AppEngine is great for rapid prototyping, but it still has several limitations that make me hesitant to base a real infrastructure off of it.
I've used it for http://www.minehub.net, http://www.quickcite.it, and a few others.
Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#12We use it for serving up static pages for aggregator/curatorial site HockeyBias. http://hockeybias.com.
As I mentioned, the site serves up static pages and it is very fast. During the hockey season these pages often change many times a day. We used .NET (which I am much more familiar with) to develop a custom browser that allows us to quickly access dozens of hockey-related web sites & youtube (with some help via Powershell). The custom browser has a 'Publish' button which spits out static html to my app engine site.
In its current incarnation I have to enter my appengine password about once a day. I am planning on implementing a better way to update the site using the new ProtoPRC api...
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#13We use it at bynd.com for a bunch of projects; we've deployed at least 30 applications on it now. It has taken me quite a while to get used to the AE way, and I don't love it, but it is very good for some things. I can think of lots or pros and cons, but off the top of my head:
Pros:
- scaling is amazing; we've had sites go from 1 to over 1000 instances in a few minutes; from - reliability is pretty good now
- if you let go of the idea of doing everything synchronously life gets a lot easier, and deferred processing is really easy to do.
- the development process is great: download SDK, checkout code, point SDK at code and you're off. Then you develop locally and have it run exactly the same (with a handful of caveats) as it does appspot. It's a really low barrier to entry.
Cons:
- webapp (the default framework) sucks. Once you find something like tipfy, webapp2, or flask life gets a lot better
- changing your datastore structure can really suck with a live site. There's still no simple way of getting data on and off, or of doing backups. Messing with your live database if you need to fix some bug can be scary
- it takes some time to grok the right way to model data, and to use the datastore.
- there's a lot of "here's how to get started / build a simple blog" info, very little on best practices, how to model complex data, how to do maintenance...
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#14Disclaimer: In a past life I was a PM on App Engine (and not surprisingly, we're using it for our new company), so the following comment has a fairly high bias.
Though it doesn't have the same HN buzz that Heroku does, App Engine has a fairly large developer community and a lot of applications using it. Like almost all PaaS product, there are restrictions that limit what you can do (library support, native code support, etc) and these limits frustrate developers that go in expecting the same experience as having a virtual machine. The limits mean that App Engine isn't the right solution for every application under the sun. But if your application doesn't have super unique requirements, the value that App Engine provides is hard to beat.
Ten second deployments, one click version management (and roll back), logs and monitoring, and autoscaling mean that we can be really agile pushing new versions of the application. App Engine's recent changes to the scheduler and Always On feature have really solved the slow instant start issue that still plagues a lot of Heroku developers. Last year the datastore had a ton of performance and reliability issues, but the new high replication configuration appears to have solved the problem. The biggest issue for us is the one that's mentioned here a couple of times and that's SSL.
For now, App Engine is nearly perfect for us. If we end up with unique requirements, we can definitely spin up a few EC2 instances and hook them up to App Engine's Task Queue. But I'm not excited about having to manage machines. Personally, if we hit a limit with App Engine, we'd be looking to another PaaS offering like Heroku or dotCloud, or Infrastructure as a Service like MongoHQ/RedisToGo before bothering to deal with machines again.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#15I have used AppEngine for a few fun projects where I have tried to use FB Login/Connect for authentication. I like the fact that you can rapidly prototype and improve your skills and have it all published to the web for free.
Question: I was looking for a library for authentication mechanism other than FB or Google . Any suggestions ? (All I need is basic user/password)
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#16What about the channel API, any experiences? I want to do a multiplayer quiz app as a side project and I'm wondering if I should go with the GAE or if I should dive into node (using socketstream, maybe).
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#17I used appengine for my now defunct http://www.unedditreddit.com project, which sucked up all reddit comments for a few months. It was extremely easy to use and seemed to preform just fine, with the exception of those few weeks where the datastore had stability problems.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#18I don't know what big sites use App Engine but I personally use it for everything. Every weekend project, every work prototype, everything! I just love the fact that it's free to start with, and the idea that it's on Google's server sort of brings a level of confidence for up-time and scalability.
Sure the fact that are some limitations (no IO and not many libraries) are a bit of a down-side, but the payoffs of using such a service instead of managing your own servers is really great. You're just able to crank a lot on the app code part without worrying at all about system administration work.
The simplicity of the datastore is also a great benefit, and it scales like nothing out there.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#19Most, if not all the comments are from people/companies that use GAE. I'd love to hear from people who evaluated it and then decided not to go for it.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#20It takes you a bit to get used to the catchas... I am using it in one of my side projects and it's working very well although we had some throuble to move from SQL to the BigTable and that slowed us down a bit in the architecture phase.
But I am betting on it because I think it will make my life easier in the future...
The memcache is ok to get.
The java subset is the part that bothers me as I had a lot of already made stuff I liked to use in my new site, and had to redo a loooooot of stuff to fit the dawn java subset.