51–60 of 98 posts
I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month. Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come…
I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month. Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come…
If you're going to use the cloud you have to do it right, and that means auto-scaling and variable resource usage. Then this option will save you money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
App Engine was in preview when its price changed.
It was in "preview" for 3 years. During those 3 years no warning was given that the pricing changes were going to be of such a magnitude. As a result people had sufficient time and not enough warning to build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. That's unforgivable.
Frankly, if your business is built entirely around a single 3rd party provider, and you are totally incapable of pivoting cloud providers at short notice... well then you are "doing it wrong".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
App Engine was in preview when its price changed.
It was in "preview" for 3 years. During those 3 years no warning was given that the pricing changes were going to be of such a magnitude. As a result people had sufficient time and not enough warning to build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. That's unforgivable.
App Engine has always been a unique PAAS because its APIs were designed to try to force developers into better distributed app architectures. The non-relational DB with entity groups and limited queries, the 30s request limit, originally not offering long-running instances, the task queue, memcache as a service, all made for scalable apps.
But the costs unfortunately weren't designed the same way. Charging by CPU time, and having datastore access free was especially bad for a market where apps typically use very little CPU, but access data a lot.
A lot of blog posts came shorty after the price change that said after making the recommended changes to datastore calls, and enabling multithreading that they got their bill down and performance up significantly. Many apps were doing absolutely no caching, or logging every request to the datastore, because datastore was ridiculously cheap for small records. Some were doing what should have been batch work per-request because they didn't use task queues.
Since 2011, I think all price changes with Google Cloud have been price drops, some pretty big. Last year, App Engine prices were dropped 30%.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
App Engine was in preview when its price changed.
It was in "preview" for 3 years. During those 3 years no warning was given that the pricing changes were going to be of such a magnitude. As a result people had sufficient time and not enough warning to build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. That's unforgivable.
The price increase also came with an SLA. Just to be clear, you're saying that businesses were entirely built atop a product with no SLA, and that's not the bigger problem?
Any developer who was burned by App Engine pricing in the past is likely to take the lure of a "70% off" discount with a grain of salt because of the much higher cost of incorrectly relying on Google's pricing pledges. In case anyone forgets, the pricing changes on Google App Engine caused many developers to abandon apps they had developed on the platform because of hundreds of percent increases in pricing: https://g…
That goes back to 2011. Has anything been changed on people more recently?
I run a $MM enterprise business almost entirely on GAE/python with a staff of ~40, public-facing site, etc and the monthly bill is under $1500/mon. Sure, I'd prefer lower $ and faster performance but truthfully, I'm no longer complaining: GAE/python saves me $$$ in IT staffing costs including security upgrades on dozens of packages that are either pre-integrated or I don't need at all (SQL & NoSQL databases incl multi-DC failover, memcache, reverse proxy, email hosting, auto-scaling, etc. etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was in "preview" for 3 years. During those 3 years no warning was given that the pricing changes were going to be of such a magnitude. As a result people had sufficient time and not enough warning to build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. That's unforgivable.
> build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. Frankly, if your business is built entirely around a single 3rd party provider, and you are totally incapable of pivoting cloud providers at short notice... well then you are "doing it wrong".
Any developer who was burned by App Engine pricing in the past is likely to take the lure of a "70% off" discount with a grain of salt because of the much higher cost of incorrectly relying on Google's pricing pledges. In case anyone forgets, the pricing changes on Google App Engine caused many developers to abandon apps they had developed on the platform because of hundreds of percent increases in pricing: https://g…
So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, and instead implement a design that allows you to easily migrate to another VM vendor.