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Goodbye, Google App Engine

carlosble.com

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Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#11

Post by smoody »

the next version will allow you to pay to keep three copies of your app loaded and ready to go at all times. that should eliminate the insanely slow load times for apps that don't get constant traffic (at a price yet to be determined).

google is also adding sql database capabilities to the platform soon.

and google apps for business will eventually let you talk https on your own domain (at a price yet to be determined).

i suspect they're about 6 or 8 months from becoming a solid solution to many problems.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#12

Post by ivanzhao »

I just launched my app 4 days ago (threewiki.com) and its backend is using GAE (Python + Tornado). On the second day, it was featured on TheNextWeb front page and the server got TONS of traffic. It scared me a bit, and I quickly change the daily max quota to $10. Anyways, GAE handles everything very gracefully. Over 70% of our users use either Facebook or Twitter to login and it hasn't been a problem at all.

I always think if your site can't be host by GAE, then it's probably not very scalable at the first place. I agree it might be better to host the data-processing end on EC2 or elsewhere if it's intense. Else in terms of the "View" part of your project, I wouldn't give it another thought for using GAE again.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#13

Post by bad_user »

arfrank wrote: post #3

#3 isn't true for taskqueue tasks or cron jobs anymore, the deadline is now 10 minutes ( actually will be once 1.4.0 SDK is released in about a week or so ) Also at first glance there is no indication of how the author got to a value of 15k€. My best guess, and a guess at that, is that they put the value of a line of code at 1€ and had to migrate 15k lines, but I hope there is more scientific than than.

I hate products that suck, waiting for that magical upgrade that's just around the corner.

After using AWS for some time now, with things like CloudFront, S3, Elastic Map Reduce and managed Mysql instances and AutoScale (and hey, they've got servers in Europe), App Engine really feels like a half baked toy.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#14

Post by zephyrfalcon »

I agree that GAE has its share of problems. However, many of the complaints listed are about limits and limitations, and can be found in the documentation; at least points #1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11 and 11.

I developed an app with GAE about 2 years ago, and ran into many of the same problems (although some of the limits were probably lower then). Fortunately I could work around them, and the app wasn't used by tons of users anyway. I can see how it would be a serious problem otherwise, though.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#15

Post by bigwally »

It is not even in Beta yet, as it states in the documentation from Google;

"This is a preview release of Google App Engine."

My biggest gripe about GAE (and Google in general) is that when a change is made on Google's infrastructure that causes large problems, no acknowledgement (or answer) is made until enough people complain.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#16

Post by ajessup »

All the points he makes are valid - and stem from the fact that GAE is designed to be 'infinitely scalable'. Because of this, it forces you into a number of design patterns that facilitate distributed, scalable software.

This can be a good thing, if you know scalability is going to be a killer feature in the near future. It can also a real pain in the ass if it's more important to simply get something off the ground quickly and see if it has market traction, and you don't want abandon the convenient but difficult to scale practices like long running processes and JOINs. In my experience, most startups fall squarely into this latter camp. Scalability is a nice problem to have for most of us.

AppEngine for Business now has a hosted SQL mode, which presumably uses a less scalable but ACID compliant alternative to the standard GAE data store (disclaimer - I haven't used it). Since he's already throwing down some serious coin on his app on GAE it might be worth investigating that before abandoning the platform completely.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#17

Post by st3fan »

"developing on GAE introduced such a design complexity that working around it pushes us 5 months behind schedule"

This is the core of all their problems. It is a mindset incompatibility between these app designers and GAE.

The GAE APIs and rules are actually pretty simple and well defined. It works really well, but only if you work WITH those rules. You have to adopt the GAE application design philosophy.

If you don't, and if you work AGAINST the rules and best practices set by GAE then you are in trouble. Big trouble. This is what happened here.

I understand this is easy to say afterwards. And you can't really blame them for finding out the hard way.

Note that the same applies to for example all the great services that Amazon Web Services provides; they only work if you build your apps with the Amazon specific design approach in mind. Things like eventual consistency, expect things to fail, don't do large amounts of work in single jobs. Etc. Etc.

These appoaches suck more or less if you come from a 'total control over a bunch of machines' background. But they are so needed to scale.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#18

Post by codeglomeration »

smoody wrote: post #11

the next version will allow you to pay to keep three copies of your app loaded and ready to go at all times. that should eliminate the insanely slow load times for apps that don't get constant traffic (at a price yet to be determined). google is also adding sql database capabilities to the platform soon. and google apps for business will eventually let you talk https on your own domain (at a price yet to be determine…

Do you have any references to the claims about GAE offering sql databases support? Is it something that you predict or is it something they made a commitment to?

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#20

Post by johnmmix »

codeglomeration wrote: post #18
smoody wrote: post #11

the next version will allow you to pay to keep three copies of your app loaded and ready to go at all times. that should eliminate the insanely slow load times for apps that don't get constant traffic (at a price yet to be determined). google is also adding sql database capabilities to the platform soon. and google apps for business will eventually let you talk https on your own domain (at a price yet to be determine…

Do you have any references to the claims about GAE offering sql databases support? Is it something that you predict or is it something they made a commitment to?

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-app...

See under the section "Enterprise Features".

Note that this is a page about GAE for business, so I wouldn't be surprised if SQL databases require a billable account similar to the Blobstore - don't think anything has been explicitly stated one way or another as yet though.

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