6 ms·

Why Google App Engine Rocks: A Google Engineer’s Take

50 points by cjdrake 10y ago

kevando 10y ago
According to my depreciated appengine console, I would not say that Google thinks "App Engine Rocks."
- justinblat 10y ago
  Of course we do :) We deprecated the original appengine console, and we've moved all of the UI over to the Cloud Developers console: https://console.cloud.google.com/ https://console.cloud.google.com/ It has all of the cloud stuff in one place. Should be a lot nicer to use too :)
  - NearAP 10y ago
    With the old appengine console, you just went to one url - appengine.google.com and you found all the links in one place - application, logs, datastore, etc Since the old appengine console was deprecated, it is difficult to remember the urls for the different services. One has to try and remember multiple urls. It is quite confusing and frustrating.
    - cbsmith 10y ago
      The golden rule of UI is that if you change it, it will ruin the experience for someone.
  - noiv 10y ago
    Recently there was one liner linked here on how to dramatically improve Angular's speed. Would help that new console too :)
- mbleigh 10y ago
  The console was deprecated in favor of a new console that lives in the larger Cloud console.
neals 10y ago
Is Google App Engine under performing? I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this. I hope they're not in trouble or anything, I have been moving my project from VPS over to GCM for the past year now. I love it.
- flurben 10y ago
  I love using GAE as well, but I'll be damned if I can find a job using it. It is almost impossible. The few that exist are in the highest-cost locations in America. In that sense I think it's a failure; it simply hasn't been widely adopted. At my last job I pushed for using it, and the suggestion was shot down, on the basis that "If I left they'd never find another person who knows GAE."
  - vthallam 10y ago
    Guess, it's about time there are more developers/devops who know GAE! Google have been quietly building a fantastic product line and when they start heavily marketing, there would be tons who would want to learn and switch.
  - appleflaxen 10y ago
    We have avoided GAE at our startup simply because we depend upon google for so much already. we made an explicit choice to avoid putting all our eggs in that basket, and are completely happy with AWS.
- cbsmith 10y ago
  > I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this. Because, there is a huge gap between market perception and their product offering.
- edwinnathaniel 10y ago
  Google was never big on Enterprise marketing materials in the past. Now that things have changed (re-org Alphabet, new Cloud leadership), they seem to take marketing/sales (and hopefully support) more seriously (and with more traditional approach). It's a good sign; they're maturing.
dominotw 10y ago
>Some were a LAMP stack on a managed hosting service. Some were running as a cron job on someone’s workstation. All that whiteboard interview pedantry doesn't seem to shield them devs who don't know how to deploy a basic production grade app. But hey they were able to memorize tree inversions before interviews so thats good.
johansch 10y ago
App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN, I think. (A cynical person might thank that it's AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs, but I guess it's more likely that the cause is groupthink.) Last summer I switched jobs from a company where we developed loads of cloud thingies ourselves, because there really weren't any good options around ten years ago when we started a product line that needed a high quality global service (involving processing, networking and storage). We had a lot of fun basically building our own little (if 5000+ machines qualifies as little) AWS/Google-style Cloud. I heard about Amazon Dynamo in 2007 and then we basically re-implemented it ourselves. We added lots of neat features like datacenter-aware global replication, etc. When I joined the new company last June, it was basically just me. A few months later we hired a great python dev. I'm so happy to find that the level of the openly available products/services had caught up quite a bit by then, enabling us not to spend so much time on just making sure things were available all of the time, and ~infinitely scalable. I spent a lot of time evaluating AWS vs GC, but my inevitable conclusion was that.. in a small company where you don't want to invest in a 24/7/365 devops team you should go for the Google App Engine. I would really like it if Google found some pragmatic way to make App Engine work inside China though, at least for companies that have chinese ICP permits. (Why hasn't AWS launched a PaaS? Lambda is so neutered that it doesn't really count.)
- untog 10y ago
  > (Too many AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs?) I don't think so. A good while ago GAE was incredibly limiting - it certainly was when I tried it. Python only (maybe also PHP?), forced to use Google Cloud whatever for storage, etc. By comparison, AWS was using MySQL databases and EC2 boxes that let you use whatever language you wanted. I know things have come a long way since then, but the reputation persists.
  - bradleybuda 10y ago
    Agreed; GAE's initial feature set was not great, and I think some of that launch stink unfortunately still sticks. As a counterpoint, you see lots and lots of love on HN for Heroku, which is a PaaS in much the same vein as GAE.
balls187 10y ago
Just logged into my GAE Console to see how my old apps were doing, and was treated to this: https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05-06_at_1.57_PM.png%2F https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05... ----- If you get that error, somewhere you need to agree to new T's and C's. The site doesn't redirect your properly, so you need to click around until you are prompted to agree. Pretty cool to see my simple little GAE Emailing app I wrote for my startup back in 2012 was cranking away 3 years later.
- nissehulth 10y ago
  Do you have javascript disabled?
  - balls187 10y ago
    Nope
- viiralvx 10y ago
  Are you using uBlock?
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
A Google engineer's take on a Google product? I don't feel like this testimonial holds a lot of real value. Why not have someone who isn't being paid by Google tell you that Google products are cool?
- alttab 10y ago
  Or at least minimally compare it to other products that do similar things and are more widely used to provide some basis for comparison?
- ldargin 10y ago
  His point is that using App Engine cut down maintenance time. I find that noncontroversial.
NearAP 10y ago
I believe I've made this comment before - Google App Engine is good and quickly allows you to get a proof of concept off the ground. But the documentation SUCKs big time - the language is obtuse, the documentation is repeated in multiple places (meaning different paths to documentation explaining the same thing in different ways), and it is not uncommon to find that the documentation is not current.
- pseudobry 10y ago
  You should take another look, as we literally rewrote most of the documentation in the last few weeks.
