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OK, it is in this this guy's interests to "sell" Appengine, but he's absolutely right. And I have no skin in the game except as a very satisfied user. Our star
by foxylad 9y ago
OK, it is in this this guy's interests to "sell" Appengine, but he's absolutely right. And I have no skin in the game except as a very satisfied user.
Our startup happened to get in on Appengine early on, and we went with it for exactly the reasons he puts forward. At the end of the day we spend all our time building our apps, instead of being diverted every time the mail server crashes, or a package needs a security upgrade, or our OS needs updating, or a hard drive dies, or a routing table gets corrupted, or replication fails between databases, or the load balancer is doing something strange. When any of those things does happen, I know the best sysadmins on the planet are jumping to fix it.
Having said that, there are a couple of provisos you need to bear in mind:
1. If you need to do anything outside the Appengine ecosystem (using unusual protocols or ports for instance), you're going to have to do it outside Appengine.
2. You have to write to Appengine's datastore. There are alternatives (MySQL for instance) but none of them give you automatic concurrency, scaling and redundancy. This is more painful, but it means if you ever hit the big time, you're covered.
I always imagined what would happen if Oprah mentioned our service on her show. If we had built on AWS (or Azure, GCS or other IaaS), I'd be tearing my hair out provisioning load balancers, web servers and sharding databases. With Appengine, all I'd need to provision would be a crate of champagne.
The article mentioned the Royal Wedding website. This was a great example of Appengine's strength, going from zero to thousands of hits a second and then back to zero. If you'd done it with AWS (or even worse, real hardware), imagine the difficulty of estimating the number of machines you'd need, and the cost of provisioning them. If you have a "bursty" service, Appengine just works and you pay for what you actually use.
And that's the other thing - what you pay is minimal. The Appengine user group is full of people complaining that it is more expensive than $CHEAP_HOSTING_PROVIDER, but as soon as you factor in any sysadmin time - or lost app development time - you come out ahead. We run three services with up to 2 million users, and the monthly cost is in two digits.