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Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play?

Risk capitalist Brad Feld good put up an intriguing post comparing Google App Apparatus to Amazon EC2. The meat of the entry is from an review by Brad's friend Scott Waspish. Here are the juiciest bits, pro and con:

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, perform scalability hacks if things spread too fast (such as distributed caching of figures via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-boy, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still be missing sys admins, AppEngine companies don't. That will certainly shift as more companies begin offering EC2 server stewardship services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that's the only datastore accessible (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people mostly use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a non-relational datastore called SimpleDB, but it's a bit *too* open. For example, it does not support sorting of results sets. Huh? That makes it non-workable in my way of thinking. There's also an issue with using EC2 virtual machines for your database servers -- Amazon says that when a accepted machine crashes, all the data managed by it disappears, so essential machine crash = hard effort crash.

With EC2, programmers can use any (non-Microsoft) intercourse to develop their apps. AppEngine users must protocol in Python. Also, Google does not finances sockets at this time. All cross-app communication must be done via HTTP.

At *this* import in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial. This, to me, is the biggest consequence, as I believe it could make startups less-attractive from an acquisition perspective by anyone other than Google. This will most meet change as people develop compatibility layers. However, Google has yet to supply any information about how to migrate data from their...

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