Does Google App Engine use any hypervisor? - 【StackMirror】|google-app-engine|hypervisor

Since Google App Engine is a PaaS does it use any hypervisor? it is known that Amazon EC2 uses XEN and Microsoft Azure uses Hyper-V.

2012-04-04 23:09
by ToinoBiclas

If they do, they'll probably never tell us : - Rick Mangi 2012-04-05 02:24

probably :) but i have a higher degree of trust in a provider whose the offering is clear for m - ToinoBiclas 2012-04-05 10:43

@ToinoBiclas What's the relevance of the type or presence of a hypervisor? The App Engine offering is at a much higher level than this; it doesn't seem relevant what's being used to provide it - Nick Johnson 2012-04-06 00:19

EC2 is Infrastructure as a Service, and provides low level access to the hardware; thus, the choice of hypervisor is relevant. MS's Azure also provides reasonably low level access. App Engine is structured around the Google stack; it doesn't provide access to kernel level services, so the choice of (or existence of) hypervisor isn't relevant.

2012-04-05 09:17
by Nick Johnson

Spoken like a true googler ;-) but he is correct. appengine is more akin to salesforce than ec2. They manage all of the scaling for you and you have no access to the underlying technology outside of the API provided to you - Rick Mangi 2012-04-05 13:41

@nick-johnson Please, let's not make users be even more confused. EC2 is a IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service); App Engine, Azure, Heroku and similar are a PaaS. SaaS, in contrast, is what you'd call services like GMail, Google Docs, Flickr, etc - alex 2012-04-05 13:46

@alex You're right, I misspoke. I've rewritten my answer to be clearer - Nick Johnson 2012-04-06 00:18