While studying GAE, one of my aims is to understand how it differs from Amazon's similar suite of services. The following article summarizes some important differences and benefits.

Google Under Pressure as App Engine Requests Rise

Unlike other hosted computing and development services, like Amazon's AWS, App Engine provides a highly integrated set of components, reducing the amount of tuning and configuring that developers must engage in.

This design sacrifices flexibility and control by reducing options, but is in line with App Engine's ultimate goal of appealing to developers who want to create and deploy their application quickly, and are happy to have Google handle the rest.

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Bill Katz, a Palo Alto, California, web entrepreneur and developer, already wrote an application called Bloog, which he released under an open-source license, and is working on developing two other applications.

Since his team is made up of just himself and his wife, he values App Engine's integration, automation and simplicity.

"App Engine removes a number of tasks I'd have to handle for a very scalable web app, like maintaining multiple servers [and] a scalable database," he said.

He finds Amazon AWS "great" -- he uses its S3 service for his personal backup storage and might use EC2 to host some Web services that App Engine can't support -- but recognizes it targets a different market.

"AWS provides raw components that can be put together in a number of ways to make a scalable web app. Google App Engine, on the other hand, provides a fully integrated stack that requires you to work a certain way," he said.