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Hey community, let me share my experience with AppEngine. I work in a small firm, where we've developed a massive Software Application comprising of 12 medium-s

by neya 9y ago

Hey community, let me share my experience with AppEngine. I work in a small firm, where we've developed a massive Software Application comprising of 12 medium-sized apps. I went with Phoenix 1.3 w/ the new umbrella architecture. With AppEngine, the beauty is that you can have many custom named microservices under one AppEngine project and each microservices can have many versions. You can even decide how much percentage of traffic should be split between each of these microservices. What's awesome is, in addition to the standard runtimes (Ruby, Python, Go, Java, etc.) Google also provides something called custom VMs for AppEngine, meaning you can push docker based setups into your AppEngine service, with basically any stack you want. This alone is a HUGE incentive to move to AppEngine because usually custom stack will require you to maintain the server side of things, but with Docker + AppEngine, zero devops. Their network panel is also very intuitive to add/delete rules to keep your app secured. I've been using AppEngine for over 4 years now and every time I tried a competitive offering (such as AWS Beanstalk, for example) I've only been disappointed. AppEngine is great for startups. For example, a lesser known feature within AppEngine is their real-time image processing service API. This allows you to scale/crop/resize images in real time and the service is offered free of charge (except for storage). Works really well for web applications with basic image manipulation requirements. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/images/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag... The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example, <image url>/image.jpg?s=120 will return a 120px image. Appending -c will give you a cropped version, etc. I really hope to see AppEngine get more love from startups as it's a brilliant platform, much more performant than it's competitors' offerings. For example, I was previously a huge proponent of Heroku and upon comparing numbers, I realized AppEngine is way more performant (in my use case). I'm so glad we made the switch. If you're looking/considering to move to AppEngine, let me know here and I'll try my best to answer your questions.

smn1234 9y ago
The way you've delivered this "experience" makes you sound like you either work for Google or were asked to make a sponsored statement - for credits or $.
- sunsetMurk 9y ago
  or a passionate user who had a great experience?! I love finding solutions which require less 'square peg round hole'. Unfortunately, rare these days when piecing together a stack w/ the myriad of platforms/frameworks/etc.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    I'm usually not skeptical of comments but this comment definitely feels "artificial". I think Google has better things to do than to pay people to comment on HN, but I do think either this person is trying too hard to sell us on Google Cloud because they like it (which isn't a bad thing per say) Edit: I thought about it and they probably aren't related to it, probably just really enthusiastic about it (good thing) but they want to sell us on it (eh, not sure how I feel about)
    - sunsetMurk 9y ago
      Yep - I guess I'm a bit empathic to the comment. I'm always trying to sell what I'm using to others, to get more into that camp, to generate more discussion and innovation. But, it's all just like ice cream [1] anyways. 1- https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752 https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752
- orf 9y ago
  The way you've delivered this "comment" makes you sound like you either work for AWS or were asked to make a sponsored reply - for credits or $.
- londons_explore 9y ago
  I would hope someone on HN would disclose a conflict of interest when presenting their opinion. Disclosure: Work for one of the cloud providers, but not on cloud itself.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Sadly, this is rarely true. Many of the people defending AMP for example turn out to be Google employees that didn't disclose it (found via their comment history), and people that complain about AMP are not just privacy activists, but often also involved in publishers or advertisers that lose money from it. I doubt it would be much different in this thread.
neya 9y ago
Full disclosure: I DON'T work with Google, I DON'T sell their services/products. I run a startup myself, with an Saas on top of AppEngine. This is just my documented (positive) experience with the stack above. I get paid nothing by Google, nothing in $ nor credits this is just my own personal documented experience. Being a long time HN member, I would responsibly disclose if I were somehow affiliated with Google (trust me, I wish I was).

by neya 9y ago

smn1234 9y ago

The way you've delivered this "experience" makes you sound like you either work for Google or were asked to make a sponsored statement - for credits or $.

sunsetMurk 9y ago
or a passionate user who had a great experience?! I love finding solutions which require less 'square peg round hole'. Unfortunately, rare these days when piecing together a stack w/ the myriad of platforms/frameworks/etc.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  I'm usually not skeptical of comments but this comment definitely feels "artificial". I think Google has better things to do than to pay people to comment on HN, but I do think either this person is trying too hard to sell us on Google Cloud because they like it (which isn't a bad thing per say) Edit: I thought about it and they probably aren't related to it, probably just really enthusiastic about it (good thing) but they want to sell us on it (eh, not sure how I feel about)
  - sunsetMurk 9y ago
    Yep - I guess I'm a bit empathic to the comment. I'm always trying to sell what I'm using to others, to get more into that camp, to generate more discussion and innovation. But, it's all just like ice cream [1] anyways. 1- https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752 https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752
orf 9y ago
The way you've delivered this "comment" makes you sound like you either work for AWS or were asked to make a sponsored reply - for credits or $.
londons_explore 9y ago
I would hope someone on HN would disclose a conflict of interest when presenting their opinion. Disclosure: Work for one of the cloud providers, but not on cloud itself.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Sadly, this is rarely true. Many of the people defending AMP for example turn out to be Google employees that didn't disclose it (found via their comment history), and people that complain about AMP are not just privacy activists, but often also involved in publishers or advertisers that lose money from it. I doubt it would be much different in this thread.

neya 9y ago

Full disclosure: I DON'T work with Google, I DON'T sell their services/products. I run a startup myself, with an Saas on top of AppEngine. This is just my documented (positive) experience with the stack above. I get paid nothing by Google, nothing in $ nor credits this is just my own personal documented experience. Being a long time HN member, I would responsibly disclose if I were somehow affiliated with Google (trust me, I wish I was).