Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and sockets

As I know the G开发者_JAVA百科AE does not support use the raw TCP/IP sockets, i.e. java.net.ServerSocket. Is there any other well known cloud service I can use it? E.g. Amazon EC2?

My client application needs the permanent TCP connection to the server...

Thanks a lot STeN

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Any IaaS provider will allow to do that. IaaS is Infrastracture as a Service, where Amazon EC2 is the most known one. In IaaS you can do all the same things that you could do with a dedicated server. The only difference is that it is using visualization and you can deploy and undeploy servers within minutes. You can find a number of IaaS providers at cloudorado.com .

GAE is PaaS - Platform as a Service. You don't play there with servers at all, you even don't know how many servers is your application using. You just put your app (like war) into the service and it hosts it. The platform will take care of scaling, distributing, etc. But there is an expense - you need to limit yourself, since the application needs to almost stateless (apart from session object). You cannot start your own services, db servers, start threads, etc.

EDIT: It appears now to be possible with GAE Managed VMs: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/

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sockets in GAE is a coming soon feature.

I read from here http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkForGoReleaseNotes

For now you need to sign up as a trusted tester to use this feature, but I guess this will be available to the public in the future.