Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations, it is going to have to pay to exceed those limitations, and it is going to have to be carefully architected in order to scale. The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host, and the other half -- the ones that will make or break the value proposition -- haven't been stated yet.

Not really -- this is "it's less effort for them to deploy everything on their existing, robust tools" thinking. I personally don't second-guess it, because once a tool proves itself worthy at the GOOG, it tends to stick around for a long, long time. Some of my cave-man Python code is probably still kicking around in ops/SRE. (It's hard to write really bad Python, although there have been valiant efforts over the years, and we're sure to see many more)

Your skepticism is warranted, but I just think it's misplaced. The one thing that Google has proven they can do as well as, perhaps better than, anyone else is get tasks to run transparently across a whole shitload of computers and datacenters. Maybe everyone there is turning evil nowadays, I don't know, I can't know -- what I do know is that it would be more effort to turn around and fuck up the existing building blocks than to simply open them up (with appropriate restrictions) via GAE. That's all.

Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think that you're off the mark. JMHO

nor are they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to ensure that my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview will "scale" out to 10 million hits per day.

If the price is right, I'd bet you they would rent it... That's really what AWS is all about. Although it will be a while before the GOOG has entire excess datacenters' worth of capacity -- somehow, Google always managed to soak up all the deployed capacity and then some, at all times. As someone coming from a supercomputing background, I thought that was really fucking cool, because when you're deploying racks an 18-wheeler at a time, you might expect some lag between powering up and going to 1mW steady. Nope.

I've never seen a company that could scale infrastructure like Google, and I worked at IBM Microelectronics a couple years before GOOG, along with another one of the biggest websites on the planet, and deployed my own multihomed network in the interim (as mentioned elsewhere, one of my bigger triumps as an 'architect' was beating Microsoft at their own game with a staff of 4 people during that time). No one I have ever seen comes close to Google in terms of operational efficiency, and I've seen a lot over the years.

Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations

No shit, that's why it's free. I honestly cannot see how those limitations will include a lack of fault tolerance, the provision of which is their biggest selling point (IMHO). Everything else (again IMHO) pales in comparison.

The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host

For certain conditions -- you can't be a Pythonista or the comparison goes out the window. Moreover, if you create several GAE accounts (do it! do it! Just because I worked there doesn't mean I don't support taking advantage of them), you now have a framework for freely deploying a bunch of pilot projects for $0 down and $0/month.

Just don't marry yourself to the Google toolset (Users, ObjectStore) too tightly and you get a LOT of good shit for free. AWS is more open and more loosely coupled, so for many (most?) non-larval startups it's probably the better choice at this point in time.

But if you're a cubicle dweller plotting your escape? FUCKING GO FOR IT, MAN! The price is right (free) and Django is an awesome framework for pilot projects. If you strike it big... well, burn that bridge when you come to it.

Oddly enough, I'm going to have to invoke DHH's "build first, scale later" maxim here -- "build first, limit lockin, migrate later" for many people. Not all, maybe not even most, but for individual developers with a little self-discipline, this is a HUGE step.

And (this is killer) nobody says you can't farm our your long-running jobs to AWS/EC2 and call them via REST from your GAE app. Just like the ticket for urllib2 support is mostly about RESTful auth and data transfer. A LOT of us want to decouple GAE from those bits -- instead of complaining, some of us are working on it, and it seems like Guido and others at Google are supporting the effort.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by the GOOG's internal disorganization and 'organic' (to be generous) growth pattern. ;-)

Why, thank you! In this case, my writing may be completely off base, but it has achieved its victory condition: It has drawn you out to provide a very intelligent level of argument. ;)

And I am operating at a severe disadvantage... all I know about Google (and about Python and Django, for that matter) is what I read in the papers. You really can't learn much about what's going on inside Google from the papers.

That's a big part of the problem here: with Google Apps the company seems to be gearing up to make a transition toward more transparency, but they're not quite there yet. I am fully willing to admit that Google's infrastructure kicks the butt of a $7 web host... once I know what I'm getting, what the charge is, and what the service level will be. I certainly agree that the various limitations we can see now -- Python only, limited static files, limits on peak bandwidth, no SSL for now, blah blah blah -- will all be forgivable, even trivial, once we have confidence that Google will deliver cheap scalability and rock-solid operational performance -- and once there are well-understood approaches and tools for deploying Google Apps without "marrying oneself to the Google toolset". But for much of their history Google's reputation has been kind of like Batman's reputation: They're known to be superheroes, they have many wonderful toys, they use them mostly for good and we're very grateful... but they operate in the shadows, and folks often complain that it's hard to get them on the phone to explain exactly why your pagerank just dropped by fifty spots overnight, or exactly how they control your ad revenue for false clicks.

I don't attribute any of that to malice, though. And it's early in the history of the beta of Google Apps (a real beta, not one of those legendary eternal "betas"), so we must be patient. Certainly your words are cause for optimism.