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It's also expensive as fuck. Good for prototyping, for when you're starting out and maybe for when you are creating an app that serves very specific uses cases

It's also expensive as fuck. Good for prototyping, for when you're starting out and maybe for when you are creating an app that serves very specific uses cases that are easier to address with a fully managed architecture. But for everything else just start adding APIs and Services and see how your costs balloon out of control.

segmondy 9y ago
I never get this, why would you use it for prototype if you will not run on it? Why are we prototyping in the cloud? What happened to localhost?
- codingdave 9y ago
  One use case would be for getting the product/market fit. Launch fast, then either fail fast or succeed and port to a cheaper service.
- 549362-30499 9y ago
  I think the GP comment means prototyping a product idea to a real market. Obviously individual developers will run a local version of the production systems.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Because your local computer is not where you will run your production. You absolutely are not required to develop on the cloud, but you should at least consider (and in fact this should be “must”) test you code in thr cloud before you enable the knot to ship it in production mode. I’d argue if cloud is convenient for you and cheap as hell, no reason not to try. However, it is not cheap because you would need to setup your own cloudfoundry or kubernetes in AWS and whatnot (or the cloud provider’s native container solution), which often means renting a machine. So that’s why most people don’t do development in the cloud. They test their “just committed to my feature git branch” latest version in the cloud by means of automatic (Jenkins etc) or by pushing to the cloud manually.
- sologoub 9y ago
  It depends on what kind of prototype it is. If you need to run a POC with a customer or two, localhost won't do.
ggg9990 9y ago
I use AWS and find that it is "cheap as fuck." The reason is that my product is very expensive per unit of compute used, so my infrastructure costs are less than 1% of my revenue. I compete on other things and had $35K revenue last year with 120GB transferred to customers and 7GB uploaded. If you have a photo storage or video sharing site you damn well better be competing on infrastructure costs and not using Amazon's premium infrastructure-in-a-box.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  That's how I feel. Cloud services are great for anything that isn't losing money on each customer and then trying to make it up in volume :). Cloud is way more expensive than other options, but I'm serving 5,000 customers for less than $100 a month, so spending more time to get that price down is definitely not the best use of my time.
  - jorgec 9y ago
    Cloud is worth if you are in the range of $10-$200. Other that, there are better alternatives.
  - tootie 9y ago
    Is it? Cloud isn't apples to apples to other options because it covers both hardware and at least some if not most of your operations costs. The less magical your infrastructure, the more (very expensive) people are required to maintain it.
    - the_duke 9y ago
      It really depends on your use case and requirements. When you have a simple stack and reduced uptime requirements, getting something like 3 servers from a provider like Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px) can give you a lote of compute power for little money. Of course building something on top of GAE or AWS EBS / Lambda is a lot easier on the OPS side and gives you much more confidence, but at a much higher price.
nickbauman 9y ago
Might be an interesting comment except we don't know what you're comparing it to. FWIW this is the opposite of my experience. To try to duplicate what GAE does in other environments, such as EC2, has been prohibitively expensive and difficult to size correctly. You can actually tune your GAE install to reduce costs by literally twisting dials. Very hard to do with "traditional" cloud and not as dynamic with container-based offerings.
benguild 9y ago
Compared to like plain Digital Ocean, yeah. But you get a lot for free with App Engine.
cobookman 9y ago
When you run a business each man hour of work costs money. While appengine charges a premium, it saves a lot of the overhead work of running a service. Think about it this way. When you use appengine Google has an sre making sure your application is up and running. It makes sure it auto scales up and down. Deals with zero day security updates. And gives you a release rollout procedure. Logging is hooked in as well. Sure you can do all of that, but at most companies it's not unheard of to cost about 50-100$/hour of SWE work.
rhodysurf 9y ago
I use it for micro services running as backends for my successful niche mobile app. I run the entire thing for free and never have to monitor the services for the most part. You have to sacrifice a lot though, like with python there are tons of libraries that are unusable because the have native code which is only allowed with the flex runtime which can never be free.
ivanb 9y ago
This is simply false. GAE is not expensive. Quite the contrary. Instead of putting hundreds or thousands of man-hours into managing scalable instances and scalable databases a developer instead can invest the time into the actual money-making code. The platform abstracts away most of the pain of running a scalable app.

