6 ms·

Google App Engine: Free and still barely worth it

23 points by randomhack 18y ago

ashu 18y ago
People just love misinterpreting products, comparing them to completely unrelated things and just making noise. That's right. Making noise is the goal. All else is secondary. Can't people just say "Hey look, here's a new product which IS USEFUL to somebody out there on earth and a damn nifty one at that." That somebody in Google App Engine's case is a hacker who wants to quickly try out his hobbies without worrying about all the mess that comes with managing a web host. But no. We must compare. And we must make noise. Lots of it. Perhaps it gives us a way to figure out which blogs / sites to NEVER visit.
- randomhack 18y ago
  Perhaps. But OTOH the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary when, according to the author, currently its only a nicely packaged free webhost with many drawbacks. The operative word here is of course "currently". edit : The article that the author links to is clearly over the top too so I think this post is partly a very angry reaction to that article.
  - ashu 18y ago
    True. Although, the noise in favor of it is also due to complete misinterpretations. People don't realize that the "X of Y" metaphors are rarely very deep; they provide an approximate introduction to a new product, but not much beyond that.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary... I just had a thought. Suppose that, hypothetically, several months ago a service very much like the Google App Engine had been released by a small YC company. And suppose that, hypothetically, that product was nearly out of beta and was already hosting apps on a scalable platform with a standard set of open-source APIs and minimal sysadmin hassle? What level of press hysteria would this product be getting, do you think, relative to this semi-complete beta from Google that doesn't yet have a clear pricing or scaling model? Would anyone on the Heroku team be willing to comment on the record? ;) [Note: I haven't used Heroku enough to really compare it to Google App Engine. However, nobody has used Google App Engine enough to really compare it to Heroku...]
toffer 18y ago
My favorite quote from the linked article: "Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications. Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know." No doubt a $6/mo. account at Dreamhost will scale better than Google.
- randomhack 18y ago
  He is not saying that it will or will not scale better. He is only saying that we simply dont have data to prove that Google will scale better. People are invoking the Google brandname but a brandname shows almost nothing.
  - ashu 18y ago
    Normally, I would have agreed but in Google's case, there is so much evidence to believe they will do a better job. Scaling is their biggest technological achievement to date. The reason they are running away with products with such great performance is because of their success in getting things to scale very well.
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      This is just magical thinking. Google's services scale amazingly well because their hardware and software were optimized, for specific applications, by great programmers commanding large budgets. Google does not have a magic bullet that can make any app in the world "scale", they are not going to rent Steve Yegge to me for $14 per hour to help me design scalable apps, nor are they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to ensure that my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview will "scale" out to 10 million hits per day. Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations, it is going to have to pay to exceed those limitations, and it is going to have to be carefully architected in order to scale. The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host, and the other half -- the ones that will make or break the value proposition -- haven't been stated yet.
rob 18y ago
First comment: "Great post. Windows web hosting is still king and that will not change anytime soon. Web hosting has grown such a loyal following that it still going to be very popular. Most of the time businesses will choose Windows web hosting over everything else because of the respect they have for Microsoft and the products they produce." WTF?
- wmf 18y ago
  Blub thinking. People who have completely bought into the MS stack won't see any value in App Engine.
cstejerean 18y ago
If the ease of deployment was the only feature App Engine had it would still be worth it. Running "appcfg.py update path_to_app/" to deploy your Python app beats all other options. And anyone complaining about static files and cron jobs doesn't understand that those don't belong on your application server anyway. Google is providing scaling for the application server and the data storage. Static files and cron jobs can be easily scaled. Database servers not so much.
iamelgringo 18y ago
Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their dominance in search. I've always thought that their main innovations and their chief advantage has been in terms of their infrastructure. Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have. So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they maybe might be overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes of downtime since 2000. With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good thing for developers.
- greendestiny 18y ago
  App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    "App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load." Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single box could serve using standard tools? I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.

23 points by randomhack 18y ago

ashu 18y ago

People just love misinterpreting products, comparing them to completely unrelated things and just making noise. That's right. Making noise is the goal. All else is secondary. Can't people just say "Hey look, here's a new product which IS USEFUL to somebody out there on earth and a damn nifty one at that." That somebody in Google App Engine's case is a hacker who wants to quickly try out his hobbies without worrying about all the mess that comes with managing a web host. But no. We must compare. And we must make noise. Lots of it. Perhaps it gives us a way to figure out which blogs / sites to NEVER visit.

randomhack 18y ago
Perhaps. But OTOH the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary when, according to the author, currently its only a nicely packaged free webhost with many drawbacks. The operative word here is of course "currently". edit : The article that the author links to is clearly over the top too so I think this post is partly a very angry reaction to that article.
- ashu 18y ago
  True. Although, the noise in favor of it is also due to complete misinterpretations. People don't realize that the "X of Y" metaphors are rarely very deep; they provide an approximate introduction to a new product, but not much beyond that.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary... I just had a thought. Suppose that, hypothetically, several months ago a service very much like the Google App Engine had been released by a small YC company. And suppose that, hypothetically, that product was nearly out of beta and was already hosting apps on a scalable platform with a standard set of open-source APIs and minimal sysadmin hassle? What level of press hysteria would this product be getting, do you think, relative to this semi-complete beta from Google that doesn't yet have a clear pricing or scaling model? Would anyone on the Heroku team be willing to comment on the record? ;) [Note: I haven't used Heroku enough to really compare it to Google App Engine. However, nobody has used Google App Engine enough to really compare it to Heroku...]

toffer 18y ago

My favorite quote from the linked article: "Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications. Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know." No doubt a $6/mo. account at Dreamhost will scale better than Google.

randomhack 18y ago
He is not saying that it will or will not scale better. He is only saying that we simply dont have data to prove that Google will scale better. People are invoking the Google brandname but a brandname shows almost nothing.
- ashu 18y ago
  Normally, I would have agreed but in Google's case, there is so much evidence to believe they will do a better job. Scaling is their biggest technological achievement to date. The reason they are running away with products with such great performance is because of their success in getting things to scale very well.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    This is just magical thinking. Google's services scale amazingly well because their hardware and software were optimized, for specific applications, by great programmers commanding large budgets. Google does not have a magic bullet that can make any app in the world "scale", they are not going to rent Steve Yegge to me for $14 per hour to help me design scalable apps, nor are they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to ensure that my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview will "scale" out to 10 million hits per day. Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations, it is going to have to pay to exceed those limitations, and it is going to have to be carefully architected in order to scale. The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host, and the other half -- the ones that will make or break the value proposition -- haven't been stated yet.

rob 18y ago

First comment: "Great post. Windows web hosting is still king and that will not change anytime soon. Web hosting has grown such a loyal following that it still going to be very popular. Most of the time businesses will choose Windows web hosting over everything else because of the respect they have for Microsoft and the products they produce." WTF?

wmf 18y ago
Blub thinking. People who have completely bought into the MS stack won't see any value in App Engine.

cstejerean 18y ago

If the ease of deployment was the only feature App Engine had it would still be worth it. Running "appcfg.py update path_to_app/" to deploy your Python app beats all other options. And anyone complaining about static files and cron jobs doesn't understand that those don't belong on your application server anyway. Google is providing scaling for the application server and the data storage. Static files and cron jobs can be easily scaled. Database servers not so much.

iamelgringo 18y ago

Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their dominance in search. I've always thought that their main innovations and their chief advantage has been in terms of their infrastructure. Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have. So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they maybe might be overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes of downtime since 2000. With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good thing for developers.

greendestiny 18y ago
App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  "App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load." Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single box could serve using standard tools? I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.