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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

#51

Post by ww520 »

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.

Google's instance-hour is process-instance-hour. The current GAE Python can only serve one web request by one process. Multiple web requests coming in would spin up multiple processes. Besides the CPU, Google charges the app while the process is waiting for IO, like waiting for receiving/sending to the browser.

But measuring process-instance-hour is misleading. In a typical web box, spinning up an extra process takes very little resource since most process memory are shared with the parent process, and most web apps are IO bound, like waiting for network/file/DB, idling taking little CPU. In a server box, many processes can be crammed in (like the shared hosting box). But Google counts those duplicate processes as separate ones and charge the idle time these processes take. That's why you see the outrageous bill.

What's more insane is that Google charges the process-instance-hour like a machine-instance-hour. GAE charges $0.08/hr for process-instance-hour while AWS charges $0.02 to $0.08/hr for the whole machine.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#52

Post by [deleted] »

aaronf wrote: post #29

Our charges are going to be increasing from $0/day to $5-11/day. While bearable, it's a serious problem given so little notice, and disappointing since we invested in their infrastructure & optimized for their previous pricing plan. This is a serious hit for a bootstrapped startup getting off the ground. No doubt it will kill a lot of startups.

[deleted]

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#53

Post by crizCraig »

jcheng wrote: post #35
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)

There's a setting for the latency threshold causing a new instance to get spun up.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#54

Post by Locke1689 »

z92 wrote: post #47
chubot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably he is saying that because their expertise and focus lies in backend, it's costlier for Google to increase frontend service and server compared with say, other web-hosting companies.

Web servers still count as backend. This is not a lack of talent problem.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#55

Post by andymoe »

thematt wrote: post #44
igorgue wrote: post #42

I hope PlusFeed's author read this: Man that's some nasty code, horrible, don't open source that kind of "code"... it's bad, even for a 5 minute projects, it's really bad. Open Source software is not a dumpster of your bad code.

He wrote software that many people found useful and gave it away for free. That's awfully damn generous as far as I'm concerned. You see an improvement that can be made? Then make it. But stop complaining.

On the other hand to make a huge stink about a 400 line script that is poorly designed and takes advantage of none of the APIs provided by app engine to make things preferment like back end instances or task queues is a little disingenuous.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#56

Post by crizCraig »

I've been developing for app engine since 2008 when it came out and absolutely love it. The price changes are a result of turning a successful and massively growing product into a profitable one a la search, youtube, etc... Google should be praised for this. The changes in price also accompany an SLA that guarantee developers will receive three years notice before a breaking API change or service shut down.

The SSL problem is a limitation in some browsers that causes the type of certificates that GAE needs to use a CNAME, not IP, based routing to display huge warnings.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#57

Post by rbanffy »

cellis wrote: post #27
kaffeinecoma wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it really worth the headache of such a Frankenstein architecture? I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding…

This is so true. The first step to correcting a problem is admitting you have one, and everyone on App Engine clearly does (locked-in). What I'm doing about it? Moving to Tornado/MongoDB/EC2 as quickly as possible.

You could also move to Django-nonrel, but I know - it's a lot of trouble. Like I said, I am exploring.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#58

Post by jshen »

Smrchy wrote: post #30
catch23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if most of my apps would increase by 10x they would still be cheaper than running a single AWS instance for them. Not even taking into account the easy of management and automatic redundancy that GAE offers.

I seriously doubt that. One AWS instance can run multiple instances of your web app. On GAE you're going to pay about $40/month for each of those instances!

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#59

Post by ChuckMcM »

chubot wrote: post #34
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?

Google historically splits off their "front end" which is dealing with messages from the internet and their "back end" which is processing what those messages want to do. It was briefly described in the original search paper they presented.

Of necessity, most machines that Google runs have 'private' (as in not directly addressable) addresses. This is how it seems that everyone runs things when they get above a certain number of servers.

Thirdly because one can assume that 'attacks' (whether they depend on XSS, overflows, or what not) are coming from the Interwebz its prudent to present the smallest possible attack surface on a machine which is being fed internet stuff. As you can imagine, those security constraints make for uncomfortable restrictions on what you can do in the 'front end', so a machine that is 'front end' has a different set of security constraints than a machine that is 'back end' (they are still constraints there of course but having gone through the filter of the front end machine which has greatly attenuated the possible exploit vectors).

I believe it is this armored 'front end' resource which is the scarce resource, but again, I've been gone over a year and things change quickly inside the 'plex.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#60

Post by andymoe »

An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases. (Which they told us were coming by the way)

And by the time the pricing takes effect the updated python runtime should bring costs down even more.

The instance costs are comperable to Heroku AND you get a high availability data store AND the ability to store really huge amounts of data in the blobstore AND a CDN for serving images from said blobstore. Not to mention background processes, task queue, XMPP, memcache, Multitenancy and multiple versions of apps so you can easily roll things back or test out updates painlessly.

Try and replicate that setup on Heroku or AWS for anywhere near the costs and time that you can get there with app engine.

While you're fighting with AWS and playing sysadmin or trying to think of ways to bring down the costs of Heroku's database services by using RDS instead or being nickel and dimed by add-on fees I'll be shipping code. Code that actually takes advantage of the platforms strengths.

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