Google App Engine vs. Azure

Google App Engine 1.5: GAE is Google’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offering, most comparable to Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Unveiled in 2008, GAE is currently still in preview, but Google is saying it will go into production mode some time later this year. (Azure went live in February 2010.) Google also said this week that 100,000 developers are using GAE every month, and that 200,000 apps are running on the platform. Microsoft said earlier this year that it has 31,000 Azure customers. The 1.5 GAE release adds support for Google’s Go programming language, and a 99.5% uptime SLA (once GAE comes out of preview). Microsoft offers a variety of different SLA rates for different components of Azure, which seem to run between 99.5% and 99.9%.