One of my main complaints about Google App Engine is that it locks you into using Google’s servers and APIs, giving you little recourse if Google decides to terminate either the service or your contract. Well, good news: that’s changed—somewhat. Chris Anderson has gotten a proof-of-concept App Engine clone running on Amazon’s EC2 service. Because Anderson has done little more than repackage the App Engine SDK for deployment on EC2, it cannot scale the same way that Google-based hosting (or properly written EC2-hosted apps) can, but it’s a good first step towards decreasing App Engine’s lock-in. If they’re able to layer BigTable on top of SimpleDB or an equivalent system, I could well see App Engine becoming the de facto high-traffic web application architecture.