Home/ Questions/Q 224561
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T19:19:42+00:00

I have my first app, not that big, but it is the first step.

  • 0

I have my first app, not that big, but it is the first step. (next big one on the way)

Now if I want to put it on my own Linode VPS, I have to configure mod_python or mod_wsgi, as well as memcache, Ngix, mySQL or Postgresql, etc. to make it work. If I put it GAE, All I have to do is convert the models to use GAE’s API.

What I like about GAE is scaling. (if they can really do it)

Then I’d only worry about developing my apps and doing SEO work on them instead of worrying about load share/balance, cache, db / IO redundancy, etc.

I don’t want to do any porting later on. (I have to decide now and stick with it)

So, if you have any experience on this, what do you recommend:

1- Use VPS(s) for everthing
2- Use VPS(s) plus Amazon S3
3- Use VPS(s) plus Amazon S3 & SimpleDB
4- Use GAE

Also: Would I be able to get away with not having JOIN rights when using the BigTable?

Note: I don’t have any spatial need now, but for a location table I might need that later on.

I’d like to know what do you think!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s business risk and technical risk.

    Business risk is that you might have to move hosts later for some external reason. VPS’s, EC2, etc require more upfront investment, but keep you independent. Tools like Chef can help with the configuration effort.

    Technical risk is that your application may not be easily implemented on the platform. Since most VPS options allow you to install arbitrary software, they minimize this, again at the cost of more configuration effort on your part. AFAIK, the largest constraint GAE enforces on you is it’s difficult to do long running background tasks. (Working without JOINs and other aspects of de-normalized data requires a different way of thinking, but this approach is fairly common in web applications no matter where they run once the SQL database is larger than a single host can support.)

    If you can live with both these risks, GAE would appear to save you a substantial amount of effort. If you cannot live with these risks, you should tailor your own environment.

    As an aside, I find S3 to be worth it no matter your environment. It’s far simpler than ensuring your local server static file storage is reliably backed up, and you never have to worry about capacity. It’s best if you use it for data that is uploaded but rarely overwritten or deleted (think facebook photo albums).

    • 0