  - alttab 10y ago
    What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS. AWS and AppEngine aren't even the same kind of thing. AWS is a high-level collection of services (Google's equivalent is Google Cloud Platform.) AppEngine is a PaaS offering within Google Cloud Platform. And, AFAIK, its one piece of GCP that AWS doesn't have a direct competitor to. (Lambda is, I think, the closest thing.)
  - rstupek 10y ago
    The google cloud documentation is definitely sub-par. I tried to build a simple Go app trying to use the pubsub api and eventually gave up. None of the documentation provided a full working example and any example you can find references an old version of the api. And this was with Go!
NearAP 10y ago
One other 'thing' - there are some services that you have to enable billing before they are available on app engine. Google also typically gives you a 30 day/$XXX credit for it. That is a nice feature. The 'challenge' for me is that typically, at this point I'm still trying to test out my code and basically have no traffic so the $200 credit basically becomes a waste. It would be nice if one could be allowed to 'decide' when to use this credit. At my testing/experimenting/design phase, the free quota would be enough for me or I would be willing to pay out of pocket (since I'm still testing I would keep the amount to the barest minimum).
diyseguy 10y ago
They're probably going to end of life it like everything else they get bored with. I can't imagine any sane business would risk putting any amount of development time investment into their stuff.
- alooPotato 10y ago
  You know appengine has been around for 8 years right?
  - saool 10y ago
    Same number of years Google Reader had been around when it was sunset.
    - ariwilson 10y ago
      I bet it's earned Google infinitely more dollars than Google Reader!
    - edwinnathaniel 10y ago
      What happened once it (GAE) reaches 9 year? gasp ...
- cbsmith 10y ago
  Does Google appear bored with this? Long before it was even a product, this kind of service was a very core competitive advantage that Google has cultivated, and the much larger competitive landscape means we're looking at a product category of the size & scope that would make sense for Google to tackle.
- QuercusMax 10y ago
  It's heavily used inside Google. Tons of google-internal tools are built on App Engine.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
filleokus 10y ago
Hehe, we're running GAE at work and I'm constantly looking for other options / trying to persuade management to spend the time on migration. I spend 8-12 hours a day fighting with GAE in one way or another, even though I very well might experience the "green is grasser" symptom. Many things are nice with App Engine, outlined in the post. But so many things are not nice: - For us the performance characteristics for some queries in the NDB (NoSQL datastore) have really left much to be wanted. - The inability of calling C-libraries from Python code (except those provided by Google, they provide standard stuff like cPickle etc) - The UI for logs / querying the database / admin is quite bad and buggy. Can't really use it in Safari at all (might very well be the wrong doing of Safari, but still) - Limitations in how long functions / tasks can run. I've spent all of my Friday night tonight (I'm in CET) re-writing code for a batch-processing task that took just above the hard imposed limit of 10 minutes to run. According to the docs an exception is to be thrown when the task is nearing its limit but most of the time (intermittently…) the exception is not thrown and just kills the process… - Limited community / toolset. Using GAE feels somewhat like using something really old or obscure, quite few SO questions/answers (the upside is that many of them are written by Gudio, which lead the NDB project before quitting from Google), and extremely limited third party tools / plugins for enhancing the developer experience. For example I haven't found any good way, except the GAE provided one, to do performance profiling. - GAE has somewhat of a bad rep in some parts of the Python community I've found. A couple of Python libraries I've tried to use have not worked and then I've found bug reports where the maintainers have explicitly stated that GAE is not supported because of some limitation they have imposed. The biggest example I can come up with right now is probably Requests With that said however, I feel like Google has started giving GAE more love recently. The documentation seems to improve, the dashboards/web UI:s have undergone major rework (not all of them improvements per se but still!). I actually said to my management a while ago that we need to move away from GAE in the medium term (1-2 years) because I feared that Google would start to "sunset" GAE. I wouldn't say that is the case today, but I could not go so far as to say that I would recommend GAE. GAE is a very nice platform in many ways, but very limited. The tradeoffs for all the ease is quite high and should probably be considered very carefully before picked.
- boulos 10y ago
  It seems like you might be better served by the new Flexible environment. You've got a desire for longer running tasks, C-extensions for Python, etc. which fits the App Engine Flexible (neé Managed VMs). Disclosure: I work at Google on Cloud.
democracy 10y ago
I believe many see AWS offer as "we have the same *nix boxes you already have but cheaper/on-demand/easily scalable". Plus nice feature as local storage of your data (can be a legal requirement for some industries). Create an account and start deploying now with the smallest investment and commitment. GAE on the other hand is "we can solve your scalability problems" that many simply don't have and "you should write/re-write your apps to use our framework" which is a red flag to many as well.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I believe many see AWS offer as "we have the same *nix boxes you already have but cheaper/on-demand/easily scalable". That's specifically EC2. To which Google's direct competitor is GCE, not GAE. AWS's component most directly competing with GAE is Lambda.
- deepsun 10y ago
  Actually, GAE is more about easier development for starter projects. GCE is more like a competitor to AWS, not GAE.
  - democracy 10y ago
    For starter project in starting companies maybe, for existing companies not that easy...
oxplot 10y ago
A trend of comments I see whenever App Engine is mentioned is how limiting App Engine platform is and how it doesn't have MySQL, etc. No one seem to ever mention scalability? App Engine is built for just that! Datastore is infinitely salable so is the application and every other API on GAE. I can spend an hour writing an app from scratch that scales infinitely on GAE without a thought. I personally do not know of any other PaaS (e.g. Openshift, Heroku) that's capable of doing that unless you spend a month learning ins and outs of devops for that particular platform. EDIT: Also the Datastore is replicated in multi data centers and again, you don't have to think about backups either.
- deepsun 10y ago
  It has MySQL, by the way. I wish they had PostgreSQL, though.

