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It looks like AWS has recognized that turnkey scaling as provided by GAE is a competitive advantage, and has added that to their set of core services, as well as load balancing and monitoring.

While the AWS services don't yet compare favorably to a full offering like that of RightScale, it has to worry them a little. Building a scalable/monitored/HA app just got a lot easier to do without RightScale, at a lower monthly cost, with no setup cost.

As these services progress, I start to smell a little snake oil. What I mean by that is: it takes an enormous amount of effort to truly make an app scalable. For instance, nothing automatically addresses data layer scaling; the recommended solution still seems to be "build a really large mysql cluster with memcached," which means really understanding issues such as denormalization, which is a big barrier. Do services like those now being offered by AWS and RightScale really get you there, or do they just remove some obstacles so that you can proceed to hit others?

I'm not really arguing against these types of services. But I can't help but wonder if RightScale's up front $2000 "setup" fee (um, what exactly are they "setting up?" Running copper to the new warehouse holding my servers, are we?) is due to most purportedly-scalable apps failing the moment any reasonable load hits them, and therefore not making RightScale enough monthly revenue on a recurring basis.

When apps grew incrementally by provisioning hardware, their software architecture grew with them; before you shelled out the bucks for five shiny new rackmounted servers, you figured out exactly when you'd need them, which meant profiling, which meant finding the reasons you'd never get to the point where you needed them, which meant fixing the right bottleneck first. Now you can drop your WAR on AWS and assume it's scaling infinitely, without really understanding the underlying issues.

Maybe it's just Monday morning crankiness. But the design patterns, particularly with respect to data, are still pretty ad-hoc, private, and usage-specific for scalable webapps. I think we're selling just enough rope to hang unwary developers with.