Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

tophatmonocle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#31

Post by davepeck »

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.

Walk Score makes heavy use of GAE across many of its products, and is very happy with it. Despite the occasional downtime, the price/performance is on par with needs.

Walk Score uses AWS where it needs heavy compute back-ends, but all front-ends (including API "front-ends") are GAE-based.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#32

Post by tav »

newtonstan wrote: post #4

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

It's not a new trend. App Engine has had issues for a long time. Here's an article I wrote early last year about some of its problems and proposed solutions that the GAE team could use to fix them:

* http://www.espians.com/why-app-engine-is-not-appropriate-for...

But, despite the various problems, I still use App Engine for various applications. There are few platforms that can even compare to its power and simplicity. And good luck finding a NoSQL datastore which offers the power and scalability of App Engine's one.

In fact, if there was a decent open source alternative to the datastore, I'd switch away almost immediately.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#33

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

I'm curious how this works out? When I look at the App Engine pricing it doesn't look cheap - see:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html

What I see is Storage 0.15/GB/Month, CPU 0.10 / hr, Transfer 0.10/0.12 / GB. This seems basically on a par with EC2 except with EC2 you can get steep discounts for reserved instances or even use micro instances for some things.

So how is it that App Engine comes out so much cheaper?

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#34

Post by kljensen »

blantonl wrote: post #24
kljensen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, my email is in my profile. The lack of sysadmin is key for me. I focus on the app with gae, not updating BLANK.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#36

Post by Kilimanjaro »

I love AppEngine. It takes you time to unwrap your head from SQL and wrap it around the datastore but that's the only thing you have to overcome, believe me.

I'll tell you my story, a desktop developer gone web, starting with php and cheap hosting from godaddy, spending hundreds a month for my pet projects.

Then I learned GAE was free, so why pay for monthly hosting when you can get it for free for your pet projects? I have hundreds of them so I took the plunge and started to learn python. Damn easy, not going back to php, ever.

Don't waste your time with java unless your corporate overlords dictate it. Python is ten times easier and you can go from zero to ninja in one day. Or less.

I started with the hello world example using webapp, no need for frameworks at all, even if you come from django, drop it. Webapp can do it all with a couple of utilities and the template engine (same as django) in a couple of lines.

You'll be amazed at how simple it is to build an app, of any size, once you master the basics about models, sessions, authentication, etc.

You don't need sql connections, chmod configs, apache htaccess, and stuff like that. Just get some data and render it with a template. Fucking easy!

Don't believe me? You lose, not me. Give it a try, you'll be surprised.

I am a happy GAE user and my next startup (which I hope will have a million visits a day) runs on AppEngine and no worries at all about handling them all. Google will be there for me.

GAE 1.4 will come with Channel API, an easy way to send messages back and forth, we just got multitenancy, longer task queues and cron jobs, xmpp, etc.

You get it all at no cost, you pay only a couple of dollars when you need it, when you get slashdotted, dugg or techcrunched. No sweat, no sysadmins running like headless chickens, no server rooms burning.

And that, my friend, that is peace of mind.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#37

Post by ianb »

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…

It's also a shame the GAE team didn't pay any attention to any established frameworks that could have worked perfectly fine within GAE's constraints, like Pylons. Shortly after App Engine came out I put significant effort into making Pylons and related libraries work with GAE, but when there were problems on their end it felt like they reluctantly doing me a favor to respond to the bug reports and make changes. It felt like they had an anti-library mindset, even though there was no technical reason a lot of libraries wouldn't work well on App Engine.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#38

Post by riobard »

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…

The beauty of App Engine is that they bill based on CPU time. EC2 bills you based on wall clock time. Huge difference.

Re: Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

#39

Post by chrisboesing »

zmmmmm wrote: post #33
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…

I'm curious how this works out? When I look at the App Engine pricing it doesn't look cheap - see: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html What I see is Storage 0.15/GB/Month, CPU 0.10 / hr, Transfer 0.10/0.12 / GB. This seems basically on a par with EC2 except with EC2 you can get steep discounts for reserved instances or even use micro instances for some things. So how is it that App Engine comes out so…

You only pay for CPU if you really use it and not for "standby".

So if you have 100k requests in one month and each request takes 0.1 seconds you only have 10.000 seconds(or 166.66 hours or 2.7 hours) so you only pay $0.27 for that month. EC2 would bill you for 720 hours(30 days *24 hours). At a rate of $0.10 you would pay $72 instead of the $0.27.

(For this example I'm not taking the free quota into account)

Post reply on HN