6 ms·

Who's using Google App Engine?

• nir 17y ago
  http://therealurl.net http://therealurl.net runs on on GAE and handled >1m reqs/day a few times with no problem. Billing is turned on, but limited to $1/day - Google only charge for the resources you use and you can assign X cents for bandwidth, Y for CPU etc. I posted a screenshot of GAE quota usage on 430k reqs/day, might interest you: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/google-app-engine-quotas-on-43k-requestsday/ http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/google-app-engine-q...
• gr366 17y ago
  I'm using it for small, very low-traffic projects, so I'd also be interested in hearing about larger sites using GAE. Also curious whether they're using Python, Java or something running on the JVM like Clojure.
• fisadev 17y ago
  http://www.subituqueja.com http://www.subituqueja.com (in spanish) http://pythonregex.appspot.com http://pythonregex.appspot.com Both running Python + Django 1.1.1 (with Google App Engine Django Helper, http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/ http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/) I don't know if they are "big", but you can see app engine in action there.
• gte910h 17y ago
  I've found it just fine for whatever clients want to do....EXCEPT....when they need to contact a server over a non-http port. It just can't do that. So for my client who wanted to do apple push notifications for his iPhone app, we needed to use both app-engine and dumb endpoint nodes on rackspace 11 buck a month linux servers. Amazon Ec2/S3 works well as well and has the highest security bar of all the cloud offerings. Rackspace is pretty good, but everyone seems very dis-satisfied with the S3 competitor, cloudfiles, so just use them for servers. Don't put anything super valuable there though, they know your root passwords (as does google, if you think about it, on GAE). The users are on python. Apologies for the poor formatting/spelling, having to rush out the door.
  • mattdennewitz 17y ago
    cloudfiles could certainly do a bit more to catch up to s3, but i've never been left wholly unsatisfied.
    • gte910h 17y ago
      I've had 2 people who had horrible issues uploading media. Unusable levels of can't upload things.
  • jeff18 17y ago
    That is no longer a limitation as of the 1.3.2 release. I quote: URLFetch API - We’ve expanded the number of ports you can access with the URLFetch API. You can now access ports 80-90, 440-450, and 1024-65535.
    • gte910h 17y ago
      Well that will be nice that I can then talk to 2195
• derefr 17y ago
  > I'm looking for a scalable web hosting provider which is free or cheap at entry level, and which isn't a VPS Heroku! Basically the Ruby equivalent of GAE—you get a Postgres database instead of Bigtable, though (whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you.)
  • nir 17y ago
    Heroku's great, but in money/performance ratio it's not really comparable to GAE. The free Heroku package doesn't get you very far as far as scaling goes (though if you're willing to pay it's a great alternative to hosting your own Ruby site)
    • derefr 17y ago
      I'd question how far you can really manage to scale something before you have to start considering it a commercial project requiring investment. My experience is that the free Heroku and GAE levels are both fine at the prototype/closed beta stage, unless your "closed beta" is the size of Gmail. Both services have heavy caching infrastructure in front of them, and you get as much of that as you need at any level—you only need to worry about scaling for actual CPU-intensive tasks, which should always be handled gracefully client-side to begin with (in case of network latency &c.)
  • Qz 17y ago
    Is Heroku free or just cheap?
    • derefr 17y ago
      It's free given the base configuration: http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1-0 http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1-0 That config is basically only for development/prototypes, though (it has a 5MB database cap); their default tiny-ish plan is $15/month, which is quite decent for anything that runs Ruby, let alone on a grid. Turning on all the knobs and levers on that page gave me "$5089/month", which is a slight bit terrorizing—but I can't imagine the kind of business that would grow to need that scale without becoming a multinational with its own IT.
• mattdennewitz 17y ago
  i've used appengine from time to time @ pitchfork, and it's been great. with the recently relaxed restrictions on uploads, result sets length, and the task queue, and ability to read and process larger uploads, and xmpp and incoming mail handling, etc, i'd say it's in good shape for bigger, more "serious" projects. absolutely capable for smaller projects, too.
• chipsy 17y ago
  I'm considering working with GAE to make a persistent browser-based game. Not serious about it yet, but maybe in another month or two. I have some doubts about staying within the CPU quotas, since I have to take on a processing load in the tick-update loop of game time, but I think I can design it to be spread out somehow.
  • psawaya 17y ago
    I looked into this a while ago, and it seems like GAE still doesn't have a real way for the server to push to the browser (Comet). There's a ticket open for it (http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=377 http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=37...), and it's a feature that's "on deck" (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html), but who knows when they'll get around to implementing it. As I'm sure you know, regular polling is usually too slow for a game, and counts against your app engine HTTP request quota.