segmondy 9y ago

I never get this, why would you use it for prototype if you will not run on it? Why are we prototyping in the cloud? What happened to localhost?

codingdave 9y ago
One use case would be for getting the product/market fit. Launch fast, then either fail fast or succeed and port to a cheaper service.
549362-30499 9y ago
I think the GP comment means prototyping a product idea to a real market. Obviously individual developers will run a local version of the production systems.
yeukhon 9y ago
Because your local computer is not where you will run your production. You absolutely are not required to develop on the cloud, but you should at least consider (and in fact this should be “must”) test you code in thr cloud before you enable the knot to ship it in production mode. I’d argue if cloud is convenient for you and cheap as hell, no reason not to try. However, it is not cheap because you would need to setup your own cloudfoundry or kubernetes in AWS and whatnot (or the cloud provider’s native container solution), which often means renting a machine. So that’s why most people don’t do development in the cloud. They test their “just committed to my feature git branch” latest version in the cloud by means of automatic (Jenkins etc) or by pushing to the cloud manually.
sologoub 9y ago
It depends on what kind of prototype it is. If you need to run a POC with a customer or two, localhost won't do.

ggg9990 9y ago

I use AWS and find that it is "cheap as fuck." The reason is that my product is very expensive per unit of compute used, so my infrastructure costs are less than 1% of my revenue. I compete on other things and had $35K revenue last year with 120GB transferred to customers and 7GB uploaded. If you have a photo storage or video sharing site you damn well better be competing on infrastructure costs and not using Amazon's premium infrastructure-in-a-box.

jjeaff 9y ago
That's how I feel. Cloud services are great for anything that isn't losing money on each customer and then trying to make it up in volume :). Cloud is way more expensive than other options, but I'm serving 5,000 customers for less than $100 a month, so spending more time to get that price down is definitely not the best use of my time.
- jorgec 9y ago
  Cloud is worth if you are in the range of $10-$200. Other that, there are better alternatives.
- tootie 9y ago
  Is it? Cloud isn't apples to apples to other options because it covers both hardware and at least some if not most of your operations costs. The less magical your infrastructure, the more (very expensive) people are required to maintain it.
  - the_duke 9y ago
    It really depends on your use case and requirements. When you have a simple stack and reduced uptime requirements, getting something like 3 servers from a provider like Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px) can give you a lote of compute power for little money. Of course building something on top of GAE or AWS EBS / Lambda is a lot easier on the OPS side and gives you much more confidence, but at a much higher price.

nickbauman 9y ago

Might be an interesting comment except we don't know what you're comparing it to. FWIW this is the opposite of my experience. To try to duplicate what GAE does in other environments, such as EC2, has been prohibitively expensive and difficult to size correctly. You can actually tune your GAE install to reduce costs by literally twisting dials. Very hard to do with "traditional" cloud and not as dynamic with container-based offerings.

benguild 9y ago

Compared to like plain Digital Ocean, yeah. But you get a lot for free with App Engine.

cobookman 9y ago

When you run a business each man hour of work costs money. While appengine charges a premium, it saves a lot of the overhead work of running a service. Think about it this way. When you use appengine Google has an sre making sure your application is up and running. It makes sure it auto scales up and down. Deals with zero day security updates. And gives you a release rollout procedure. Logging is hooked in as well. Sure you can do all of that, but at most companies it's not unheard of to cost about 50-100$/hour of SWE work.

rhodysurf 9y ago

I use it for micro services running as backends for my successful niche mobile app. I run the entire thing for free and never have to monitor the services for the most part. You have to sacrifice a lot though, like with python there are tons of libraries that are unusable because the have native code which is only allowed with the flex runtime which can never be free.

ivanb 9y ago

This is simply false. GAE is not expensive. Quite the contrary. Instead of putting hundreds or thousands of man-hours into managing scalable instances and scalable databases a developer instead can invest the time into the actual money-making code. The platform abstracts away most of the pain of running a scalable app.