Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#41

Post by dsulli » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

jbaker wrote: post #40

dsulli wrote: post #38

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,…

Just out of curiosity, how would you describe what you are currently doing? Can you elaborate on why it might not be a good fit? I'm honestly just trying to learn from your experience, not disputing anything.

Sure - no problem - the application is Generic Domain Finder - just search it on Google. The current app in the search results is still running GAE.

The things I loved: - tight integration with Google accounts - easy integration with other Google apis (we used a few)

The frustrating thing was dealing with the black box. We used an api to get domain availability. Every time it returns more slowly than the equivalent call on our linux based cloud server.

With GAE, you're basically stuck with what you get. With a generic Linux based cloud server - you have more room to optimize your environment, or even take your code and run it anywhere... AWS, Rackspace, Voxel...

I still believe in what GAE is trying to do - and I'll definitely try it out again for future projects.

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#42

Post by sean_lynch » Fri, Jul 01, 2011, 2:32 AM UTC

jcampbell1 wrote: post #39

sean_lynch wrote: post #14

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…

> For now, App Engine is nearly perfect for us. Have you launched yet? My experience is that it becomes very difficult to manage once you have customer data.

Launched, although not particularly large (www.splitterbug.com). What becomes difficult to manage when you introduce customer data?

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#43

Post by edhgoose » Fri, Jul 01, 2011, 8:19 AM UTC

The UK's Met Office - who provided Weather Forecasts use it for their new Weather Observations Website (WOW): http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk

It's a site that allows the public to submit weather observations from anywhere in the world. Since launching 31 days ago, we've got 1.7 million weather reports and probably spend about 0-30 seconds a day (on average) on maintenance.

App Engine has some big pains (SSL has already been mentioned) but if you don't require it (we don't), I think it's a fantastic tool.

The multiple versions, quick deployment (new build inc all testing&configuration can be completed by us in I'd say the biggest difficulty (or barrier to entry) is the datastore design. It's very easy to think you're in SQL land, and you're not. And because of that, it's very easy to burn yourself quickly. But, the design gives great scalability. We wouldn't be able to manage the size of the data we're expecting in 2 years+ in a typical environment.

So, I think it's great :)

(Disclaimer: I was part of the team at PA Consulting that built WOW)

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#44

Post by erebrus » Fri, Jul 01, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

I'm using Google App Engine in a new project ( http://www.homeyplanet.com - allowing travelers to share their favorite spots off the beaten track) and I have to say I am very happy about it. This project requires geo spatial queries, so at first it wouldn't be a good choice given how inadequate the datastore is for it, but the trick is always to think how things work in GAE and see if you can optimize it. It only scales well if you do it their way...so it won't work for everything, but most problems can be solved quite well, you will just have to scratch the way you normally would solve them.

Note: I noticed that some have accessed the site from this link. The site is beta and is newly launched, and for now we are only covering Europe. If you want to check out how fluid are the geo spatial queries, you can try checking out Portugal, where half our spots are now.

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#45

Post by code_devil » Sat, Jul 02, 2011, 10:51 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #36

code_devil wrote: post #15

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)

I use Django exclusively on it, and thus use Django's authentication framework, which works very well.

so are you using one of those helper libraries/project django-norel ?

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#46

Post by znt » Sun, Jul 03, 2011, 11:28 AM UTC

Google itself is using App Engine on both internal and external projects as far as I know.

The websites below has tens of thousands of registered members, there are also similar websites for some other European countries (Italy, Spain, Germany etc)

Getting British Businesses Online: http://www.gbbo.co.uk/

Getting Australian Businesses Online: http://www.gettingbusinessonline.com.au/

So yeah, App Engine seems to be suitable for big projects if you play by their rules. Only problem seems to be backing up data, as their App Engine's bulkloader tool has rate limitation, so it takes quite a while to download/upload all data.

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#47

Post by okal » Sun, Jul 03, 2011, 10:15 PM UTC

vosper wrote: post #13

We 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…

What framework did you wind up using? Tipfy seemed great at first but the docs aren't quite up to date, so I wound up sticking with webapp for the prototype for my project.

Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?

#48

Post by marram » Mon, Jul 04, 2011, 2:39 AM UTC

I have been using GAE Python since it came out. Used it to build www.thesponty.com and www.gamedaytycoon.com (social game on FB). The latter has thousands of users and GAE scales super well. We deploy > 10 times a day. GAE is really awesome.