  • bd 17y ago
    I did a very simple game on GAE in its early days and the biggest trouble were very costly writes. Basically you could forget about applications that needed to write game state to datastore in each step. Even the simplest possible writes were already triggering CPU quota warnings [1]. I didn't touch GAE recently, so maybe they already relaxed it a bit, but when it started, it was usable practically only for read-heavy applications (for which Google strongly suggested to use memcached wherever possible). Also moving larger amounts of data between your computer and GAE datastore was massive pain (e.g. backups or initial state load). You had to be very careful not to blow over your quotas, as such imports were doing a lot of writes. --- [1] For example, in early days they counted CPU use in "megacycles": * memcached based ajax request costed tens of megacycles * datastore-read based ajax request costed hundreds of megacycles * datastore-read-write ajax request costed thousands of megacycles
    • grandalf 17y ago
      this has gotten much better. Also, they now let you specify what level of consistency you want, which makes writes go a lot faster if you're just putting in a bunch of data or don't need to wait to be sure it's consistent before you put in the next item.
• simonk 17y ago
  I really only know sites that use Google API's like http://www.socialwok.com/ http://www.socialwok.com/ We're working on moving our application over to App Engine but waiting until they get SSL on your own domain before doing that. You can see the roadmap for it here http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
• johnnytee 17y ago
  I built a small app on it Tweetc.com using python and webapp framework. It was my 1st gae and python app. So far no problems. I know Twibes is built on it which gets moderate traffic. I like it can I can quickly build and test ideas for free.
• robspychala 17y ago
  We're using it for http://www.scienceslides.com/ http://www.scienceslides.com/ ... a place for scientists to download signaling pathway slides in powerpoint format, etc...
• adamfisk 17y ago
  LittleShoot is all built on Google App Engine with App Engine Patch using Django: http://www.littleshoot.org http://www.littleshoot.org I'll soon update that to use "Django non rel" though -- Django running on no-relational data models like Big Table: http://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel-multidb/wiki/Home http://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel-multidb/wiki/H...
• frognibble 17y ago
  Google's Panoramio runs on App Engine: http://www.panoramio.com/ http://www.panoramio.com/
• adora 17y ago
  I talked with one of the guys that works for Google App Engine, and he confirmed that BuddyPoke is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) apps that run on it. That app serves millions of DAUs on various social networks and runs just fine. I've set up things on app engine and amazon as well. I found GAE just to be much, much easier and saved me a lot of time and money (yes I know EC2 is cheap but it's not cool to see your bill growing when you're just testing things). I actually took the time to switch to EC2/S3 for a couple days because I was worried that GAE was not really serious about making it a productive place to run serious applications. Portability was a big factor too. But after a while I figured that all this worry was nonsensical. If I ever have to move things over, it must be a good sign and either someone will have built a tool for it or I just spend a week building a tool for it. Also, re: SSL. You can actually do it right now on GAE but it involves a few tricky workarounds. That said, the GAE team just pushed a more straightforward feature for this to the top of the roadmap. Beforehand they had said they weren't going to work on it anytime soon, but presumably after so many people complained they decided to go ahead with it -- another good sign that at least they're responsive to developers' needs.
• kaffeinecoma 17y ago
  I've been using GAE+GWT for about 6 months now, mostly for small, "do it in a weekend" type projects. I've also used it to host content for my iPhone apps, so that I could update the content (mostly ebooks delivered as PDFs) without going through the awful App Store update process. It's been great for me. I love how quickly I can bootstrap new ideas, put up a prototype, and then just hand out the URL for to people to try. A couple of recent apps: http://create-a-password.appspot.com http://create-a-password.appspot.com http://slimpoints.appspot.com http://slimpoints.appspot.com http://mealminder.appspot.com http://mealminder.appspot.com That last one was mostly a proof-of-concept in using Google's account and payment infrastructure. Really handy if you decide that you'll want your customers to pay you some day. I guess the biggest hurdle is getting used to the Datastore, which is not really intuitive if all you're used to is SQL. Overall, a very positive experience for me.
  • araneae 17y ago
    Meal Minder is cool, but you might want to work on the automatic-filling-in bit. It read my directions as an ingredients list... AND as directions. I listed my ingredients with bullet points (*) which is a pretty common format, and they weren't recognized at all.
• khelloworld 17y ago
  Jumping URL (http://www.jumpingurl.com http://www.jumpingurl.com) runs on app engine. FYI, there are few key things the GAE team is working on which can be found at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html Things like SSL for custom domains and background processing would make GAE even awesome to have your project running on.