50 points by cjdrake 10y ago

kevando 10y ago

According to my depreciated appengine console, I would not say that Google thinks "App Engine Rocks."

justinblat 10y ago
Of course we do :) We deprecated the original appengine console, and we've moved all of the UI over to the Cloud Developers console: https://console.cloud.google.com/ https://console.cloud.google.com/ It has all of the cloud stuff in one place. Should be a lot nicer to use too :)
- NearAP 10y ago
  With the old appengine console, you just went to one url - appengine.google.com and you found all the links in one place - application, logs, datastore, etc Since the old appengine console was deprecated, it is difficult to remember the urls for the different services. One has to try and remember multiple urls. It is quite confusing and frustrating.
  - cbsmith 10y ago
    The golden rule of UI is that if you change it, it will ruin the experience for someone.
- noiv 10y ago
  Recently there was one liner linked here on how to dramatically improve Angular's speed. Would help that new console too :)
mbleigh 10y ago
The console was deprecated in favor of a new console that lives in the larger Cloud console.

neals 10y ago

Is Google App Engine under performing? I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this. I hope they're not in trouble or anything, I have been moving my project from VPS over to GCM for the past year now. I love it.

flurben 10y ago
I love using GAE as well, but I'll be damned if I can find a job using it. It is almost impossible. The few that exist are in the highest-cost locations in America. In that sense I think it's a failure; it simply hasn't been widely adopted. At my last job I pushed for using it, and the suggestion was shot down, on the basis that "If I left they'd never find another person who knows GAE."
- vthallam 10y ago
  Guess, it's about time there are more developers/devops who know GAE! Google have been quietly building a fantastic product line and when they start heavily marketing, there would be tons who would want to learn and switch.
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  We have avoided GAE at our startup simply because we depend upon google for so much already. we made an explicit choice to avoid putting all our eggs in that basket, and are completely happy with AWS.
cbsmith 10y ago
> I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this. Because, there is a huge gap between market perception and their product offering.
edwinnathaniel 10y ago
Google was never big on Enterprise marketing materials in the past. Now that things have changed (re-org Alphabet, new Cloud leadership), they seem to take marketing/sales (and hopefully support) more seriously (and with more traditional approach). It's a good sign; they're maturing.

