High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Google App Engine (GAE) is focused on making development easy, but limits your options. Amazon Web Services is focused on making development flexible, but complicates the development process. Real enterprise applications require both of these paradigms to achieve success… What we really want is the flexibility of AWS and the simplicity of GAE..

This post include detailed on who is using the platform and how from Enterprise applicaitons, to ISV that are looking for SaaS enablement, through partners and solution providers that are looking for to gain a competitive advantage and deploy application in short time to market and small initial investment.

This may be a bit higher level then the general discussion here, but I think this is an important issue in how it relates to reliability and uptime. What kind of SLAs should we be expecting from SaaS services and platforms (e.g. AWS, Google App Engine, Google Premium Apps, salesforce.com, etc.)? Up to today, most SaaS services either have no SLAs or offer very weak penalties. What will it take to get these services up to the point where they can offer the SLAs that users (and more importantly, businesses) require? I presume most of the members here want to see more movement into the cloud and to SaaS services, and I'm thinking that until we see more substantial SLA guarantees, most businesses will continue to shy away as long as they can.

Would love to hear what others think. Or am I totally off base?

Can you really create an infinitely scalable infrastructure for less than $100 using Amazon's storage, grid, and queuing services platform? It appears so, at least for the right application. Amazon beams a spot light on the future battle of the roll-your-own versus the connect-the-dots approach to building next generation websites using core external services. Their argument is strong. Using Amazon's platform you can quickly build an infrastructure that would otherwise take an eternity to make, a pile of money to create, and an unbounded mass of people to implement and maintain. Yet Amazon doesn't provide SLAs, so you can you really trust them with your crown jewels? Facebook recently leap frogged Amazon's vision with an even more comprehensive set of services. The battle for the future is on.