• snprbob86 17y ago
  Although we aren't a big site by any measure; we're using it and loving it for http://www.classlet.com http://www.classlet.com
  • khelloworld 17y ago
    Nice site!
    • snprbob86 17y ago
      Thanks!
  • clemesha 17y ago
    Great site you have going there. Went through the whole thing, and then demo. Clean and straightforward. Quick question, a bit off topic. Here: http://twitter.com/Classlet/status/3854900110 http://twitter.com/Classlet/status/3854900110 you say "We finally rescued our Twitter user name from a squatter!". How did you manage to do this?
    • snprbob86 17y ago
      Thanks! As per some instructions on the web, we created a "classlet2" Twitter account. When logged in, there is a help form where you can open a ticket. It took a few weeks, but they eventually released the account to us.
  • deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
• waleedka 17y ago
  I use app engine for several projects, a couple of which have decent load. My biggest one is networkedblogs.com, which I started on php/mysql and recently migrated big parts of it's back-end to the app engine. My experience with it has been good, and I always build new projects on it, unless there is a good reason that prevents it. It has it's own pros and cons, but overall it's a good choice: - It's easy to start with and fun to use. You shouldn't need more than one day to learn it. - If you like to focus on coding and not worry about managing the server then you'll love it. But if you're a control freak and like to have access to low-level settings then you'll not. - If you have prior experience with relational databases such as mysql, then you'll need an adjusting period to forget much of what you learned about databases and start thinking in new and different ways. Some things that are really easy in mysql, such as getting the number of records in a table or joining tables, become hard on app engine and require writing code. - When it goes down, you'll feel helpless that you can't do anything to bring your site back up, but you'll also feel lucky that a Google employee is carrying that beeper and have to wake up and fix it. - It scales, but it's not super fast. Due to its distributed nature, individual requests rarely finish in less than 50ms and usually take 100 to 150ms (that' my experience, yours will likely differ). But it can run a huge amount of requests at the same time. - It solves the scaling problem, but it's not magic. You still need to optimize the heavily used parts of your code for scaling. But at least you do it with code, rather than having to fiddle with server and cache settings. - It's a paradigm shift that will eventually eliminate most of database and system admin jobs if it catches it (I think it will). - It's very different from Amazon's EC2. Amazon gives you servers that you have to manage, Google manages everything for you. With ec2 you pay per server hour, with App Engine you pay for resources you use: CPU Cycles, storage, bandwidth, ...etc. - It's free to start with, but if you have heavy load it's a bit more expensive than hosting dedicated servers. I think it's worth it, though, because you'll be saving a lot of your own time. - It's good for the majority of projects, but if your project has special not-too-common requirements, then it might not. Check first. - It only supports python and Java right now. If you're in Silicon Valley and if you need more in-depth information, you can find me at the next App Engine meetup at Google on the 6th.
  • gurop 17y ago
    You shouldn't need more than one day to learn it. Depends how well you want to learn it of course.
• jeff18 17y ago
  I've been using it for about a year for http://www.wolfire.com http://www.wolfire.com and several hobby projects and am a big fan. If you have any specific questions, I am familiar with most aspects of it. It certainly has a lot of limitations, but if your app happens to coincide with what App Engine currently offers, it is a pretty sweet deal.
  • micaelwidell 17y ago
    About where do you usually hit the limit for free usage? Are we talking hundreds of daily visitors? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I know this varies heavily depending on your code, but does anyone have a good rule of thumb?
    • jeff18 17y ago
      We rarely go over the free limit -- I think we've stayed under $10-20 for the entire year, while serving up several million pages. Most of this is due to bandwidth overages from our comic: http://www.wolfire.com/comic http://www.wolfire.com/comic The times we are charged tend to be for burst traffic when something gets picked up on Digg or Reddit. Recently, one of our blog posts was featured on Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. at the same time and Google dutifully served up a couple hundred thousand visits over the course of a few days. They charged us about a nickel! Granted everything is nicely cached so we were not doing much heavy processing. It definitely depends on your web app. If you can cache it, App Engine is essentially free. If you are doing something CPU intensive for every visitor, it's going to be expensive.
      • micaelwidell 17y ago
        Thanks! One more question: Had any problems with using third-party Python libraries? I mean like PIL, cjson or stuff like that? Heard something about C-based libraries not working?
        • skybrian 17y ago
          No, you can't install your own C libraries. There's an imaging library built in: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingimages.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingima...
