His app generated no revenue, so any price other than trivial would have him jumping ship. Why does Google want apps like his?
Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
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Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#12I am currently playing with the idea of moving an application from all-GAE to part GAE, part EC2 with some spot instances running jobs when cheap enough. According to my sloppy math, this should reduce the load on the GAE side by at least 60%. Anyway, this is all theoretical (in the worst sense of the word) - the app is not even public.
I went through this thought process. I really liked Python and auto-scaling, so GAE seemed really appealing. But the combination of lack of SQL and inflexibility of architecture led me to want to create the sort of combination architectures you describe with EC2 instances or whatever.
Ultimately, after a lengthy debate with a friend, I concluded that Heroku was a sufficiently better option that it was worth learning Ruby (which I've been writing more or less as an uglier Python anyway).
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#13That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why people trade a bit of system administration and superb performance for a vendor lock and insane prices.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#14His app generated no revenue, so any price other than trivial would have him jumping ship. Why does Google want apps like his?
The $2.63 a day comes out to $81 a month which for hosting is a non trivial amount. It does come down to whether Google can turn a profit at these levels for someone using this amount of resources but I don't think customers willing to pay $50-$100 a month are ones you want to push away.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#15That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why people trade a bit of system administration and superb performance for a vendor lock and insane prices.
Yeah trading back a little bit of system admin you can get a pretty serious amount of server power on AWS for that amount of money.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#16Yeah I still don't understand why the Khan Academy and other educational/open source developers are using Google App Engine when it suffers from vendor lock-in.
some of it yes, but if you write modular code then its a none issue. Doing Java development, GAE supports most Java EE and popular frameworks, so if done correctly porting would not be an issue. I can't say the same about Python stack.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#17I'm wondering if google is just trying to encourage an architecture which is less bad for their site. I'm guessing a small minority of apps were doing things in a way that was eating up tons more resources than they were paying for. I bet for many apps, this could end up no worse or better.
I don't think it's a small minority of apps. 100% of the people I know who are using GAE are seeing the minimum of a 4x price increase for their app (before the 50% discount). The price increase would actually prevent some small ISVs from reaching ramen profitability. There's a thread somewhere on the GAE google groups containing many angry users.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#18What's most interesting to me about this article is that the management of GAE seems to actually be getting worse over time.
GAE has always had two main disadvantages. First, there is vendor lock-in because you code specifically to the data store, worker API, and so on (though arguably there are alternative platforms that implement the GAE API). Second, you cannot run custom code (custom C in some virtual machine) or have a custom architecture (if, say, Redis might be useful to have around). These disadvantages probably aren't changing and are probably necessary for auto-scaling, security of Google's infrastructure, and so on.
However, there are lots of little things that GAE has been getting wrong for a while that are totally unnecessary. Lack of hosted SQL support. Lack of SSL for custom domains. Just little things that are probably annoying to implement and boring, but totally necessary for real websites or websites just gaining traction. (I know these are in varying stages of early support at the moment.)
But now, the GAE team almost seems to want to actively disappoint users. With hosted SQL being a request for years, Guido appears to have spent a bunch of time re-architecting the API for the datastore instead. With this pricing increase, they're pushing the many developers who came to their platform based on price (due to the very interesting scaling properties of the Google front-end) off the platform.
Overall, I'm very confused.
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#19Can someone please explain frontend versus backend instance processing? Does backend here mean processing that takes place in data storage systems?
Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
#20Yeah I still don't understand why the Khan Academy and other educational/open source developers are using Google App Engine when it suffers from vendor lock-in.
some of it yes, but if you write modular code then its a none issue. Doing Java development, GAE supports most Java EE and popular frameworks, so if done correctly porting would not be an issue. I can't say the same about Python stack.
Unless you're doing regular integration testing on an alternative platform, you're bound to inadvertently introduce some painful GAE-specific dependencies.