dominotw 10y ago

>Some were a LAMP stack on a managed hosting service. Some were running as a cron job on someone’s workstation. All that whiteboard interview pedantry doesn't seem to shield them devs who don't know how to deploy a basic production grade app. But hey they were able to memorize tree inversions before interviews so thats good.

johansch 10y ago

App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN, I think. (A cynical person might thank that it's AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs, but I guess it's more likely that the cause is groupthink.) Last summer I switched jobs from a company where we developed loads of cloud thingies ourselves, because there really weren't any good options around ten years ago when we started a product line that needed a high quality global service (involving processing, networking and storage). We had a lot of fun basically building our own little (if 5000+ machines qualifies as little) AWS/Google-style Cloud. I heard about Amazon Dynamo in 2007 and then we basically re-implemented it ourselves. We added lots of neat features like datacenter-aware global replication, etc. When I joined the new company last June, it was basically just me. A few months later we hired a great python dev. I'm so happy to find that the level of the openly available products/services had caught up quite a bit by then, enabling us not to spend so much time on just making sure things were available all of the time, and ~infinitely scalable. I spent a lot of time evaluating AWS vs GC, but my inevitable conclusion was that.. in a small company where you don't want to invest in a 24/7/365 devops team you should go for the Google App Engine. I would really like it if Google found some pragmatic way to make App Engine work inside China though, at least for companies that have chinese ICP permits. (Why hasn't AWS launched a PaaS? Lambda is so neutered that it doesn't really count.)

untog 10y ago
> (Too many AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs?) I don't think so. A good while ago GAE was incredibly limiting - it certainly was when I tried it. Python only (maybe also PHP?), forced to use Google Cloud whatever for storage, etc. By comparison, AWS was using MySQL databases and EC2 boxes that let you use whatever language you wanted. I know things have come a long way since then, but the reputation persists.
- bradleybuda 10y ago
  Agreed; GAE's initial feature set was not great, and I think some of that launch stink unfortunately still sticks. As a counterpoint, you see lots and lots of love on HN for Heroku, which is a PaaS in much the same vein as GAE.

balls187 10y ago

Just logged into my GAE Console to see how my old apps were doing, and was treated to this: https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05-06_at_1.57_PM.png%2F https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05... ----- If you get that error, somewhere you need to agree to new T's and C's. The site doesn't redirect your properly, so you need to click around until you are prompted to agree. Pretty cool to see my simple little GAE Emailing app I wrote for my startup back in 2012 was cranking away 3 years later.

nissehulth 10y ago
Do you have javascript disabled?
- balls187 10y ago
  Nope
viiralvx 10y ago
Are you using uBlock?

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

A Google engineer's take on a Google product? I don't feel like this testimonial holds a lot of real value. Why not have someone who isn't being paid by Google tell you that Google products are cool?

alttab 10y ago
Or at least minimally compare it to other products that do similar things and are more widely used to provide some basis for comparison?
ldargin 10y ago
His point is that using App Engine cut down maintenance time. I find that noncontroversial.

NearAP 10y ago

I believe I've made this comment before - Google App Engine is good and quickly allows you to get a proof of concept off the ground. But the documentation SUCKs big time - the language is obtuse, the documentation is repeated in multiple places (meaning different paths to documentation explaining the same thing in different ways), and it is not uncommon to find that the documentation is not current.

pseudobry 10y ago
You should take another look, as we literally rewrote most of the documentation in the last few weeks.
- alttab 10y ago
  What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS. AWS and AppEngine aren't even the same kind of thing. AWS is a high-level collection of services (Google's equivalent is Google Cloud Platform.) AppEngine is a PaaS offering within Google Cloud Platform. And, AFAIK, its one piece of GCP that AWS doesn't have a direct competitor to. (Lambda is, I think, the closest thing.)
- rstupek 10y ago
  The google cloud documentation is definitely sub-par. I tried to build a simple Go app trying to use the pubsub api and eventually gave up. None of the documentation provided a full working example and any example you can find references an old version of the api. And this was with Go!

