost-savings of GAE coming from its scale, and if so, how could a private AppScale cloud running on Eucalyptus or similar garner the economies of scale to make it cheap enough to be viable? As well, don't you have to have the expectation of servicing a large number of applications of the type that work with GAE to even consider something like this? (something that a typically enterprise is not going to need)

In short, I'm really confused as to what the big deal is. Can someone elaborate on the above questions?

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If you fear being trapped sharecropping on Google's land -- that they might arbitrarily change the GAE rules, or prices, or capabilities, or even cancel the service entirely -- this gives you the possibility to migrate elsewhere.

Migrating elsewhere might not be better along any single dimension (price, speed, reliability, etc.) at any particular point in time. You might never need to do it. But having the option is gigantic. It makes GAE a much, much, safer platform on which to develop. In a pinch, you could port elsewhere in short order without reengineering your service architecture.

This is a very impressive move by Google. It removes my number one fear of using GAE. I'll be watching AppScale closely.

"they might arbitrarily change the GAE rules, or prices, or capabilities, or even cancel the service entirely"

The risk of Google doing something to simply enrage GAE developers is very, very low. Is there any non-hypothetical reason why they would do this?

Google has killed a bunch of unprofitable projects recently. Lively died with 6 weeks' warning, and users who wanted to save their 3D handiwork were told to do so by "taking videos and screenshots of your rooms". I don't blame Google -- they don't owe anyone continued development of a money-losing business line -- but it happens.

And that's with Google still making barrels of money and not yet facing significant antitrust action for using profits from search to underprice products in other markets (like cloud services). With a few unprofitable quarters or lawsuits, what's the guarantee GAE will continue in an attractive form indefinitely? What if they decide they have to maximize revenue from developers locked-into the GAE platform? (Or what if the core team leaves to do their own startup?)

Even a tiny risk that another company could yank your platform out from under you on short notice, for arbitrary reasons having to do with their business needs (and not yours), may be unacceptable. AppScale mitigates that risk -- a lot.

It's about lock-in, or removing lock-in in this case. Previously the cost of switching away from App Engine was pretty high; maybe now it's still not zero but it's a little lower.

And who says AppScale is just for private clouds? What if Yahoo starts offering AppScale hosting?

Their commercial pricing seems pretty competitive with other "cloud computing" offerings. What quota issues are you talking about?

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