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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

#81

Post by buff-a »

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…

So they built a service called "App Engine" and it turns out that the "engines" that run my "app" are exactly the parts that Google doesn't have enough of, and so they are going to charge me uncompetitive amounts of money per day?

Lets suppose that google doesn't have enough machines. Do they:

  a) Massively increase the price to reduce customers?
  b) Massively increase the number of machines?
You're saying "a".

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#82

Post by dev360 »

humbledrone wrote: post #61
igorgue wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound like a troll... but you're better off re-writing the whole thing... I mean look at it. https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed/blob/master/plusf... Global variables galore, tabs no spaces, no documentation, compares to empty not just once but multiple times, pokemon style exception handling (you gotta catch them all!), 'is not None' lol, type checking instead of duck typing... Just to name a…

You realize that you're looking at a 399 line script, right? A couple of globals are perfectly reasonable at that scale. Also note that checking for "x is not None" is the recommended, idiomatic Python style (see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ for reference). More importantly, the script works, and was apparently used by quite a few people. Rewriting something that is already known to work, just because you…

This code is a complete abomination, why would you stick your neck out and defend it? What igorgue is saying is, even if somebody gave me this code, I wouldn't take it, and I concur.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#83

Post by maxent »

I think this comment from Wesley Chun on the GAE team is key:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/obfGjbIkOTI...

"your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creat... -- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding-be... ... these are the reasons for using App Engine. it was not meant as free/cheap generic app-hosting but to provide a premium service that's difficult to get elsewhere in the market. if you're just after the former, there are plenty of options for you."

My take-away is that GAE is hard to justify unless your usage pattern is unpredictable and spike-y. I'm taking the long weekend to give dotcloud a serious test-drive.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#84

Post by skybrian »

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…

SQL support is in progress: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/l0D...

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#85

Post by buff-a »

Here's my complaint:

I, and many others, spent a lot of time figuring out how to write apps that do it the "app engine way":

  * Fast completes (30 second timeout)
  * Offloading to task queues when you cant
  * Channels
  * Blobstore two-phase upload urls
  * Mail eccentricities
We did so, because we believe Google when they told us If you write your apps in this really weird way then we will be able to give you scale and cost benefits that you wont be able to get elsewhere

We believed them, because it seemed reasonable. We laughed at those who complained that django would hit the 30-second limit: "Its not a general hosting! Figure out the App Engine way!" And we educated on how to do it right, and many were happy.

Well, it turns out that it is general purpose hosting, with all of the costs, and yet also with all of the (once rational, now bullshit) idiosyncrasies.

---

But that's not the biggest complaint. The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don't like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google's engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#86

Post by buff-a »

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.

I'm seeing a 50x (5000%) $ increase and I wrote my app from scratch "by the GAE book". It almost seems as if those of us who put the effort in to do it the GAE way are worse off than those who just uploaded django.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#87

Post by catch23 »

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.

As Wesley Chung noted in his reply on the GAE mailing list, GAE is designed for companies who get very unpredictable traffic. If you get a very predictable traffic, it's significantly cheaper hosting on AWS. Some of my apps previously cost $40 a month, now cost almost $300 per month. I can definitely run these apps on Linode for a fraction of the cost.

I picked GAE mainly because it was fast to setup, but I could have equally chosen Heroku over app engine when I first built it. In hindsight, I wish I had.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#88

Post by davisml »

mtogo wrote: post #78
vessenes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn it. It appears the only solution is limiting the amount of instances in the application settings. I manage a free sync service with approximately 20,000 active users on App Engine. I just checked the billing history for our application and saw similar results, the cost will increase 10 fold.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#89

Post by catch23 »

wccrawford wrote: post #37
robryan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For $81/month, you can get a 4 processor 2GB Linode box, which is enough to run a few dozen fun projects on there.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#90

Post by systems »

maxent wrote: post #83

I think this comment from Wesley Chun on the GAE team is key: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/obfGjbIkOTI... "your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creat... -- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- http://googl…

DotCloud is not cheap if your application is database intensive.
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