Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#1

Post by jzb » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 3:06 PM UTC

Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed
readwriteweb.com

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#2

Post by cd34 » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 3:43 PM UTC

1.5gb out with 880 frontend instance hours in 24 hours.

Someone needs to rethink their architecture.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#3

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 3:52 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#4

Post by trafficlight » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:11 PM UTC

cd34 wrote: post #2

1.5gb out with 880 frontend instance hours in 24 hours. Someone needs to rethink their architecture.

That works out to be about 36 instances each pushing 40 megabytes for the day. That's crazy.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#5

Post by tomjen3 » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:15 PM UTC

cd34 wrote: post #2

1.5gb out with 880 frontend instance hours in 24 hours. Someone needs to rethink their architecture.

No he doesn't.

The problem is that google count each process of the python runtime as a separate instance and count them when they run only partial hours (amazon counts this way too, but you can run many, many python programs at the same time even on a micro instance).

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#6

Post by gte910h » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#7

Post by wccrawford » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:21 PM UTC

I think we're missing a big part of this...

How many users were using it?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#8

Post by kaffeinecoma » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:21 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.

But is it really worth the headache of such a Frankenstein architecture?

I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding work-arounds for all of these things, are you really coming out ahead?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#9

Post by ddon » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:30 PM UTC

We tried to use GAE several times on our heavy traffic production, and was just too slow. We contacted google several times, but never received any help from them. So, thanks to this, we don't use them and we are not affected but the price change.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#10

Post by edtechdev » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 4:36 PM UTC

Yeah I still don't understand why the Khan Academy and other educational/open source developers are using Google App Engine when it suffers from vendor lock-in.