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How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine.

Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google's cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google's infrastructure:

What … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 701: Doughnut for your hate

Flickr-haters get free doughnuts. If that's what you get for hating, sign us up! Also, Gartner hates on Windows, and no one gets any doughnuts for that. Europe rejects plans to criminalize file-sharing, offering doughnuts in the form of broad exemptions for fair use, and Network Solutions gets a big, fat doughnut hole for putting ads on your subdomains. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 701

Mike Please keep doing the show.

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9916717-56.html http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1870375122;fp;;fpid;;pf;1 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8428… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 700: Merger-mania!

Yahoo and Microsoft bring Google, AOL, and News Corp. into the ring for a pretty awesome merger-mania that we sincerely hope involves the gratuitous use of Spandex. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday on Pay-per-view! That darned RSA conference continues to scare the sneezes out of us by demonstrating how taking down a national power grid is trivially easy. (Insert nervous giggle here.) We guess it's good to know? Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 667

Yahoo-Microsoft buyout brawl, one-two punch with a swift comeback punch http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9916001-7.html http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9915835-80.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120776803032602423.html… Read more

Does streaming lift music sales?

Free streaming music turns people on to new music and encourages them to buy, says social-networking site Last.fm. In the music industry, this will not come as a huge revelation.

Last.fm, acquired by CBS last May, announced Wednesday that since the company launched its on-demand streaming service two months ago, CD and download sales through its partnership with Amazon.com have more than doubled.

So what does that mean?

Music discovery continues to be one of digital music's greatest vulnerabilities. Nobody has come up with a sure or simple way to help people wade through the millions … Read more

Amazon.com feels bad you bought an HD DVD player, so here's $50

Still reeling from the recently concluded format war?

Lucky for some early adopters, the number of retailers lining up to ease your pain is growing: first Best Buy, then Wal-Mart, and now Amazon. The online retail giant is currently offering a $50 credit for every HD DVD player purchased on its site. The offer is good until April 9, 2009, for HD DVD players bought before February 23, when Toshiba said it would stop making the devices.

Gizmodo has posted the e-mail sent to some Amazon customers on Tuesday. I've excerpted the best parts:

"New technologies don't … Read more

The new hosting provider?

One of the problems with putting things into categories is that as technologies and the environment change over time, those which were once separate and distinct can become much less so. But, because we've grown so accustomed to thinking of them as independent entities, we can miss that shift.

From a practical business perspective, this can mean failing to notice that someone we never thought of as a competitor is now serving the needs of our customers. They may well be doing it in a different way or coming at a problem from a different mindset or design point. … Read more

Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service

On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.

Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy … Read more

Google hopes to house Web software on App Engine

Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications.

App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a combination of several online Google services for those who want a place to host software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those include the BigTable service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with authentication to let people sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications, he said.

At … Read more

Amazon computing Web service suffers glitch

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.

A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.

It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.

It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on … Read more