31–40 of 48 posts
The biggest benefits for us are the scalability (huge), ease of deployment, and the monitoring. The biggest cons have been lack of support for SSL on custom domains (HUGE hassle) and lack of official support.
It would be great if Google would allow for managing of a custom reverse proxy with unique IP into an app. This could solve the naked domain and SSL issues and enable other cool customizations. Has anyone done this themselves? Just put Varnish or Nginx in front of GAE?
I'm sure there are many people who have done this. I'd be interested in hearing how other people have solved the lack of SSL...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Completely agree that it's a much needed feature. We've worked around that by setting up an nginx server in AWS which has proxies to the https://*.appspot.com name. So it's still SSL all the way, but we just didn't want appspot.com as the URL we gave out.
We use it here at Optimizely and have been very happy. It hasn't been smooth sailing all the time, and we've gradually grown our stack to include EC2, S3, and several CDNs as well, but overall we're very happy with it and have no plans to leave. The biggest benefits for us are the scalability (huge), ease of deployment, and the monitoring. The biggest cons have been lack of support for SSL on custom domains (HUGE has…
App 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…
> The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. Why do you say that?
I 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)
App 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…
I would still try it again down the road, but it's really not a good fit for what I'm currently doing.
Disclaimer: 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 suppo…
Have you launched yet? My experience is that it becomes very difficult to manage once you have customer data.
I was using this on a project for a while. But compared to running the application with PHP, it was always slower. Sure, I've developed applications with PHP since 2001, so I really know how to tweak it and optimize it. But, with App Engine it was really frustrating. Requests really took long to complete, and there was no real way to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. We created an 'always on' instance,…