• eplanit 17y ago
  Sounds like from all these postings that its appropriateness for "big, serious projects" just isn't there. Now that it's over 2 years old now, I'm underwhelmed (yet not at all surprised) by it's lack of adoption/popularity.
• dhess 17y ago
  While we're on the subject, does anyone here have experience using Clojure with GAE? I'm considering that configuration for a useful-but-not-mission-critical application, and wondering if Clojure on GAE is robust enough for that.
  • DTrejo 17y ago
    Yes, someone please tell us about their experiences?
  • jeandenis 17y ago
    I've been using Clojure w/ GAE to build an enterprise knowledge-base webservice for about 3 months now. It's my first serious project with Clojure on the GAE although I've been playing around with it since last summer. (1) On GAE you don't get to use some of the good parts of Clojure because you can't spawn any threads. So the rationale for Clojure has to be something else than agents and the Clojure concurrency model. I'd say use Clojure if you want functional programming and all of the Lispy goodness: code as data, macros... For me Lispyness is a huge + so it was a no brainer. (2) One of the things I really like about traditional Clojure web-development (using Ring or Compojure) is that if you set things up properly you can experiment with and patch a live system using the REPL. I haven't been able to set that up just yet on the GAE. On your development server using the GAE jars, however, you can do it (see http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-programming-with-clojure.html http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-pr... for some guidance). There is nothing like being a C-c C-c away from updating your development server app :) I can't emphasize enough taking the time to get Slime, your GAE development server, lein, and Clojure well-integrated. Your development cycle will make good ol' Java GAE development using the Eclipse plug-in (which I used to think was pretty sweet) feel really really clunky. (See also http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google-appengine.html http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google-appe... for some pointers on setting up Clojure on GAE) (3) GAE's datastore works extremely well with Clojure because it's schema-less. You can store arbitrary hashmaps and structmaps in GAE with zero effort -- it's a match made in heaven. There are a couple of branches of appengine-clj (http://github.com/duelinmarkers/appengine-clj http://github.com/duelinmarkers/appengine-clj is the original, http://github.com/r0man/appengine-clj http://github.com/r0man/appengine-clj is a pretty good branch) that you can look at to get a feel what I mean. (4) With GAE's transaction support and automatic index generation (it's good enough most of the time), you can dynamically create types (kinds), put them in the datastore, and query on them without having to do any of the traditional NoSQL stuff (thinking queries first, denormalizing ahead of time, etc.). It's very sweet. I've done some Clojure+Cassandra and Clojure+GAE is a lot more painless (as long as you can live with the other limitations of the GAE) -- although things are getting much easier in Cassandra world with Hector + automatic index generators. (5) In terms of performance and robustness, nothing about Clojure's held me up. But since I haven't launched yet, that doesn't mean anything. I don't know of any "high-traffic" Clojure+GAE apps out there -- if there are any, I'd love to get some numbers on costs (CPU, especially) to see if there is a significant difference with similar java projects. (Actually, the guys behind https://the-deadline.appspot.com https://the-deadline.appspot.com, see http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-project-turned-into-a-fullblown-cloudcomputing-webapp http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-..., just launched three days ago -- you may want to shoot them an email, they seem nice enough) My guess is that this is a non-issue. Clojure holds up really well against Java and JVM languages like Scala in terms of performance (especially if you give type-hints), and I'd expect the same thing to be true on GAE. (6) General Clojure limitation with web development: Clojure web frameworks are light. You don't get to start with anything as nice as Scala's Lift. You'll have to work and build your own tools -- the good thing is that Clojure is a blast and macros will, in the longer term, allow you to do much cooler stuff. Compojure is a great light framework to start with. Also look at Enlive for templating. On the flip-side Clojure immutable nature works very naturally with request / response. (7) For the OP: before you get on GAE, spend some time reading about its limitations: - exploding indexes (makes implementing text search very tough -- there is some irony in there I think) - no threads (it kills me, I want to use pmap) - not real message queues. GAE is a pull/request-based system, not a push system. It is, however, getting much better (tasks, comet on the coming features list). Still, if you are building a real-time system that needs constant background processing, I'd think twice right now. - if GAE goes down, you're down until they fix things, and will be totally helpless. - some of the GAE goodness/crack means you're locked in (e.g., index building -- to move away you'll have to build equivalent facilities for whatever DB you move to). Although you can protect yourself by being smart in how you abstract away the GAE. (8) Can't think of anything else. If there is interest, I have been thinking about writing some blog posts about my experience setting up a Clojure+GAE development environment, working with the data store, working the the GAE API, etc. Let me know here and I'll get a first post out of the way by week's end.
