I completely agree. Many people I know, including myself, are willing to give up root access simply for a easy to use administrative interface to manage their Accelerator.

I’d happily sacrifice root. What do I use root for? Updating blastwave packages, trying to get things to compile on solaris, and setting up SMF services. Hmm. Google has eliminated the need for all of that.

If Joyent offers a competitive advantage against app accelerator, it might be:

1) better pricing
2) better performance
3) significantly more flexibility

or simply

4) root access

Focusing on 4 is just a bad idea. The real question is, what is Joyent doing to help make peoples’ rails apps easy to deploy? It’s not submitting patches so that gems compile effortlessly on Solaris! It’s not making mysql on accelerators blazingly fast (even though Sun now owns mysql). What is it? It is the answer to that question that will determine whether anyone stays on Joyent as soon as Google releases support for Ruby in app accelerator.

Also, there is at least one open source bigtable clone, and I imagine that a competent engineer could recreate google’s platform on EC2 or even on an accelerator in less than a week. It’s not magic, it’s just python, cgi, bigtable, and a handful of other conventions.

Reading an absurd post about the benefits of root — for anything but niche deployments — really does not inspire confidence in Joyent’s vision and direction.

Then, solaris ports of linux things are not smoth. I lost 3 weeks triying to use pyLucene, and in the end, decide to launch the site with no searching – hoping solve it later -.

In the other hand, the google apps service have a lot of problems, or more exactly, a lot of that kind of small-things that become a lot of thing later. If I need to reinvent PIL, for example,where is the fun?

But I agree something could be done to easy the deployment on the accelerators. Maybe a option that say: “Add full django support with (Select packages: SVN, PIL, DB Library, etc)

It can create databases, install popular software (e.g. WordPress, etc), I can easily create email accounts etc … all with ease.

And you know what, even with their crappy downtimes – people stay solely because of the crazy simple and easy to use control panel they have developed.

Joyent, that’s why so many people were disappointed when word came out that TextPanel was not going to be developed.

People want tools to make their life easier. Webmin sucks in comparison to Dreamhost control panel. If you don’t believe me, spend the 7 bucks and find out.

(I only say this b/c I love you guys so much)

This is because my layer of abstraction is Python, Apache, Django, and MySQL. Someone else’s might be PHP or Ruby, Postgres or SQLite. And if the basic stack doesn’t have it I want gcc, make, and bash so I can build add-on apps that I can’t get to in Python. The last thing I want to think about is the OS.

@David: an instance creation API is cool, but so is a slick UI for doing quick and dirty tasks. I keep my personal account on WebFaction. They have a really nice UI for deploying instances of common blogging engines, databases, Django, etc. It’s good enough for 80% of the things I do. What they don’t have is the scalability if something gets Dugg.

These aren’t hobby projects, btw. They’re prototypes and demos being done for clients and partners. Not even close to — as @Ev said — the Y-Combinator kids. They’re not meant to scale. But they’re good stepping stones on the way to the final thing. I can’t imagine doing that on Joyent today. Way too much work.

To paraphrase the Perl guys, I want a service that makes “easy things easy and hard things possible.”

I am a web developer. It matters to me. All of things I mentioned (for which you queried and then conveniently neglected to address..) matter to me.

“…the OS doesn’t matter to the web developer. “

Are you sure?

(hint: I’m an incredibly happy Slicehost customer)

That is only half of the puzzle in a service like Google App Engine, which like AWS is quite a different model from typical hosting, plus offering a free taste.