What alternatives are there to Google App Engine?

Question

What alternatives are there to GAE, given that I already have a good bit of code working that I would like to keep. In other words, I'm digging python. However, my use case is more of a low number of requests, higher CPU usage type use case, and I'm worried that I may not be able to stay with App Engine forever. I have heard a lot of people talking about Amazon Web Services and other sorts of cloud providers, but I am having a hard time seeing where most of these other offerings provide the range of services (data querying, user authentication, automatic scaling) that App Engine provides. What are my options here?

Answer 1

AppScale

AppScale is a platform that allows users to deploy and host their own Google App Engine applications. It executes automatically over Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus as well as Xen and KVM. It has been developed and is maintained by AppScale Systems. It supports the Python, Go, PHP, and Java Google App Engine platforms.

http://github.com/AppScale/appscale

In the mean time...

...it is amost 2015 and it seems that containers are the way to go forward. Alternatives to GAE are emerging:

Google has released Kubernetes, container scheduling software developed by them to manage GCE containers, but can be used on other clusters as well.

There are some upcoming PaaS on Docker such as

• http://deis.io/
• http://www.tsuru.io/
• even Appscale themselves are supporting Docker

Interesting stuff to keep an eye on.

Answer 2

Microsoft Windows Azure might be worth consideration. I'm afraid I haven't used it so can't say if it's any good and you should bear in mind that it's a CTP at the moment.

Check it out here.

Answer 3

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is a good option. You basically run Linux VMs on their servers that you can control via a web interface (for powering up and down) and of course access via SSH or whatever you normally set up... And as it's a linux install that you control, you can of course run python if you wish.

Answer 4

If you're interested in the cloud, and maybe want to create your own for production and/or testing you have to look at Eucalyptus. It's allegedly code compatible with EC2 but open source.

Answer 5

A bit late, but I would give Heroku a go:

Heroku is a polyglot cloud application platform. With Heroku, you don’t need to think about servers at all. You can write apps using modern development practices in the programming language of your choice, back it with add-on resources such as SQL and NoSQL databases, Memcached, and many others. You manage your app using the Heroku command-line tool and you deploy code using the Git revision control system, all running on the Heroku infrastructure.

https://www.heroku.com/about

Answer 6

The shift to cloud computing is happening so rapidly that you have no time to waste for testing different platforms. I suggest you trying out Jelastic if you are interested in Java as well.

One of the greatest things about Jelastic is that you do not need to make any changes in the code of your application, except the changes for your application functionality, but not for the reason the chosen platform demands this. With reference to this you do not actually waste your time.The deployment process is just flawless, and you can deploy your .war file anywhere further.Using GAE requires you to modify the app around their system needs. In case if you happen to get working with Java and start looking for a more flexible platform, Jelastic is a compatible alternative.