<? DriftLogic ¿>

As I've had my nose buried in PHP and Drupal for what amounts to most of the last year, Google's announcement of AppEngine took me a bit by surprise.

A few months ago, we looked into setting up a production server using S3 + EC2. The combination works well and is a fraction of the cost in comparison to the fully managed hosting we currently use. The lack of an Amazon backed persistent storage filesystem forces you to have a solid recovery plan, but in all other regards, Amazon's scalability lets us compete at a level not possible without serious infrastructure investment. From a business perspective, Amazon is cost effective and accessible provided you have some linux sysadmin talent sitting around (or are willing to hire some).