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Do you feel the same way about App Engine Flexible Environment (neé Managed VMs)? That is, is your complaint that GAE Standard offers you all these services (li

by boulos 10y ago

Do you feel the same way about App Engine Flexible Environment (neé Managed VMs)? That is, is your complaint that GAE Standard offers you all these services (like Memcache, Task Queues, Datastore) or that you hate the sandbox it's in? The GAE team has been (admittedly slowly) pushing the services that were GAE only into being fully-consumable "Cloud Platform" services (e.g., Cloud Datastore is the same Datastore that's been "part of" App Engine forever, but now accessible from anywhere). It's your choice to use Datastore, and I respect that you would chose to avoid it, but the basic PaaS idea of "here's some code, run it for me as a web endpoint" is still compelling even today. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

scrollaway 10y ago
My impression of GAE is that on top of the core issues of the platform's (lock in by design, outdated by design), it is also very much unloved by Google and has received very few updates. I stayed away from it so I could be wrong. But to answer your question, I don't know anything about that Amazon service but I would feel the same way about similarly-designed competing product. IMHO, no informed person would ever pick proprietary, lock-in-heavy PAAS solutions.
- boulos 10y ago
  But picking at that a bit, if I were to run a simple off-the-shelf Django setup against MySQL, I'd use GAE (if not Standard than certainly Flexible). My code wouldn't be any different than deploying it to a raw VM, so I'm not locked in and could deploy it on DO, AWS or anywhere else in a heartbeat. In the meantime, I don't have to deal with setting up load balancing, autoscaling, DNS per module, etc. so I get some real value from that. Is your concern the lock-in from the code standpoint, or operational "lock-in" that once you've got all this set up for you, you'd have to go replicate it to get out? If the latter, aren't you saying you're going to do that on Day 1 in the "avoid PaaS" case?
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Why would you use GAE in this scenario, over, say, GCE or even AWS? And at a smaller scale, DO would be far cheaper.
- manigandham 10y ago
  > IMHO, no informed person would ever pick proprietary, lock-in-heavy PAAS solutions. This sounds like your personal bias and is clearly not true. Business doesn't work like this and you would be surprised if you looked at just how much proprietary software runs the world. Lock-in isn't a thing to fear, it's a natural spectrum of using any service. The more specialized that service, the more work will be involved if you need to move away. The real question is if the risk is worth it. Do you really need to switch? Are you worried that Google or AWS will somehow disappear before your business does? If not, what is the big deal?
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    I did preface with "IMHO" (in my humble opinion). I'll give you it's not very humble, but it's an opinion. You're conflating two things though: Lock-in as a whole, and unnecessary lock-in like GAE's. Yes, lock-in is a choice to make and not always an incorrect one. But I can safely say no informed business should/would pick Adobe Flash over HTML today for, say, internal web apps. Adobe Flash is fairly old and legacy technology, deprecated in all but name for that scenario and includes a fairly significant amount of lock in due to its proprietary nature requiring you to rework your entire application were you to change to an alternatire. Sounds familiar?
    - manigandham 10y ago
      There is no such thing as "unnecessary" lock-in, it's just how the service is. Take it or leave it. Just because you think it's unnecessary doesn't change how that service is offered. And so what if there is work to do? Again, that is what "lock-in" is by definition = the work involved to move away. You weigh the risks and see if the potential work (that might not ever need to be done) is worth the benefits offered today by that service. That's what an informed business does.

by boulos 10y ago

scrollaway 10y ago

My impression of GAE is that on top of the core issues of the platform's (lock in by design, outdated by design), it is also very much unloved by Google and has received very few updates. I stayed away from it so I could be wrong. But to answer your question, I don't know anything about that Amazon service but I would feel the same way about similarly-designed competing product. IMHO, no informed person would ever pick proprietary, lock-in-heavy PAAS solutions.

boulos 10y ago
But picking at that a bit, if I were to run a simple off-the-shelf Django setup against MySQL, I'd use GAE (if not Standard than certainly Flexible). My code wouldn't be any different than deploying it to a raw VM, so I'm not locked in and could deploy it on DO, AWS or anywhere else in a heartbeat. In the meantime, I don't have to deal with setting up load balancing, autoscaling, DNS per module, etc. so I get some real value from that. Is your concern the lock-in from the code standpoint, or operational "lock-in" that once you've got all this set up for you, you'd have to go replicate it to get out? If the latter, aren't you saying you're going to do that on Day 1 in the "avoid PaaS" case?
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Why would you use GAE in this scenario, over, say, GCE or even AWS? And at a smaller scale, DO would be far cheaper.
manigandham 10y ago
> IMHO, no informed person would ever pick proprietary, lock-in-heavy PAAS solutions. This sounds like your personal bias and is clearly not true. Business doesn't work like this and you would be surprised if you looked at just how much proprietary software runs the world. Lock-in isn't a thing to fear, it's a natural spectrum of using any service. The more specialized that service, the more work will be involved if you need to move away. The real question is if the risk is worth it. Do you really need to switch? Are you worried that Google or AWS will somehow disappear before your business does? If not, what is the big deal?
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I did preface with "IMHO" (in my humble opinion). I'll give you it's not very humble, but it's an opinion. You're conflating two things though: Lock-in as a whole, and unnecessary lock-in like GAE's. Yes, lock-in is a choice to make and not always an incorrect one. But I can safely say no informed business should/would pick Adobe Flash over HTML today for, say, internal web apps. Adobe Flash is fairly old and legacy technology, deprecated in all but name for that scenario and includes a fairly significant amount of lock in due to its proprietary nature requiring you to rework your entire application were you to change to an alternatire. Sounds familiar?
  - manigandham 10y ago
    There is no such thing as "unnecessary" lock-in, it's just how the service is. Take it or leave it. Just because you think it's unnecessary doesn't change how that service is offered. And so what if there is work to do? Again, that is what "lock-in" is by definition = the work involved to move away. You weigh the risks and see if the potential work (that might not ever need to be done) is worth the benefits offered today by that service. That's what an informed business does.