PaaS (Platform as as Service) Solutions Review

Well, I have decided to start (finally) playing around with PaaS solutions. I have briefly looked at GAE vs OpenShift, my initial impressions of each:

GAE (Google App Engine)

Strengths

• Integrates well with Maven, and POM is nicely setup with a Maven Archetype
• Will soon be offering MySQL solution, so you can have proper transactional apps on it
• Plays well with Spring
• Offers a NoSQL datastore (BigTable)
• Automatically scales well with not much effort/monitoring on a devs behalf
• Ties in well with other Google offerings, such as Drive, Maps, and even user management

Weaknesses

• No full Java EE stack offering
• Hard to avoid vender lock in

OpenShift

Strengths

• Zero vendor lock-in
• Can run basically any application. You can deploy straight to a JBoss 7.1 server easily (or PHP, Perl, whatever tickles your fancy)
• Has a nice Eclipse plugin
• Deploys by checking into a specific GIT repo (haven't tried yet but looks fairly easy)
• Automatically scales well with not much effort/monitoring on a devs behalf
• Can use MySQL, PostgreSQL or even MongoDB out of the box

Weaknesses

• The default MySQL install doesn't automatically scale, I am sure you can some how set up replication but haven't looked into yet.
• No built in niceties that you get with GAE, such as automatic user management
• Relatively new, and not as well used and therefore tested as GAE (yet)

Verdict

I like both offerings to be honest, it would just depend on your requirements and personal likes/dislikes. I think I am leaning towards setting up a new application on OpenShift, mainly due to the fact you can deploy to a REAL application server (as opposed to a lightweight one such as Jetty etc). Stay tuned for how I get on...