I also think that both google’s and amazon’s data models are more complicated than most people think, this summarizes the issues nicely http://www.ryanpark.org/2008/04/top-10-avoid-the-simpledb-hype.html

Rob, do you think Amazon.com’s data storage service offers more to the data-literate developer than Google does? If so, is it worth experimenting on combinations?

Competent sysadmin is a -very- scarce resource.

-That’s- the real value proposition here, not the data apis. And at some level, perhaps I buy it. I’m just not sure yet.

sure, I like the turnkey provisioning, the built-in authentication, provision of email, URL mapping, and load-balancing. But I don’t like the fact that the only data API I get is to this “substandard” BigTable thing. I want my ACID, maaaan. And why shouldn’t I get it? Why shouldn’t I get normal relational SQL?

The googlers might tell me that I don’t want it. But they’re living a world where apps might scale up so far and so fast that giving real fully-serializable access to shared data is prohibitively expensive. So they’re purposely given us an API that is -less- than that. Problem is, for most, -MOST- apps, they’ll never get to the level where a panty-waist MySQL on a weenie machine isn’t enough. If I believe that my app is in that category, -why- would I want to write my app to this much-more-complicated concurrency-control regime? Really, why would I want to do it?

@Patrick: I came to this conclusion as it appears to be harder to write a GAE than a PHP / mysql application, this is due to all the limitations on what you can do with the data layer. If you don’t need huge scalability I don’t see why you would want to make life more complicated for yourself. Get a webhost and code a PHP/ Mysql application :)

Not clear to me how you came to this conclusion – that the premise is that apps built on GAE will be wildly successful. Rather, I suspect there’s plenty of low-fruit to be picked here in terms of the ‘long-tail’ – most apps will NOT be wildly successful, and GAE will be a good fit for them.