After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure.

Does anyone know what the effective bandwidth and latency would be between machines? They talk about thousands of cores a little too casually. I guess they mean unrelated independent instances of some task as opposed to actual parallelism. I am confused as to what market segment they are going for here.

Is anyone actually using compute engine here? Would be interested in your experiences. The scalr reference point sounds like payola to me.

$93/month seems a bit outrageous. What do they offer that makes it worth this much?

4% seems underwhelming given regular double digit reductions from amazon

Did I read correctly that you have to sign up for a Gold Support Package @ $400 / month before you have access to GCE?

Still waiting for naked domains...

I'm seeing lots of numbers here of throughput, latency and IO, all of which are great, but does anyone have any experience with cpu performance. Will a GCE High CPU machine beat an EC2 high CPU machine in straight flops?

These are paid services but before I'd jump in, Google would have to guarantee this service for say 5 years, with updates and no catch (like increasing the price by 5000% to force you out.) Microsoft is a lot of things, but one they do good is guaranteed, long term, support for their products. At least for the core ones. For example they are still supporting Windows XP, so when Coca Cola signs at the dotted line they know that the hundreds of millions they spend on developing their specific apps, they will serve them for at least 10 years. That's worth extra to me and apparently to many others.

Going all in in Google an then Google deciding that their latest experiment is not worth their time is painful. It will most likely ruin the start-up. This may seem as an emotional knee-jerk reaction to Reader, but it's the reality. You cannot throw 100 things against the wall, ask people to invest time and money on them and then drop all but a few of them. Trust is gone, fool me once and all...

Does anyone have experience in deploying Rails app to both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine? How was your experience in terms of price, speed and easiness of deploying/maintaining?

As part of their pricing switch a few years ago, Google committed to a 3 year depcreation period for App Engine: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-g...

"For App Engine, leaving Preview will include providing all paid users a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, billing via invoice, a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses, and a new, easier to understand usage-based pricing structure for App Engine that is in line with the value App Engine provides. It will also reaffirm our deprecation policy whereby we will support deprecated versions of product APIs for 3 years, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to function."

A quick comparison of the TOS shows that Compute Engine doesn't have the same policy, but IANAL, so I could be missing something.

My employer was on ae before the "big" price hike and after, and even to this day it is cheaper than the alternatives.

sure there was a couple of months of it being pricier nowhere near 5000% though.

Like when we ported to 2.7 from 2.5. Which was the biggest win in regards to reduction in cost AND latency.

another win was moving to ndb

and another win was offloading a lot of work to backends once they were introduced.

also, support is better than other vendors I've dealt with throughout the years including microsoft. An answer < 24 hours from someone who acts like they know whats going on is always appreciated.

My philosophy is to always have an exit strategy.

I'm far from Google's biggest fan but I wouldn't depend on any platform remaining over a 5 year period and would instead avoid lock in. For example Heroku in convenient for Rails but it should only be a few days to a couple of weeks to migrate to raw AWS any other hosting solution if required. This may mean limiting the use of the additional features and services integrated with Heroku.

Providing portability was possible (and I haven't looked into this service so it may not be simple) if I was a VC startup my bigger worry would be that Google would have too much information about my operations, scale and growth that I would prefer they didn't have until I chose to give it to them.

I don't see how this platform can lock you in, they are just Linux VPSs, they are everywhere.