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> App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN No, it's the worse PAAS in existence. Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB, filtered headers, must per

> App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN No, it's the worse PAAS in existence. Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB, filtered headers, must perform http requests with custom SDK (horrible SDK BTW...). It is absolutely not worth it. The new Google "managed VMs" or whatever are closer to what Appengine should have been all along. I'm not saying AWS is great, it has a horrible UI, but AWS has none of these silly limitations.

tacos 10y ago
App Engine screwed so many people over. First they couldn't get it working. Then they tripled the price. Fuck App Engine. I can't imagine anyone reading HN who'd think this is the right solution in 2016. Even if you want to jump on the Google train (there are valid reasons for this, including free outbound bandwidth to YouTube and Google Drive...), there's no excuse for App Engine. Use the other Google cloud offerings. The container stuff is top notch.
- johansch 10y ago
  I find the history of app engine and how it compared to the competition back then quite uninteresting. What I find interesting is how it works today.
- jedc 10y ago
  They didn't "triple the price". They changed the model of what they charged and how. For some users, this definitely screwed them. For many others the list price could have gone up quite a bit, but with just a bit of performance tuning could have been perfectly fine. I speak from experience... the pricing shift incentivized me to do some refactoring, and my monthly bill dropped by ~50-60%. And AppEngine is absolutely the right solution for some users, like people who don't want anything to do with sysadmin work, configuring containers, etc. (Like myself.)
- boulos 10y ago
  Eh, I don't know that I agree that there's no reason for App Engine. For a simple, low traffic Django app it's both simpler and cheaper than say standing it up on GCE or GKE. I hear you about the pricing change. We talk a lot about not getting pricing wrong internally (now), as that's exactly what happened. Initial trial pricing is ... dangerous. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
johansch 10y ago
> Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB First, why do you think Google Datastore is any more or less proprietary than AWS Dynamo? (Which has its own eccentricities- like having to forecast and/or overallocate capacity in advance; while with Datastore you only pay for actual usage?) Oh; and you can also use Cloud SQL or BigTable from within AppEngine. > must perform http requests with custom SDK What do you mean?
boulos 10y ago
Are you saying the raw sockets API doesn't allow you to use port 80? (I don't believe that to be the case). The filtered headers thing is a common issue in many https load balancers, particularly ones like ours that have global anycast routing. I've shown a bunch of people that a modern App Engine standard environment app can run stock Django talking to MySQL (which we manage for you with Cloud SQL) just fine. If you need native C-code extensions, sure use our new Flexible Environment (neé Managed VMs) but you don't need to for many simple apps. Finally, as others have pointed out, App Engine is just one piece of our overall platform (though it was first, so it's common to have this misperception). Disclosure: I work at Google on Compute Engine (so of course I want you to use our products).

tacos 10y ago

App Engine screwed so many people over. First they couldn't get it working. Then they tripled the price. Fuck App Engine. I can't imagine anyone reading HN who'd think this is the right solution in 2016. Even if you want to jump on the Google train (there are valid reasons for this, including free outbound bandwidth to YouTube and Google Drive...), there's no excuse for App Engine. Use the other Google cloud offerings. The container stuff is top notch.

johansch 10y ago
I find the history of app engine and how it compared to the competition back then quite uninteresting. What I find interesting is how it works today.
jedc 10y ago
They didn't "triple the price". They changed the model of what they charged and how. For some users, this definitely screwed them. For many others the list price could have gone up quite a bit, but with just a bit of performance tuning could have been perfectly fine. I speak from experience... the pricing shift incentivized me to do some refactoring, and my monthly bill dropped by ~50-60%. And AppEngine is absolutely the right solution for some users, like people who don't want anything to do with sysadmin work, configuring containers, etc. (Like myself.)
boulos 10y ago
Eh, I don't know that I agree that there's no reason for App Engine. For a simple, low traffic Django app it's both simpler and cheaper than say standing it up on GCE or GKE. I hear you about the pricing change. We talk a lot about not getting pricing wrong internally (now), as that's exactly what happened. Initial trial pricing is ... dangerous. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

johansch 10y ago

> Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB First, why do you think Google Datastore is any more or less proprietary than AWS Dynamo? (Which has its own eccentricities- like having to forecast and/or overallocate capacity in advance; while with Datastore you only pay for actual usage?) Oh; and you can also use Cloud SQL or BigTable from within AppEngine. > must perform http requests with custom SDK What do you mean?

boulos 10y ago

Are you saying the raw sockets API doesn't allow you to use port 80? (I don't believe that to be the case). The filtered headers thing is a common issue in many https load balancers, particularly ones like ours that have global anycast routing. I've shown a bunch of people that a modern App Engine standard environment app can run stock Django talking to MySQL (which we manage for you with Cloud SQL) just fine. If you need native C-code extensions, sure use our new Flexible Environment (neé Managed VMs) but you don't need to for many simple apps. Finally, as others have pointed out, App Engine is just one piece of our overall platform (though it was first, so it's common to have this misperception). Disclosure: I work at Google on Compute Engine (so of course I want you to use our products).