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App Engine down

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Re: App Engine down

#112
post #31

I'm seeing a bunch of Google properties also. Maybe they are running on app engine? Like https://developers.google.com/

Also, http://dartlang.org http://golang.org , http://code.google.com/codejam/ http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ Gotta give 'em props for dogfooding.

Props, really?

That's what i _expect_ them to do - otherwise i can't see anyone trusting/using them if even they themselves avoid their own product(s)..

Re: App Engine down

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you can script away 90% of your system administration tasks, hosting in the cloud doesn't really make a ton of sense. How big is your ops team? I'm guessing it's more than 0.

Ops team? We're a two man operation with occasional contractors.

In that case, what is the ratio of "time spent doing ops-related tasks" vs "time spent developing new features" in your company? Please offer an honest evaluation. Everything has a cost; I'm genuinely curious about data points other than my own.

Re: App Engine down

#114
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember: this took down all of app engine for at least an hour. AWS has had only 17 minutes of downtime affecting all of us-east this year (that network glitch a couple days after PyCon) - the rest of it has been a subset of the service amplified by people rediscovering that they weren't as redundant as they thought. The correct less to draw is that any one point of infrastructure is a risk, so you need…

GAE applications are distributed across multiple data centers[1], so in theory you get "scale wide" automatically. Unfortunately it looks like there was some sort of flaw in the architecture. I believe this is the first systemwide failure of the HRD. The real question is: Can you and your ops team build a "scale wide" system better than Google?[2] How much effort are you willing to put into it, when those development…

I completely agree that Google is likely to do better than many teams, modulo your second point (which I completely agree with - generic is much harder than specific). For me it really just comes down to the lock-in aspect: with GAE if you decide that Google isn't taking the platform in the right direction for your business you're looking at something close to rewriting your application. This is far from the most likely outcome - although pricing can be interesting - but it's the kind of thing you really want to consciously acknowledge, similar to the way Netflix has accepted the risks of AWS by investing heavily in failure management tools.

Re: App Engine down

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Germans referred to a Schwerpunkt (focal point and also known as Schwerpunktprinzip or concentration principle) in the planning of operations; it was a center of gravity or point of maximum effort, where a decisive action could be achieved. Ground, mechanised and tactical air forces were concentrated at this point of maximum effort whenever possible. By local success at the Schwerpunkt, a small force achieved a b…

This is a much more succinct explanation than my own. This is the point I was trying to make. Even given that I have a good bit of sysadmin skills, I am needed more as a software developer right now in the early goings. I expect, as you've pointed out, that priorities will change with time and growth. We may even move to bare metal eventually, if we find ourselves needing and able to do so. Excellent analogy.

So to summarize you both: You want a rapid development platform that doubles as a production system and costs nothing to maintain. That does sound useful!

Re: App Engine down

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ops team? We're a two man operation with occasional contractors.

In that case, what is the ratio of "time spent doing ops-related tasks" vs "time spent developing new features" in your company? Please offer an honest evaluation. Everything has a cost; I'm genuinely curious about data points other than my own.

I probably spend no more than an hour a week on ops, and most of that is reading emails from our service providers.

Re: App Engine down

#117
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAE applications are distributed across multiple data centers[1], so in theory you get "scale wide" automatically. Unfortunately it looks like there was some sort of flaw in the architecture. I believe this is the first systemwide failure of the HRD. The real question is: Can you and your ops team build a "scale wide" system better than Google?[2] How much effort are you willing to put into it, when those development…

I completely agree that Google is likely to do better than many teams, modulo your second point (which I completely agree with - generic is much harder than specific). For me it really just comes down to the lock-in aspect: with GAE if you decide that Google isn't taking the platform in the right direction for your business you're looking at something close to rewriting your application. This is far from the most lik…

I keep hearing the lock-in argument over and over and I'm not quite sure that there is a solid basis for it beyond a level of paranoia. It's fine to be paranoid, I just don't want it to hold me back unnecessarily.

Looking at things more closely, the only thing that you're truly locked into with GAE is the esoteric nature of the datastore. This isn't any worse than picking say MySQL vs. Oracle or Riak vs. Mongo. Most applications end up depending on some sort of specific functionality of each database that they are written for. While it would be difficult to migrate to another solution for storing your data, it wouldn't be impossible.

There is no way to predict what direction any product might take in the future. Look at the way that Oracle is treating MySQL now. Tons of vendor lockdown there.

The only reason to migrate away from GAE would be if you find out that your application doesn't work well on it (pricing, scalability, etc) or if Google decides to kill GAE entirely. Hopefully you do the analysis of your application before you decide to use GAE (ie: you can't blame GAE for you deciding to use it) and with a 3 year deprecation promise, I'm pretty confident that it will be around for a while longer.

Re: App Engine down

#119

It's really quite remarkable (to be honest, inexcusable is probably a better word) that their status page is failing as well. My expectations for a company with Google's resources and infrastructure are a lot higher than that. Nothing on their Twitter account either: https://twitter.com/app_engine A poor handling of a systems failure in my opinion.

If you subscribe to: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum... They'll email you when issues occur and info becomes available. It took about 30 minutes after the crash for me to receive an email which seems very reasonable.

If you find that reasonable, I have a slice in Brooklyn to sell you.

Re: App Engine down

#120
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that Google is likely to do better than many teams, modulo your second point (which I completely agree with - generic is much harder than specific). For me it really just comes down to the lock-in aspect: with GAE if you decide that Google isn't taking the platform in the right direction for your business you're looking at something close to rewriting your application. This is far from the most lik…

I keep hearing the lock-in argument over and over and I'm not quite sure that there is a solid basis for it beyond a level of paranoia. It's fine to be paranoid, I just don't want it to hold me back unnecessarily. Looking at things more closely, the only thing that you're truly locked into with GAE is the esoteric nature of the datastore. This isn't any worse than picking say MySQL vs. Oracle or Riak vs. Mongo. Most…

> Looking at things more closely, the only thing that you're truly locked into with GAE is the esoteric nature of the datastore. This isn't any worse than picking say MySQL vs. Oracle or Riak vs. Mongo.

Sure it is. If you pick the wrong DB your only locked into that DB. You pick GAE and you're locked into GAE's DB.... and GAE. I can move my MySql db to another cloud provider.

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