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Goodbye, Google App Engine

carlosble.com

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Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#71

Post by grandalf »

zmmmmm wrote: post #55
mike_esspe wrote: post #52

The biggest problem for me with GAE is cost. Currently I'm paying around $150 per week for around 50k daily active users (~6 million requests per day). I'm almost sure, that i can run the same amount of traffic from $100/month dedicated server.

This is what I've never understood about GAE. If you're small, GAE is free, but then, you could host anywhere for peanuts - just buy a linode or a small EC2 instance, it doesn't really matter. Once your site becomes big, cost is going to matter and GAE is as expensive as anyone else, last time I looked, quite a bit more expensive. So there is really not much advantage, it is only free when it doesn't matter, and when…

I'm curious how the billing breaks down for your app. Is it mostly CPU quota? Or bandwidth? etc.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#72

Post by mbrenig »

bemmu wrote: post #62
mike_esspe wrote: post #52

The biggest problem for me with GAE is cost. Currently I'm paying around $150 per week for around 50k daily active users (~6 million requests per day). I'm almost sure, that i can run the same amount of traffic from $100/month dedicated server.

I'm paying a similar amount for similar traffic, and I do recall it was a bit cheaper when I had my own server. However I also recall wasting a looot of time configuring and maintaining that server. I'm willing to spend some to save time.

Can you share general numbers on this? I'm interested in which quotas you're spending money on the most.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#73

Post by nischalshetty »

grandalf wrote: post #68
mmastrac wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late September was bad for the datastore. We were seeing latency on simple queries vary from 50ms up to 5s. These were simple properly-value queries as well. This was fixed in early October I think, and a recent bit of maintenance brought latencies down even further. The datastore is now extremely fast and rarely errors out. We ( http://gri.pe ) are still happy on AppEngine, even though September was rough.

Very true. The datastore unreliability was a real nightmare. I was getting periods of 60 seconds where it was unusable... But it does appear to be fixed now.

The Datastore problems have indeed been fixed and things have been smooth since the fix.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#74

Post by [deleted] »

st3fan wrote: post #17

"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'…

[deleted]

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#75

Post by herrherr »

st3fan wrote: post #17

"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'…

That is exactly our experience with the development of Metric Mail.

Yes, there are limitations. And most of them might get you upset first, but if you "work with the rules" it is a fantastic platform.

Metric Mail has been running absolutely fine since its launch in August, it has never failed us. Even under severe traffic it scaled without any problems.

We knew from the beginning what the limitations are and this way there were no big suprises during the development.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#76

Post by thebootstrapper »

IMO, i feel this is a design flaw. Without understanding what's a NOSQL used for you can't except joins to work.

Shouldn't there be a checklist to show "What applications can be moved to cloud (appengine here)? including the myths, expectations, assertions?"

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#77

Post by ntoshev »

st3fan wrote: post #17

"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'…

There is less difference in expectations from AWS though, probably because it's lower-level.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#78

Post by sahaj »

i'd curious to hear what you switch to and, in about a year, how well it is working out.

my buddies and i are working on a time manager for college students and we are having a hard time deciding between RoR and GAE. any insight would be helpful.

we are looking for: login manager database capable of up to 50 fields for each user sorting and search capability must cost less than $10/year/user.

ps. if you are someone interested in solving this problem, please contact me directly at hn@sahajsingh.com

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#79

Post by DrJosiah »

nl wrote: post #31

Does no one read the documentation before deciding to use a platform anymore? App Engine supports Python 2.5. The Python interpreter runs in a secured "sandbox" environment to isolate your application for service and security. The interpreter can run any Python code, including Python modules you include with your application, as well as the Python standard library. The interpreter cannot load Python modules with C co…

I'm glad you wrote this comment so that I wouldn't have to. Every comment he made about the system and it's limitations were documented (except the 500's).

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#80

Post by fauigerzigerk »

nl wrote: post #40
dantkz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the comments he says that the restrictions were not THE problem, THE problem was the instability. List of restrictions is kind of reminder of what he had to cope with, and wasted money on, until it turned out that GAE doesn't work properly.

In my experience "instability" with GAE means you are pushing it beyond where it wants to go. If you a have code that just completes within the timeout, then guess what? When the system is under load it isn't going to complete. You can use all kinds of techniques to protect your application from things like variable datastore performance. For example, nowdays I usually use a pattern where user-facing servlets only ev…

" If you a have code that just completes within the timeout, then guess what? When the system is under load it isn't going to complete."

Unless the platform scales as it should, which is the whole point of accepting all the limitations. If there are tight and hard limits on request timeout, then there must be equally stringent guarantees provided by the underlying platform. "We're working on it" is just not enough under these conditions.

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