It may be expensive, but you don't have to do "scaling" right now. A startup doesn't even know the business requirements or bottlenecks yet, how can it even begin to talk about scaling?
Scaling on GAE really works because of all the restrictions, and nothing stops you from restricting yourself in a similar way, e.g. in a similar vein the FriendFeed people have done: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
The sysadmin part is also easy when you've got only 1 or 2 servers to worry about, the hard part of doing sysadmin is also when "scaling". Personally I can get an initial EC2 instance up and running in 2 hours tops, and then I can and have been automating that.
I've also worked on GAE apps, and from my experience the sysadmin stuff is replaced by at least 3/2 as much developer time, and this for trivial stuff.
Sorry for the analogy / bad language, but do you know what else scales? Fucking in the ass, i.e. no unexpected pregnancies, but that would be a stupid suggestion to make, wouldn't it?
Scaling on GAE really works because of all the restrictions, and nothing stops you from restricting yourself in a similar way, e.g. in a similar vein the FriendFeed people have done: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
The sysadmin part is also easy when you've got only 1 or 2 servers to worry about, the hard part of doing sysadmin is also when "scaling". Personally I can get an initial EC2 instance up and running in 2 hours tops, and then I can and have been automating that.
I've also worked on GAE apps, and from my experience the sysadmin stuff is replaced by at least 3/2 as much developer time, and this for trivial stuff.
Sorry for the analogy / bad language, but do you know what else scales? Fucking in the ass, i.e. no unexpected pregnancies, but that would be a stupid suggestion to make, wouldn't it?