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Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

tophatmonocle.com

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Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#21

Post by Swizec »

Nemisis7654 wrote: post #19

Wow, these stories about the horrors of GAE are a little bit scary for me. I was starting to develop a project with a friend in our spare time, and we decided to go with GAE. We've only gotten as far as the end of the tutorial and are reading the documentation for GAE, but I have a question: As a college student who is looking to build a project on the side as a means for experience and a way to handle an issue we ha…

Go with GAE. There's a lot less overhead with things you really don't want to be dealing with.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#22

Post by kljensen »

blantonl wrote: post #16
woan wrote: post #7

Anyone have a happy story of GAE availability in particular? I am not so bothered and actually appreciate the programming model. Actually reading the story, seems like some of their architectural patterns may have run contrary to asynchronous intent. 98% availability is a deal breaker for most betting thyeir business and image.

I'll pile on this. I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine. I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are. I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so…

I run two profitable businesses on app engine. The occasional downtime is a tolerable exchange for the numerous benefits. (I also use ec2 for computationally expensive jobs. The ec2 instances are started and stopped by gae.)

Bottom line for me is this: on gae one dude, sans team, can be dangerous.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#23

Post by netaddict »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #17
robinhouston wrote: post #9

There's an interesting detail in the final paragraph: “We pay about 1000x more for EC2 than we did for App Engine”. One of the rarely-mentioned virtues of App Engine is that it's really, astonishingly, cheap — as well as removing the system administration burden, which is also a cost in either time or money. For a large company, web application hosting is an insignificant cost, but for an unfunded startup it can be p…

re: very low cost: how true! The web app I run on AppEngine 24/7 is a low volume site so I never appreciated how much the daily free quota gets you until last summer when I took one of the Google Buzz firehose reading demos and modified it to extract what I wanted from the Buzz firehose (large volume of Buzz, Twitter, etc. social messages). I just used the daily free quota and my temporary app would run for 5 or 6 ho…

App Engine has a billing plan if you want to use more resources than the free quota. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html It is a lot cheaper than AWS

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#24

Post by blantonl »

kljensen wrote: post #22
blantonl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pile on this. I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine. I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are. I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so…

I run two profitable businesses on app engine. The occasional downtime is a tolerable exchange for the numerous benefits. (I also use ec2 for computationally expensive jobs. The ec2 instances are started and stopped by gae.) Bottom line for me is this: on gae one dude, sans team, can be dangerous.

Interesting perspective. I'm a "one dude" on EC2 and geeze I feel dangerous at times.... I haven't had any spectacular failures, but I've certainly had some close calls.

I'd love to hear more about how you've leveraged GAE.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#25

Post by grandalf »

100k wrote: post #10

I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment. Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine-patch or django-norel working. Those also suck. There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way. Nope. Ab…

What's wrong with the Webapp framework? I like it quite a bit -- it's light, fast, and simple, almost like Sinatra but with a bit less syntactic elegance.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#26

Post by grandalf »

blantonl wrote: post #16
woan wrote: post #7

Anyone have a happy story of GAE availability in particular? I am not so bothered and actually appreciate the programming model. Actually reading the story, seems like some of their architectural patterns may have run contrary to asynchronous intent. 98% availability is a deal breaker for most betting thyeir business and image.

I'll pile on this. I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine. I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are. I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so…

I love app engine. The datastore issues have been the only negative aspect of it. Yes, SSL support and naked domain support would be nice, but it's a very nice platform to develop on.

Sure, the first time I wrote a toy app on app engine I ran into the so-called "limitations" b/c I didn't understand the way the platform is designed. But once you get it, it's really just a series of quite reasonable tradeoffs that you make in order to get effortless scaling.

Yes, the platform could be a bit more reliable and in some areas a bit more mature, and yes, one of my projects almost failed b/c of the datastore issues over the last few months (angry users, etc.) But we made it through, and as of Nov 6, I get very few errors and things just work again.

Is App Engine ready for every prime time app you might want to build? No. But it's definitely a platform to know about and to watch carefully.

One other feature to note is the app versioning capabilities. You can simultaneously run lots of different versions of an app... useless at first, but extremely valuable later when you want to get aggressive and roll out updates gradually, etc.

And, there is ZERO sysadmin work and NONE of the usual web server setup yak shaving.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#27

Post by jread »

For what it is worth, we've had 99.998% uptime for static files on appengine - not using datastore or any other features (about 11 minutes of legitimate outages the past year).

During the same time period we've had 100% uptime for m1.small servers in EC2's US East and West regions, 99.989% uptime for EU West and 99.997% for APAC.

http://cloudharmony.com/status

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#28

Post by grandalf »

jonpaul wrote: post #2

I really appreciate reading stories like this. For budding startups like mine, we need every available resource at our disposal on technology choices. I also think articles like this will encourage Google's engineers to keep making GAE a better platform. AFAIK, Google is also notorious for eating their own dog food. I was a bit taken back by the criticism on the last app-engine article. Quite frankly, sometimes you d…

I think Google sort of deserves some negative press after the major datastore problems of late (now fixed), but it's not reasonable to criticize the app engine platform itself. The so-called limitations are just reasonable trade-offs, and frankly they are less annoying than many that teams end up self-imposing in order to work around unexpected bottlenecks in their app.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#29

Post by grandalf »

jskopek wrote: post #12
newtonstan wrote: post #4

Is it getting fashionable these days to blame Google App Engine? I am reading lots of horror stories about GAE!!

I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. There have been a number of posts attacking App Engine recently, and a lot of good discussions have come out of them. The two things issues that seem to get brought up most are app design and reliability. - Reliability: App Engine reliability used to be horrible, but it's getting better. GAE was the first service I ever developed for where reliability was an issue. I've hosted apps…

I'm really curious about where Django helps with this? Is it really that hard to use 3rd party libs with webapp?

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#30

Post by davepeck »

100k wrote: post #10

I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment. Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine-patch or django-norel working. Those also suck. There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way. Nope. Ab…

I agree that people who approach App Engine for the first time get quite confused about how to make Django "work" on GAE. There are too many options. Even after evaluating, developers may not understand how round-peg/square-hole the problem is.

I like some of the basic infrastructure that Django gives me, so I make use of `use_library()` Django 1.1 on App Engine. It's not "full" Django but I find it more palatable than WebApp and the parts of Django that fit GAE fit it well. Models, etc should be done directly on top of the GAE APIs, in my opinion.

I think Guido's rietveld sample app is a good place to start if you're new to App Engine and want to use (the useful bits of) mainline Django.

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