Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed • Hacker News Board

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#71

Post by andymoe » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 7:53 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #67

andymoe wrote: post #60

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 fo…

"An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases." This depends a lot on what you're doing. GAE is now pretty terrible if you're using it for high-bandwidth applications (say, a data proxy or similar). Especially when you compare it to other providers for whom bandwidth prices have been dropping (AWS, Linode, etc now offer incoming bandwidth totally free and the…

I agree that picking the right tool for the job is important but I just wanted to list the reasons I prefer GAE. There is quite a lot of outrage (raising prices does that) without really considering what the real costs of the alternative platforms are.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#72

Post by WeAreKnights » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #69

wavephorm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality. Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other tha…

Those products bolster search advertising... That's the point. Android produces a ton of search revenue. So does Chrome. > Android is a junk iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. It's the most popular smartphone OS... Is Linux free as well because it can't be sold? Your blind hatred of Google is bizarre.

> It's the most popular smartphone OS

Would it be if they charged for it? Android has massive issues across development, the market, the user experience and poor vendor practices that are routinely ignored by the same people that jump on every mistake Apple makes.

Don't get me wrong, Android has a lot of promise but it's popular because it's on so many phones. That's not exactly a "winner" if it takes dozens of phone to compete against one phone. The same goes for tablets.

The more Android devices you make, the more iOS devices stand out among them.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#73

Post by mdwrigh2 » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 7:57 PM UTC

wavephorm wrote: post #66

jonknee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a ton of money on those products. It's all part of the ecosystem. Android users use Google search. So do Chrome users. Analytics users use AdWords (get too many hits with Analytics and you need to start spending some sweet AdWords bucks). YouTube and Gmail users see ads (Google Apps business users pay money directly).

Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality. Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other tha…

> Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising

No, Google makes 97% of their revenue from advertising, not just search advertising. 31% of the revenue comes from "Google Network web sites" (AdSense).

http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q4_google_earnings....

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#74

Post by wavephorm » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #69

wavephorm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality. Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other tha…

Those products bolster search advertising... That's the point. Android produces a ton of search revenue. So does Chrome. > Android is a junk iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. It's the most popular smartphone OS... Is Linux free as well because it can't be sold? Your blind hatred of Google is bizarre.

I said they are half-assed products. Google is not commited to GAE, or anything for that matter. Perhaps they lead in indirect ways to advertising revenue. But that's no excuse for having no support at all for any of their products. The poor quality of GAE is a symptom of an ambivalent company that doesn't deserve your respect.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#75

Post by libraryatnight » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 8:19 PM UTC

wavephorm wrote: post #74

jonknee wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those products bolster search advertising... That's the point. Android produces a ton of search revenue. So does Chrome. > Android is a junk iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. It's the most popular smartphone OS... Is Linux free as well because it can't be sold? Your blind hatred of Google is bizarre.

I said they are half-assed products. Google is not commited to GAE, or anything for that matter. Perhaps they lead in indirect ways to advertising revenue. But that's no excuse for having no support at all for any of their products. The poor quality of GAE is a symptom of an ambivalent company that doesn't deserve your respect.

Poor quality? Did you not read the posts of all the devs saying they really like GAE, some of them so much that the pricing change isn't really even an issue?

You're not contributing to this conversation at all, you're just spewing opinionated venom with no support for your claims.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#76

Post by angkec » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 8:21 PM UTC

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)

No there isn't. Just "max idle instances". So you'll get a huge bill if you get slashdotted.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#77

Post by ww520 » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 8:58 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #3

I 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.

That is my current project's design. Web frontend stuff in GAE and AWS doing the backend processing. AWS is needed to run media servers which can't run in GAE. I was going with it despite the disadvantage of the split architecture because I liked GAE. Now with the new pricing model kicking in, the frontend cost has skyrocketed and it doesn't make sense to run frontend stuff in GAE.

Also the way Google handling this confirms my fear of proprietary lock-in, leaving a really bad taste in mouth. I meant I've spent lots of time to develop in their framework to work around their quirks and limitation. They have been advocating to developers to optimize for CPU time and that's what we did. Now they found out they don't make enough money with CPU optimization and change the whole billing scheme, screwing all the efforts done by developers. What would stop them to change again tomorrow if they find instance-hour is not making enough money for them?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#78

Post by mtogo » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 8:59 PM UTC

vessenes wrote: post #65

davisml wrote: post #62

It appears that the chart is being misinterpreted. The cost per hour is less under the new pricing and I believe the total hours is calculated for the month.

Agreed. The number of instance hours is vastly different on the two charts; the price seems to be going from .10 / hr to .08 per hour (currently .04).

That's the point. Appengine is changing their pricing from CPU hours to Instance hours, so an app that previously had 3-4 hours a day is now going to have 48-72.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#79

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 9:03 PM UTC

The strength of GAE is the magic scaling beans, but to take advantage of it you need to lock yourself in massively. It's probably not realistic to port an existing application that actually needs real scale to GAE given the complexity of most apps by the time they reach that point. Therefore, the key funnel for them is new apps with hopes of becoming truly massive. Fortunately for Google way more people dream of scaling than actually will, but they need to A) not scare poor startups away with the price today and B) not scare them that they're going to get bent over and raped on price changes later.

Personally I'll never touch GAE with a 10' pole simply because of the support issue and perpetual-beta-culture uncertainties.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#80

Post by wavephorm » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 9:08 PM UTC

libraryatnight wrote: post #75

wavephorm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said they are half-assed products. Google is not commited to GAE, or anything for that matter. Perhaps they lead in indirect ways to advertising revenue. But that's no excuse for having no support at all for any of their products. The poor quality of GAE is a symptom of an ambivalent company that doesn't deserve your respect.

Poor quality? Did you not read the posts of all the devs saying they really like GAE, some of them so much that the pricing change isn't really even an issue? You're not contributing to this conversation at all, you're just spewing opinionated venom with no support for your claims.

My original points of Google building half-assed products they don't care about was succinct. It's others on this board that keep dragging on and defending the company for some reason or another. Perhaps it's because they're employed by them?