Both App Engine and EC2 edge closer to the goal

In the two days since I posted that I was waiting to see if App Engine or an alternative got to the goal first both App Engine and EC2 have edged forward.
Yesterday Amazon announced a private beta for their own monitoring, load balancing, and automatic scaling service offering. Such included services is one of [...]

Waiting to see if App Engine or an alternative gets there first

After tracking down numerous alternatives to Google App Engine after hitting a wall on Project Fangorn, I looked at the most promising alternatives in more depth. Here is what I found.
GigaSpaces

Using GigaSpaces XAP would mean–at a minimum–creating Python bindings to their C++ API and re-writing my data model. Actually running on their EC2 [...]

Alternatives to Google App Engine

As I hit a wall in my development of Project Fangorn on Google’s App Engine platform I started looking around for alternative platforms. While there are numerous providers that claim to provide a cloud very few of them actually have a distributed datastore and a hosting environment that automatically expands and contracts (i.e. scale) [...]

Google App Engine not up to the task

Update 10/24/2008: It appears that the mcycle consumption of datastore operations are not actually counted against the soft cap and that GAE’s admin console is incorrectly including the consumption of datastore operations when issuing warnings about excessive mcycle consumption.
Update 12/16/2008: It starting to look like the mcycle consumption values I observed in GAE’s logs [...]

Project Fangorn playable prototypical preview deployed

I just played through all my initial turns for the playable prototypical preview of turn based web strategy game codenamed Project Fangorn that I deployed to Google App Engine earlier today.  At this point you are confined to your majorverse (home base) and you can’t come into contact with other players; however, you can build [...]

Project Fangorn progress V

At this point, I’ve got all of the game features implemented that I wanted in place before publishing a prototypical preview of Project Fangorn onto Google App Engine.  Fours things remain before publishing the preview:

Implement robust cross-entity cross-request update mechanism for changes to entities that are not all in the same entity group.
Improve error handling
Update [...]

Google App Engine scalability that doesn’t just work

Now that I’ve got enough of Project Fangorn’s features implemented for it to be playable, I spent some time reflecting on the experience of utilizing Google App Engine’s datastore and it strikes me that there are things about it that actually don’t scale and its API does not provide it-just-works (IJW) scalability. In theory [...]

Project Fangorn progress IV

Game Design
In thinking about the exploits feature (as previously mentioned) I came to the conclusion that having players achieve singular global exploits by being the first to do something would give to much advantage to those who start a hear, round, or game exactly when it began.  First I was thinking about changing it to [...]