NearAP 10y ago

One other 'thing' - there are some services that you have to enable billing before they are available on app engine. Google also typically gives you a 30 day/$XXX credit for it. That is a nice feature. The 'challenge' for me is that typically, at this point I'm still trying to test out my code and basically have no traffic so the $200 credit basically becomes a waste. It would be nice if one could be allowed to 'decide' when to use this credit. At my testing/experimenting/design phase, the free quota would be enough for me or I would be willing to pay out of pocket (since I'm still testing I would keep the amount to the barest minimum).

diyseguy 10y ago

They're probably going to end of life it like everything else they get bored with. I can't imagine any sane business would risk putting any amount of development time investment into their stuff.

alooPotato 10y ago
You know appengine has been around for 8 years right?
- saool 10y ago
  Same number of years Google Reader had been around when it was sunset.
  - ariwilson 10y ago
    I bet it's earned Google infinitely more dollars than Google Reader!
  - edwinnathaniel 10y ago
    What happened once it (GAE) reaches 9 year? gasp ...
cbsmith 10y ago
Does Google appear bored with this? Long before it was even a product, this kind of service was a very core competitive advantage that Google has cultivated, and the much larger competitive landscape means we're looking at a product category of the size & scope that would make sense for Google to tackle.
QuercusMax 10y ago
It's heavily used inside Google. Tons of google-internal tools are built on App Engine.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

filleokus 10y ago

Hehe, we're running GAE at work and I'm constantly looking for other options / trying to persuade management to spend the time on migration. I spend 8-12 hours a day fighting with GAE in one way or another, even though I very well might experience the "green is grasser" symptom. Many things are nice with App Engine, outlined in the post. But so many things are not nice: - For us the performance characteristics for some queries in the NDB (NoSQL datastore) have really left much to be wanted. - The inability of calling C-libraries from Python code (except those provided by Google, they provide standard stuff like cPickle etc) - The UI for logs / querying the database / admin is quite bad and buggy. Can't really use it in Safari at all (might very well be the wrong doing of Safari, but still) - Limitations in how long functions / tasks can run. I've spent all of my Friday night tonight (I'm in CET) re-writing code for a batch-processing task that took just above the hard imposed limit of 10 minutes to run. According to the docs an exception is to be thrown when the task is nearing its limit but most of the time (intermittently…) the exception is not thrown and just kills the process… - Limited community / toolset. Using GAE feels somewhat like using something really old or obscure, quite few SO questions/answers (the upside is that many of them are written by Gudio, which lead the NDB project before quitting from Google), and extremely limited third party tools / plugins for enhancing the developer experience. For example I haven't found any good way, except the GAE provided one, to do performance profiling. - GAE has somewhat of a bad rep in some parts of the Python community I've found. A couple of Python libraries I've tried to use have not worked and then I've found bug reports where the maintainers have explicitly stated that GAE is not supported because of some limitation they have imposed. The biggest example I can come up with right now is probably Requests With that said however, I feel like Google has started giving GAE more love recently. The documentation seems to improve, the dashboards/web UI:s have undergone major rework (not all of them improvements per se but still!). I actually said to my management a while ago that we need to move away from GAE in the medium term (1-2 years) because I feared that Google would start to "sunset" GAE. I wouldn't say that is the case today, but I could not go so far as to say that I would recommend GAE. GAE is a very nice platform in many ways, but very limited. The tradeoffs for all the ease is quite high and should probably be considered very carefully before picked.

boulos 10y ago
It seems like you might be better served by the new Flexible environment. You've got a desire for longer running tasks, C-extensions for Python, etc. which fits the App Engine Flexible (neé Managed VMs). Disclosure: I work at Google on Cloud.

democracy 10y ago

I believe many see AWS offer as "we have the same *nix boxes you already have but cheaper/on-demand/easily scalable". Plus nice feature as local storage of your data (can be a legal requirement for some industries). Create an account and start deploying now with the smallest investment and commitment. GAE on the other hand is "we can solve your scalability problems" that many simply don't have and "you should write/re-write your apps to use our framework" which is a red flag to many as well.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I believe many see AWS offer as "we have the same *nix boxes you already have but cheaper/on-demand/easily scalable". That's specifically EC2. To which Google's direct competitor is GCE, not GAE. AWS's component most directly competing with GAE is Lambda.
deepsun 10y ago
Actually, GAE is more about easier development for starter projects. GCE is more like a competitor to AWS, not GAE.
- democracy 10y ago
  For starter project in starting companies maybe, for existing companies not that easy...

oxplot 10y ago

A trend of comments I see whenever App Engine is mentioned is how limiting App Engine platform is and how it doesn't have MySQL, etc. No one seem to ever mention scalability? App Engine is built for just that! Datastore is infinitely salable so is the application and every other API on GAE. I can spend an hour writing an app from scratch that scales infinitely on GAE without a thought. I personally do not know of any other PaaS (e.g. Openshift, Heroku) that's capable of doing that unless you spend a month learning ins and outs of devops for that particular platform. EDIT: Also the Datastore is replicated in multi data centers and again, you don't have to think about backups either.

deepsun 10y ago
It has MySQL, by the way. I wish they had PostgreSQL, though.