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Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

#12

Post by alooPotato »

We, streak.com, use GAE. We think its one of the best platform decisions we've made. Zero admin time, scales without us worrying about it, etc.

We aren't really worried about the platform lockin (we think it will be hard to migrate from any provider to any other provider anyways). Cost can be an issue if you don't optimize or do things the appengine way. But at least you have the decision - you can tradeoff $ for engineering time.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

#14

Post by markahern »

Tethras (http://tethras.com) is built entirely on top of App Engine for Python. We're a fully managed app translation service. We've found a lot of the baked in features like map reduce and the search api really help us with out with our translation memory and translation search implementations.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

#15

Post by japhyr »

Thank you for the replies everyone, this is really helpful.

I asked because I have a student (11th grade) who wants to be a professional programmer. He is taking the intermediate web development course, and I saw that the main project is building a blog on top of GAE. I was not sure if GAE is maintaining relevance, or if it is losing out to other platforms.

I know that at this point in his education most of what he learns by focusing on GAE will be relevant. All of the platforms deal with the same server-side and client-side issues, they just do it in their own way. I know that if he understands how apps are built on top of GAE, he will be able to make sense of whatever framework he chooses to learn next, deployed to whatever platform he chooses to build on.

This helps share some perspective with him about GAE's role in the platform space. I am happy to hear it is still quite relevant.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

#17

Post by salimmadjd »

nixarn wrote: post #5
salimmadjd wrote: post #4

We built an entire semantic content discovery engine on top of it. However, had to shut it down when their price went up by 10X.

With their new Python 2.7 multithreading support the price of GAE seem to have gone down, I read about some gaming company that got their cost down to ~40% of what it was before. So with that and coding around GAE's limitations I think it's possible to use. We're certainly looking into using it instead of AWS for our next projects (games). Rovio also uses it for their Facebook games.

Dedicated server from various vendors are probably so much cheaper than the GAE or AWS. We should have just started with AWS and then stayed on AWS or transfer to one of these dedicated server since our traffic was pretty steady. Just a suggestions for others who are looking into this. Don't build your business around google!

Re: Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

#18

Post by japhyr »

japhyr wrote: post #15

Thank you for the replies everyone, this is really helpful. I asked because I have a student (11th grade) who wants to be a professional programmer. He is taking the intermediate web development course, and I saw that the main project is building a blog on top of GAE. I was not sure if GAE is maintaining relevance, or if it is losing out to other platforms. I know that at this point in his education most of what he l…

I meant to clarify, he's taking the intermediate web development course through udacity.
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