• okaq 17y ago
  GAE is ideal for nano web apps. I wrote an HTML5 Canvas Plasma Benchmark using GAE/P: http://speed.okaq.com/ http://speed.okaq.com/ It clocks in under 10kB compressed, is very fast, very accurate and I use it to test devices all the time. Under current quotas, I'm able to serve ~200k users per day at no cost and am actively developing 2 more nano web tools. The development environment is certainly restrictive, but the risk for web app prototyping is absolutely minimal.
• grandalf 17y ago
  If you're disciplined about how you design your app it's an amazing platform. I recommend doing a fairly trivial project in your spare time to get the hang of it. Try out the following features before deciding: - large data set related stuff like cursors, paging lots of records - transactions - GQL (look at the various limitations of it) GAE gives you a set of solid conventions for writing a highly scalable app that you'd eventually have to deal with if you used a more traditional approach. Some can be a bit annoying at first but it's fairly obvious why each choice was made. You might also check out jinja2, django, etc. But personally I love the simple webapp framework. It's clean, obvious, stays out of the way, and it's very fast.
  • olsonjeffery 17y ago
    I used webapp pretty faithfully, myself, until I came across bottle.py .. I haven't looked back, since.
    • grandalf 17y ago
      interesting. was it easy to set up on app engine?
    • camperman 17y ago
      I saw a note in the bottle docs that it's easy to set up with GAE but no further info. Any tutorials out there?
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• Concours 17y ago
  I use it for 2 sideprojects: http://www.websitecheck.org/ http://www.websitecheck.org/ and http://www.serversproxy.org/ http://www.serversproxy.org/ are both running on GAE , it's very easy to "manage"
• mayanks 17y ago
  I have used google app engine for several projects. Most recently for http://www.smstweet.in http://www.smstweet.in This basically helps Indian mobile phone users to update their twitter status by sending a simple SMS at negligible price. Overall I feel GAE is very good to quickly validate your core ideas without having to worry about scalability at all. In SmsTweet I created the app in couple of days and as traffic grew, started optimizing little by little by using Tasks and Memcache. Yes there are a tonne of restrictions if you chose GAE, but there are decent workarounds for every one of them. You also have to learn stuff specific to GAE (datastore, tasks for example), but I guess they are trivial to pick up. And finally if your application does pick up traffic you can easily convert it to paid version and pay only for the extra traffic that you get. So a win win situation for you.
• mbenjaminsmith 17y ago
  We're using app engine for www.jukaroo.com. We've been using it for a year now and after a lot of invested time are migrating away. The number one reason to use it is the one click deploys but we've found that time saved there is lost working around app engine's quirks. The service is buggy (set a page to refresh every ten seconds or so and watch how many random 500's it will throw - there's a monkey patch floating around for the random datastore timeouts that are partly to blame). It's also slow compared to other setups I've used (currently running vanilla django at webfaction). The limitations are many and absolute (dig around but off the top of my head no threading, no long running threads, no push, no naked domains, no python c libs, no ssh no advanced image processing, no support, no support and no support). Core apis I've had to patch: imaging (black lines on edges of pics), datastore (random timeout errors), inbound mail (improper body and attachment handling) and probably others that I've forgotten about. There is also no portability at this point. I've seen one project that will run an app engine app on ec2 but I haven't used it. I think it's a cool project but if you want the unhindered ability to build really good products I can't recommend it. Also don't mistake app engine for a hosting company. The experience for us has been 'you are lucky to be using our nifty cloud' and not 'thanks for your business, we're here to help'.
• blasdel 17y ago
  https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting is the only service I know of that does this kind of thing other than GAE and Heroku. They support a whole bunch of languages, but PHP is the only one worth using because their execution model is pure-CGI — no persistent processes. The pricing model is just like GAE: pre-pay into an account that is debited for the resources you actually use.
• RoyceFullerton 17y ago
  I have used it for prototype projects, but nothing that I have been completely serious about yet. I know that http://www.shoesofprey.com http://www.shoesofprey.com uses it and I believe it is working well for them and scales when it needs to.
• ordinaryman 17y ago
  Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on? I believe it is and am betting with my startup with hosted apps targeting SMBs with CRM (http://crm.ifreetools.com http://crm.ifreetools.com) and Online Database App Creator (http://creator.ifreetools.com http://creator.ifreetools.com). If you are from RDBMS, at first you will have to become flexible to accommodate to the BigTable way of things - no group-by, joins, etc., - and find alternate ways of doing things. Once you make the switch, if will indeed be good enough for big or highly scalable projects.