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Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

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Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#41
post #36

Everything Google does, they do in a half-assed sort of way. And it's getting really annoying. Even their core business of search is showing signs of neglect. SEO experts have learned to game the system such that the quality of search results is pretty abysmal now. GAE is a half baked AWS. Google+ is a half baked Facebook. Google Docs is a half baked MSOffice. They have no blood in these projects and don't really car…

> Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform. Except for the largest business on the internet... Well search, video delivery, mobile phones, email, mapping, news, RSS, web analytics, and web browsers. Getting clobbered in almost everything else though.

They make no money on those products. They can't charge money for their products because they are half-assed knockoffs that nobody will pay anything for.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#43

Can people list their choice for python hosting and the main benefits? What are some good services layered on top of EC2 to provide more management and automation? Does anyone have any experience with whether DotCloud is priced reasonably?

I've been playing with ep.io for a while (nothing serious), it's a standard Python + PostgreSQL stack using few inis for configuration. Their pricing is a bit high on bandwidth though, so I'll probably wait for Heroku Cedar to officially support Python and use that instead.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#44
post #42

I hope PlusFeed's author read this: Man that's some nasty code, horrible, don't open source that kind of "code"... it's bad, even for a 5 minute projects, it's really bad. Open Source software is not a dumpster of your bad code.

He wrote software that many people found useful and gave it away for free. That's awfully damn generous as far as I'm concerned. You see an improvement that can be made? Then make it. But stop complaining.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#45
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.

It's not fair to make assumptions like this. I have a Google App Engine app which doesn't push put a lot MBs each day, but does use a fair amount of CPU, and I'll pay for it. It's not a poorly designed service, it's a service which doesn't generate a lot of traffic (when measured in MB), but I'm getting value from it elsewhere. In this case, my app on GAE is an API which my front end (hosted elsewhere) is consuming.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#46
post #34

Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places. So back when I worked there Google had no clue what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their…

Your last point is very confusing. You're saying you think Google can't spin up more App Engine front ends if it wants? ("every machine in their data center can [not] be a web server") Or any other kind of front end?

I interpreted it more as saying that their architecture allows them to parallelize all sorts of 'back end computations' across their infrastructure, such that their scarcity is in internet-facing processing and not processing as a whole.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#47
post #34

Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places. So back when I worked there Google had no clue what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their…

Your last point is very confusing. You're saying you think Google can't spin up more App Engine front ends if it wants? ("every machine in their data center can [not] be a web server") Or any other kind of front end?

Probably he is saying that because their expertise and focus lies in backend, it's costlier for Google to increase frontend service and server compared with say, other web-hosting companies.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#48
post #44
post #42

I hope PlusFeed's author read this: Man that's some nasty code, horrible, don't open source that kind of "code"... it's bad, even for a 5 minute projects, it's really bad. Open Source software is not a dumpster of your bad code.

He wrote software that many people found useful and gave it away for free. That's awfully damn generous as far as I'm concerned. You see an improvement that can be made? Then make it. But stop complaining.

I don't want to sound like a troll... but you're better off re-writing the whole thing... I mean look at it.

https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed/blob/master/plusf...

Global variables galore, tabs no spaces, no documentation, compares to empty not just once but multiple times, pokemon style exception handling (you gotta catch them all!), 'is not None' lol, type checking instead of duck typing... Just to name a few.

14 pople forked it already, I hope those are Github bots.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform. Except for the largest business on the internet... Well search, video delivery, mobile phones, email, mapping, news, RSS, web analytics, and web browsers. Getting clobbered in almost everything else though.

They make no money on those products. They can't charge money for their products because they are half-assed knockoffs that nobody will pay anything for.

They make a ton of money on those products. It's all part of the ecosystem. Android users use Google search. So do Chrome users. Analytics users use AdWords (get too many hits with Analytics and you need to start spending some sweet AdWords bucks). YouTube and Gmail users see ads (Google Apps business users pay money directly).
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