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

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#111

Post by bane » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 5:26 AM UTC

buff-a wrote: post #96

hga wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your pain, but that said: From what else I've read, it sounds like engineers who didn't also wear green eye-shades (or good enough ones, or who didn't possesses or use good enough crystal balls) set up this debacle. And it was people wearing green eye-shades (who we can sincerely hope are also engineers) who aligned it with reality. Causing way too many people way too much pain. Object lesson: if you're going…

The problem is how does one get from 31 cpu-hours to 879 instance-hours. You might be thinking that in the original measure they did something insane like measure only user time of a process, or only when its executing a request, not booting or whatever (or fuck, I don't know because honestly there is no reasonable explanation). That is to say, that the 31 cpu-hours is a misread, and if the fellow in the article ran…

It means that GAE is horribly, amazingly, inefficient.

This. We always knew GAE was inefficient. There's no doubt about that. Serving 30 or 40 requests per second would spawn quite a few instances and start producing request errors.

This is a load a 4 year old machine could handle with ease.

Why did we put up with this? Because Google didn't make us pay for the crappiness -- the pricing made sense. You don't pay Ferrari prices for a slow car...and during a surge it scales up gracefully. Go from 30 rps to 1000 rps and it'll just work. An old machine co-located someplace won't do that.

Now under the new pricing gouge Google is making us pay for their inefficiencies. All appearances are that this is what this really costs (plus some reasonable markup)...well that's pretty piss poor. Because we're essentially paying to haul cargo in a Ferrari and it's dumb dumb dumb.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#112

Post by switch » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 5:55 AM UTC

nir wrote: post #68

I think Google just doesn't really get how unique GAE was. It was a fantastic platform for small apps, and inevitable some percentage of these would grow to big, paying apps. Also (sorry for the armchair quarterbacking here, can't resist..) it was exactly what Google can do better than anyone - best server infrastructure + Guido Van Rossums - while stuff like Google+ is exactly what Google haven't a clue how to do.

This is amazing. You've hit the nail on the head. Google would be much more successful if it focused on being Google and didn't try to be Apple+Fecaebook+X companies all in one.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#113

Post by white_devil » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 6:26 AM UTC

buff-a wrote: post #110

wisty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend GAE to people who are prototyping - it's easy to do simple stuff in. But mostly, GAE doesn't make sense for larger apps. You can't buy your way out of trouble, by putting your db on a dedicated server with fast drives and tonnes of RAM. You can't really use relational data without performance and reliability issues. It's not just about the "app engine way". It's not like learning C or Haskell, and havin…

I have several ideas that would scale well on GAE and neither want not need a relational db. I'm not making do without SQL, I'm actively not using it and its very successful. Even when I move to EC2, I still wont be using SQL. In fact I have only one idea that needs any kind of relational data and that is so relational that SQL is a bad fit too. EDIT: Actually, sorry, all my data is relational. Its just that I put th…

Its just that I put the (small) effort in to figuring out how to make it work without joins.

Care to elaborate?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#114

Post by papaf » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 7:12 AM UTC

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.

I think you're severely underestimating what a $81 machine is capable of:

http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

and the choices available for fun projects:

http://www.lowendbox.com/

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#115

Post by georgemcbay » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 7:25 AM UTC

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…

I still don't quite understand their market, and honestly I don't think they do either.

If you're expecting insane traffic to begin with, it makes more sense to create your own systems using a more standard stack and not tie yourself to GAE. If you're just some small to medium sized site that gets "slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore", I guess it is nice that your site will automatically scale to serve the millions of unexpected incoming users, but when you're filing for personal bankruptcy due to the unexpected and infinitely scaling GAE bill that comes along with that, how much consolation is the fact that your server stayed up during the rush going to be?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#116

Post by buff-a » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 7:47 AM UTC

white_devil wrote: post #113

buff-a wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several ideas that would scale well on GAE and neither want not need a relational db. I'm not making do without SQL, I'm actively not using it and its very successful. Even when I move to EC2, I still wont be using SQL. In fact I have only one idea that needs any kind of relational data and that is so relational that SQL is a bad fit too. EDIT: Actually, sorry, all my data is relational. Its just that I put th…

Its just that I put the (small) effort in to figuring out how to make it work without joins. Care to elaborate?

Denormalize. Match your data rows to your access pattern (i.e. your UI). Naive example: if you have a webpage that displays a list of employees, and it must have their department name and boss in that list, you put that data in the employee row. What is the probability that a boss will change his or her name causing you to have update a ton of records? Very low. (not zero mind you, so you have to be able to do it). So why pay for the join every query?

There are no longer, in my view, any situations where a SQL db is the best idea. You either want a giant NoSQL database, or you want a massive in-memory object-graph using pointers. Or you want something for $20m from Oracle or IBM.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#117

Post by DanielChatfield » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 9:02 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #111

buff-a wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is how does one get from 31 cpu-hours to 879 instance-hours. You might be thinking that in the original measure they did something insane like measure only user time of a process, or only when its executing a request, not booting or whatever (or fuck, I don't know because honestly there is no reasonable explanation). That is to say, that the 31 cpu-hours is a misread, and if the fellow in the article ran…

It means that GAE is horribly, amazingly, inefficient. This. We always knew GAE was inefficient. There's no doubt about that. Serving 30 or 40 requests per second would spawn quite a few instances and start producing request errors. This is a load a 4 year old machine could handle with ease. Why did we put up with this? Because Google didn't make us pay for the crappiness -- the pricing made sense. You don't pay Ferr…

It would only start producing request errors if there was bad coding. Many of Google's stuff (like the chrome updates) are done through GAE and receive no "special treatment" from GAE (except lifting the request limits which wouldn't affect any sites you make). GAE was made to be fast - and it is. It was made to be reliable - and it is (100% uptime in over 500 days).

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#118

Post by wulczer » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 9:15 AM UTC

buff-a wrote: post #116

white_devil wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just that I put the (small) effort in to figuring out how to make it work without joins. Care to elaborate?

Denormalize. Match your data rows to your access pattern (i.e. your UI). Naive example: if you have a webpage that displays a list of employees, and it must have their department name and boss in that list, you put that data in the employee row. What is the probability that a boss will change his or her name causing you to have update a ton of records? Very low. (not zero mind you, so you have to be able to do it). S…

The problem is not having to update tons of records, the problem is seeing one day, after 2 years of having the app in production, that the listing shows that employee X works in department Y and her boss is Z, but Z is not the head of Y. Bugs happen and referential constraints go a long way towards keeping your data clean.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#119

Post by catch23 » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 9:37 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94

buff-a wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Actually no. I'm saying that they seem to have learned what their costs are and have priced their service based on those costs and what ever economic model they use. Given their pricing it suggested that "transactions" (which is to say a query from the web and its response) are either a good scalar for their cost to deliver, or are one of their scarcer resources. It is entirely possible that they discover they can't…

I'm not sure if Google understand their own freemium model. Isn't the idea to let people use your cloud service at a very low cost, in hopes that they'll scale up and pay more? I feel like there's a huge gap between free and paying $400 a month. The day that the app becomes popular is the day the developer will have to shut it down or get hit with large server bills.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#120

Post by catch23 » Sat, Sep 03, 2011, 9:42 AM UTC

cHalgan wrote: post #49

My understanding of all these GAE pricing story is that Google decided that GAE is not a strategic business and that business unit need to break even or they will be canceled. Does this make sense?

If that were the case, wouldn't apps like google calendar get cancelled long time ago? I doubt the ads on google calendar are sufficient to sustain the number of users it has on a daily basis.