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What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

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Re: What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

#11

Post by thrownaway2424 »

rnc000 wrote: post #4
TeeWEE wrote: post #2

Lots of internal apps at google are written on top of appengine. For example the android developers portal is written on top of it. So i woudnt worry too much.

Good point. But still, it's hard to believe that it's taking years for Google to add to GAE a mature Search API and support for multiple datacenter locations, which are things Google does better than anyone.

Developers outside of Google are not really ready to cope with the daily reality of being inside Google. Things that Google does "easily" like search and multihoming with replication and failover and so forth are actually tremendously difficult. App Engine customers are not willing to embrace the limitations that Google's architecture dictates (indeed, App Engine customers are constantly complaining about the few such very minor limitations to which they are already exposed.)

Re: What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

#12

Post by dylanvee »

recuter wrote: post #8
genwin wrote: post #6

Lack of info from Google is a big problem for me. Who knows what the memcache quota is, for example? [1] They drastically raised prices with little warning. GAE doesn't seem professional enough to depend one's business on it, unless it's a relatively tiny app. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8276292/google-app-engine...

Understandably for a PAAS they tell you to treat memcache as if it wasn't there and make no promises as to the quota. The reason is that they can twiddle things around behind the scenes without anybody architecting their app around a particular memcache performance fingerprint. If you think about it, that's how you are supposed to treat something ephemeral as memcache anyway, best effort availability, not to be relie…

(Khan Academy dev here.) The datastore being a black box is a slight concern to me personally, but the really great tradeoff is letting Google handle the responsibility of keeping our persistence layer, among many other services, up and running. They're quite good at doing that.

Re: What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

#13

Post by m0shen »

sk55 wrote: post #5
RyanZAG wrote: post #3

I think no discussion of GAE's future should ever miss these very important options: http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/index.html http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf So even if Google shuts down GAE, you could transition without too much trouble. Regarding the question itself: GAE is just a friendly face on top of Google's internal systems, and Google is deploying all of their new stuff onto it directly for ease of maintenance.…

"Want free hosting? Not a good choice, look elsewhere." What are some better alternatives? And why are they better? I've used GAE for some toy apps and a few websites with low traffic. It works great.

I'm not sure which criteria he's using for "better", but these guys give you a lot, plus flexibility for nothing:

http://www.appfog.com/

https://openshift.redhat.com/app/

Re: What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

#15

Post by bitcartel »

This question applies to all proprietary platforms. By tightly integrating your application or service, you're pretty much at the mercy of the PAAS provider.

To avoid vendor lock-in, check out the OpenShift platform [1] from Red Hat. It's open source [2] so you can set it up on your own servers if you felt Red Hat weren't providing the service you required.

[1] https://openshift.redhat.com/community/paas

[2] https://openshift.redhat.com/community/open-source/download-...

Re: What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine?

#16

Post by woodyinsb »

Great conversation. Our best info is that Google is committed to GAE and so are we. AppScale can be the "on-ramp" to GAE and also your insurance policy if "lock-in" is a concern. Run AppScale on top of EC2 or Eucalyptus (or others) for portability across clouds.
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