Cloud services comparison [closed]

Question

I'm studying cloud services and what kind of cabablities biggest ones have. I'm intrested in services like Goole App Engine, Amazon etc. I would like to know if there are any good comparsion of cloud services.

Answer 1

Maybe this should be community-wiki.

Google App Engine runs your webapp. It only runs your webapp. It's great if all you want is a webapp. You can't do any long-running calculations except by breaking it up into tasks and adding them to the "task queue" (you might use the task queue to do stuff like rescaling user-uploaded images). It has a handful of nice services (mail sending, mail "receiving" by converting it to a POST request, XMPP sending/receiving by roughly the same means), but you do not get a core or a file system.

Amazon provides lower-level infrastructure. EC2 is a virtual machine, EBS is a virtual block device, S3 is a network "storage solution" (you give it blobs). They also provide a few other things (Mechanical Turk, payment/shipping stuff). EC2 is good if you want to run a big calculations, or you can otherwise keep the CPU load high — you pay for VM uptime, not CPU usage. (EC2 is actually reasonably cheap if you use "spot instances", but spot instances are terminated when demand brings the spot price higher than your maximum price; it designed for calculations which take days/weeks where you don't mind a little extra latency).

Heroku primarily lets you run Ruby and PostgreSQL. The architecture doesn't seem as scalable as GAE.

Windows Azure gives you "compute hours" and a MSSQL-ish database. It's unclear whether "compute" means uptime or CPU time; it appears to be marketed as a server-replacement, but there's an SDK involved which suggests it might be more like GAE.

I can't quite work out what force.com offers; the page is entirely marketing.