Wow, I love the conversation. I am the CEO of AppScale, so my perspective will be biased. Spoiler alert.
We have many customers using AppScale in production. Some migrated away from GAE for very specific reasons. Privacy (particularly in Europe), lock-in, control, performance and cost are the typical reasons...in that order. Many, however, come to AppScale because they love the GAE development model and want the independence to run their application wherever is best for their business; without the restrictions, quotas and performance irregularities.
The brilliance of GAE is the development model. The notion of concentrating on the business logic, the problem you are trying to solve, rather than working with stacks of software is the innovation. Our customers, and GAE's, are typically not tech companies. They do not have a deep bench of experienced developers. They are fashion and electronics retailers, global non-profits, SaaS companies trying to rapidly prototype and create MVP's. They want to innovate quickly and fail fast as they develop their business model. This is where the GAE model shines. It's fast. Business today must move at the speed of need, and the App Engine model, whether GAE or AppScale, is a tool that facilitates this.
AppScale is a complement to GAE. If want to run in AWS, SoftLayer, Azure or Digital Ocean, no problem. You can also run your app behind the firewall on OpenStack, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, Mothership1 or simply on top of KVM or VMware. AppScale is easy to install and deploy from GitHub. GAE needs to worry about running 4.5M active applications (up from 3M last year) but AppScale only needs to worry about one application, yours.
We understand that GAE did not make many fans in the early days. That has changed and their 50% growth in active apps over last year is evidence. Add AppScale to the picture and you get to continue using the awesome development model but you have the complete flexibility to run where you choose and maintain complete granular control over your app.
So, I will make a bold offer. Check out AppScale and give it a test drive. I would love to hear your feedback. If you need some extra love, our engineers will help over our IRC channel at freenode, #appscale
It is our goal to be the open source private PaaS of choice for forward-thinking developers and companies. We would love your support.
For a one-man shop like me, GAE has been a godsend in many ways. I've also deployed toy apps to AWS and Heroku, Azure and OpenShift just to give them a spin, but I'm certainly no expert, and I don't doubt that some or all of these are "better" than GAE, but they all take more time and effort. On none of these other services was I comfortable that I'd set things up properly to suddenly scale. What if your big break comes and you get written up in the NYT or make the front page of HN? All is for naught if 100,000 visitors show up one day instead of 100 and you can't handle it. GAE relieves me of this particular anxiety.
AppScale relieves me of the fear that Google drops GAE or raises their prices too much, and having observed Google over the last 5 years, this is a real fear. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that AppScale and Google are in cahoots on this.
There are other Google headaches as well. Support is very hard to come by, even with credit card in hand. Compared to Microsoft support it might as well be called nonexistent. And the Google account "system" is completely perplexing to me. My sites just use the old-fashioned username/password scheme, and I try to just ignore Google's because I don't understand it and neither do my customers.
The ease of administration trumps all of that for me though.
It generally isn't clear (or discoverable) which release(s) of AppScale correspond to (compatibility with) which release(s) of GAE. Is there a changelog or roadmap document I missed?
I'm having a real hard time finding where the GAE 1.8.0 compatibility is mentioned in that document.
Most recent explicit mention of version compatibility seems to be:
AppScale version 1.6.5 was released December 19, 2012.
Bugs fixed in this release:
- Update Java AppServer to 1.7.3
- Update Python AppServer to 1.7.3
But even aside from that, are you really saying that your compatibility with GAE's releases is lagging by more than a year? The 1.8.0 version of the SDK was released in May 2013.
We have many customers using AppScale in production. Some migrated away from GAE for very specific reasons. Privacy (particularly in Europe), lock-in, control, performance and cost are the typical reasons...in that order. Many, however, come to AppScale because they love the GAE development model and want the independence to run their application wherever is best for their business; without the restrictions, quotas and performance irregularities.
The brilliance of GAE is the development model. The notion of concentrating on the business logic, the problem you are trying to solve, rather than working with stacks of software is the innovation. Our customers, and GAE's, are typically not tech companies. They do not have a deep bench of experienced developers. They are fashion and electronics retailers, global non-profits, SaaS companies trying to rapidly prototype and create MVP's. They want to innovate quickly and fail fast as they develop their business model. This is where the GAE model shines. It's fast. Business today must move at the speed of need, and the App Engine model, whether GAE or AppScale, is a tool that facilitates this.
AppScale is a complement to GAE. If want to run in AWS, SoftLayer, Azure or Digital Ocean, no problem. You can also run your app behind the firewall on OpenStack, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, Mothership1 or simply on top of KVM or VMware. AppScale is easy to install and deploy from GitHub. GAE needs to worry about running 4.5M active applications (up from 3M last year) but AppScale only needs to worry about one application, yours.
We understand that GAE did not make many fans in the early days. That has changed and their 50% growth in active apps over last year is evidence. Add AppScale to the picture and you get to continue using the awesome development model but you have the complete flexibility to run where you choose and maintain complete granular control over your app.
So, I will make a bold offer. Check out AppScale and give it a test drive. I would love to hear your feedback. If you need some extra love, our engineers will help over our IRC channel at freenode, #appscale
It is our goal to be the open source private PaaS of choice for forward-thinking developers and companies. We would love your support.