I am planning on moving my static files to Google's App Engine. I was wondering if this is a good idea to do.
I have read that is it possible that Google will cache your files on multiple locations, which is a good thing in my opinion.
The setup should also be quite easy in eclipse with the GAE plugins.
But i still have my doubts on the performance of this. Is the setup of App Engine optimized for serving static content. Now I have Nginx server my static content, will App Engine perform the same way.
Are there any other ups or downs using this method?
Best Answer
The app engine is a cloud computing platform and is not designed to be a CDN. While your data may be stored on multiple nodes those nodes are not edge-cache nodes so they will not offer the same benefits that a CDN would. You can compare GAE vs various CDNs using the CloudHarmony.com speed test. Here were the results when I tested today:
You'll see that the CDN ends up being 2-7 times faster than GAE for file downloads.