Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: Google App Engine: How AppDrop Does and Does Not Affect Lock-in

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: Google App Engine: How AppDrop Does and Does Not Affect Lock-in: "The cloud computing blogging world is abuzz with the news that Chris Anderson has created an interesting experiment in which he has created GAE-compliant hosting on Amazon EC2. This is an experiment that I've actually been looking at myself, but having a day job that is intensely busy right now, haven't had a chance to get to.

What did Chris do? In short, he got a working copy of the GAE SDK working on Amazon virtual machines with some modification. There are limitations:

* It will not scale (none of the Google 'secret sauce').
* It does not support email at this time (though the source code is available for anyone who wants to add it).
* It could go down at any time, either due to an EC2 outage (not very likely), or because whoever is paying for this doesn't want to foot the bill anymore (much more likely).

The implications of this are big, however. A couple of days ago, in an email exchange with Simon Wardley, I did a little analysis of what it would take to do a scalable version of this in open source. I don't have the depth of knowledge necessary to identify all of the relevant projects, but here's what I came up with:"