For anyone planning to use google cloud storage as an s3/cloudfront alternative to host public content, pay close attention to request pricing. Retrieving an object through its HTTP url is considered a class B XML request type by Google Cloud Storage. That is 1.3x - 2.5x times more expensive than cloudfront and s3 respectively.
I don't understand why people expose files they expect to receive significant traffic on public buckets, instead of using a caching reverse proxy from somewhere with cheaper data transfer rates.
Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
211–220 of 223 posts
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can configure the metrics that cause a new instance to be launched. I forget where that particular setting is ... somewhere in the console I'm sure. We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.
There is no solution in the admin settings, nor according to their enterprise support. It is plain old tough luck. The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it. Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg…
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
This announcement make me even trust Google less. First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore…
I was such a big early fan of GAE, but I do remember so many people feeling burned by the pricing change and the terrible customer service. SSL was for me an important missing feature and I got a friend to walk up to one of the GAE guys at SXSW to ask him directly about SSL or SNI, but according to him it wasn't even on their public roadmap in March 2010. I see that Google product guy has long since moved on to Dropb…
App Engine is absolutely second to none as a PaaS. Fact is I sleep better at night on App Engine that I ever could on AWS.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't you still stuck using their implementation of BigTable? I forget if that's changed. The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.
I've been working on AppScale ( https://github.com/AppScale/appscale ), the open source implementation of GAE, which implements the datastore API, along with most of the other GAE APIs. Your app is portable to any other hosting environment if the need ever comes.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a link or some info about the languages they are adding? We're very curious over here--would love to know if they plan to add support for something we already have.
I don't have any links ... but Dart support is coming (already have Python, Java, Go, and PHP). Also, with managed VMs you can basically run anything you want and still get Google to manage things for you. Manage VMs give you a sort of script you can define that apt-get installs the packages you need. You can also use Docker if you like to make your own VM images. Haven't used it yet, but it looks good based on the d…
While no longer necessary because of managed VMs, it would be very good to have Ruby support also. I tried JRuby and Sinatra on AppEngine many years ago but the long loading request times were a killer. Plain Ruby and Sinatra would be good.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no solution in the admin settings, nor according to their enterprise support. It is plain old tough luck. The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it. Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg…
Hmm, you must be talking about something else, but there's a "min/max instances" slider in the console. I have set it to 1 for many of my apps, and they never go over 1 (or at least I don't get billed for it).
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, you must be talking about something else, but there's a "min/max instances" slider in the console. I have set it to 1 for many of my apps, and they never go over 1 (or at least I don't get billed for it).
I only have that slider for idle instances, which you aren't charged for. It is limiting the active instances I am talking about.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android. Mind you, I'm a huge Google…
It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions. Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well. I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.
The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and acquihires.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only have that slider for idle instances, which you aren't charged for. It is limiting the active instances I am talking about.
Yeah, you're right. It has just never spawned more active instances than that slider is set to, for me.
Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself. Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobil…
> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android. Mind you, I'm a huge Google…
You're also hopping the goalposts around a bunch between revenue, success, and some subjective measure of "quality", but Android has over a billion activations, Chrome has three-quarters of a billion active users, GMail has 600+ million active users...again, one would have to be a complete fool (or a recent immigrant from Mars) to think that "only GoogleX and AdWords have had success".
By the way, in case you're planning to move the goalposts again to focus on only revenue, if you can't understand the concept of a product having monetary value without directly being a source of revenue, then I'm honestly just in awe of how little you understand how any of the industry works.