One cloud ain’t enough

One thing I’ve been learning over the last few months is that if your app is pretty beefy, you might well need more than one cloud provider to deploy it. With the major differences in approach between Amazon EC2 and Google AppEngine, they each have a variety of strengths and weaknesses with respect to a given application, and the weaknesses are such that you can’t really just live with them. So you partition the app into pieces and spread ’em around…

I’d like to be able to claim that that gives you a more robust solution, but of course, if you require two clouds to be operational in order for your app to work, you’re less robust. Both EC2 and GAE have been OK, but not great, in terms of uptime. I expect both to get better over time, though.

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