Good questions nderground (loving the name).
I agree that no technology fits 100%, but Google leads the way for 90% of enterprise use-cases in my experience (for now).
Most of the stuff we build is for the enterprise. I’ts transactional, has a database, queues, email, SMS, backends, PDF generation, credit card payment etc.
For example, a telethon donations management system that raises $7M in 16 hours needs all of the things you’re describing, and more.
We’ve done big stuff on Amazon too, so I feel we have the experience to compare (and we started on Heroku). For example a cloud-based API for a big media company that serves millions of requests in a short window each day and powers some of the top sites in Australia, mobile/tablet apps etc.
It’s just that whenever we do Amazon we end up wasting huge amounts of time and money discussing HTTP, spin-up, load balancing and a thousand other infrastructure things.
All I can say is that 185 projects down, none of these has impacted the user experience, security or availability. Quite the reverse, we’ve never had to worry or think about these things.
Now that there’s a data centre in Australia (long time coming) I’d even build that API project on Google if we had to do it today.
Thanks for joining in.
