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Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

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Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#31

Post by [deleted] »

catch23 wrote: post #17
gte910h wrote: post #6

I'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.

[deleted]

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#32

Post by jcheng »

sasha-dv wrote: post #13

That'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.

But it's 880 instance-hours per day. So assuming that "el-cheapo" dedicated box has similar performance characteristics to one GAE instance, then you'd need 37 of those boxes.

My question is why the heck 31.42 CPU hours turned into 880 frontend instance hours, and whether this is something a lot of other GAE apps are seeing as well.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#33

Post by nroach »

mcantelon wrote: post #23
pbh wrote: post #18

What'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…

Yeah, the hard limitation to request duration is pretty nasty too. It's a pretty limited platform overall, and never took aoff, so maybe they are trying to push people off it so they can eventually sunset it?

Deliberately pushing people out? Probably not. They had a major decision point available when they chose to either exit beta and step onto a release product schedule or drop the project entirely. The fact that they chose to productize it bodes well for the immediate future. Adding SLA and SSL was also non-trivial from a product perspective.

But, that does mean that you have to figure out what your revenue-producing tenants are going to look like, just as you would do in physical real estate. Yes, it looks like the high-traffic commodity-product (think Halloween store) doesn't make a good tenant. But that doesn't mean that a jewelry store or office (low throughput, high value per-square foot) wouldn't be a good tenant.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#34

Post by chubot »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #24

Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places. So back when I worked there Google had no clue what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their…

Your last point is very confusing. You're saying you think Google can't spin up more App Engine front ends if it wants? ("every machine in their data center can [not] be a web server") Or any other kind of front end?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#35

Post by jcheng »

Smrchy wrote: post #25

I love using GAE and got 8 apps running currently. At first the new pricing model shocked me. But please take a 2nd look. Sure it's more expensive than the old model. But you can set the maximum number of idle instances in your Application Settings page. Just set it down so no more that X instances get spun up: > The Idle Instances slider allows you to control the number of idle instances available to your applicatio…

Thanks for the info. Is there a setting for max number of simultaneous instances? If your app gets slashdotted are your potential costs completely unbounded?

(Just out of curiosity, I'm not a GAE customer)

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#36

Post by jonknee »

wavephorm wrote: post #28

Everything Google does, they do in a half-assed sort of way. And it's getting really annoying. Even their core business of search is showing signs of neglect. SEO experts have learned to game the system such that the quality of search results is pretty abysmal now. GAE is a half baked AWS. Google+ is a half baked Facebook. Google Docs is a half baked MSOffice. They have no blood in these projects and don't really car…

> Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform.

Except for the largest business on the internet... Well search, video delivery, mobile phones, email, mapping, news, RSS, web analytics, and web browsers. Getting clobbered in almost everything else though.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#37

Post by wccrawford »

robryan wrote: post #14
kennystone wrote: post #11

His 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.

$81/month for a fun project that gets you noticed and looks good on your resume is nothing to sneeze at. Blog about it, and suddenly you have a hidden revenue stream from it. Let people know its yours and suddenly you have some weight to throw around.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#38

Post by jonknee »

jcheng wrote: post #32
sasha-dv wrote: post #13

That'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.

But it's 880 instance-hours per day. So assuming that "el-cheapo" dedicated box has similar performance characteristics to one GAE instance, then you'd need 37 of those boxes. My question is why the heck 31.42 CPU hours turned into 880 frontend instance hours, and whether this is something a lot of other GAE apps are seeing as well.

He has a lot of instances spun up waiting to do work. This is your choice, but if you want to be able to handle spikes without latency troubles, it's what you should do. None appear to be doing a lot of work in this case, so he should have definitely tried messing with the settings before closing shop.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#39

Post by ww520 »

sasha-dv wrote: post #13

That'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.

And you basically trade sysadmin time with developer time in working around GAE's idiosyncrasy and proprietary API.
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