2009-03-24
Addressing App Engine Lock-in
One of the biggest criticisms of Google App Engine is the lock-in factor. Although the App Engine SDK is open source (Apache 2.0 license) and you can use Django to make your app more portable, there's no easy way to port your App Engine code to Amazon EC2 without creating your own datastore, etc.
AppScale addresses this concern. It's a cool looking project out of UC Santa Barbara that's supported by grants from Google and the National Science Foundation. The datastore is implemented with HBase and Hypertable databases over HDFS. Here's a technical report on this platform.
