What big sites use Google App Engine? Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on?
Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#2App Engine has a lot of really awesome features going for it. There are some pains for sure, but not the ones you find people typically griping about. The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. What's annoying is the lack of library compatibility, and no real SSL suport. Having access to a relatively small subset of available libraries for Java/Python sucks, each time you find a library you'll have to find out for yourself it it works on AE or not.
As for SSL. I mean come on. It's 2011, it's absolutely unbelievable they don't support SSL for custom domains. Unbelievable.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#3we use it at ligertail.com and dont see a reason to switch to aws so far :)
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#4App engine has the following awesome characteristics:
- the datastore is extremely scalable if you use it as intended.
- your app can automatically scale up and down (as if an invisible genie were moving the little "workers" slider that Heroku uses)
- always on instances make your app mega fast, even at low volume (but cost a tad bit more).
- there are a lot of useful apis (memcache, queue, email) and a nice development environment.
- it usually "just works" and "just scales".
a few bad things:
- they had some very annoying downtime while they sorted out the datastore architecture problems (where theory and practice had differed with horrible results)
- the OSX dev tools don't bundle the correct version of python and associated libs, which makes it a pain to get a working dev environment on OSX without breaking your system's python.
- no naked domains, SSL support for normal apps that aren't priced per user.
All in all I'd rather write an app for AppEngine than any other cloud system, though Heroku is catching up -- both could really benefit from prioritizing 24 hour support via irc though.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#5Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#6Appengine is extremely good for auto scaling, if u have 100 users today and and u get 1 million users tomorrow, it will just work without u having to do anything, u dont need a scaling engineer.
I use appengine for all my web apps, it works for most of basic webapps, here are a few I have used appengine for: http://gramfeed.com, http://shaloc.com, http://checkinmania.com, http://misotrendy.com
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#7At 2XL we built the backend for Ricky Carmichael's Motocross Matchup on Google AppEngine. We might switch to EC2 as it grows.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#8We use it at www.bugsense.com and we love it. It has lot of great apis included but it requires a mind switch and you should study the limitations. Datastore is really scalable but slow.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#9App Engine has a lot of really awesome features going for it. There are some pains for sure, but not the ones you find people typically griping about. The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. What's annoying is the lack of library compatibility, and no real SSL suport. Having access to a relatively small subset of available libraries for Java/Python sucks, each time you find a library you'll have to find out…
There are ways to hack around the lack of SSL on third party domains with Ajax, but yeah it's pretty insane that they still haven't got that in place.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#10We use GAE for Pulp Sync (acrylicapps.com/pulp). It's scales very well if you handle requests quickly and take advantage of the memcache and taskqueue APIs.