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It's never been clear to me why people use the AppEngine for anything other than learning and playing around. Why not just get a $40/mo. VPS?

apl 16y ago
I'd argue that it's exactly the other way around. GAE offers massive scalability at relatively little cost, at least theoretically, but you lose flexibility. (For instance, you're limited to a very specific database backend and so on.) A cheap VPS, on the other hand, gives you free reign. But scaling isn't trivial - you have to take care of it yourself. Learn and fiddle around on a VPS, deploy on GAE or EC2 or whatever cloud computing service suits your needs.
wkornewald 16y ago
It's because a little VPS won't give you a fail-safe system. For a SaaS startup you'll need to have several machines in a redundant cluster and ideally you'll also have machines in at least two data centers. The people who use App Engine for their business all have the same dream: Build the app, click deploy, and have Google handle all the annoying server stuff. Obviously, App Engine isn't quite there, yet. It's not fast enough, it's not stable enough, and it has a limited feature set. Clearly, we're early adopters. However, App Engine is going in the right direction and once the problems are gone people will ask "Why not just use App Engine?" (or whatever other PaaS) instead of "Why not just use a VPS?".
- pjscott 16y ago
  Because I'm feeling pedantic today: you meant to say "a fault-tolerant system". A fail-safe system is one which fails in a safe way. An example would be a CPU that shuts itself down if it's overheating, rather than risk permanent damage. If anything, a fail-safe system may be more prone to failure because of its cautious approach to dealing with faults. There are some pretty cool examples on the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe
  - wkornewald 16y ago
    OK, thanks. Will try to remember that. :)
atomical 16y ago
How easy or hard is it to move your code from AppEngine to something else? I avoided it because there isn't enough support for Django. And I love Django!
- wkornewald 16y ago
  Did you try Django-nonrel? It supports a lot of Django features out of the box (even the admin). Also, it makes it a lot easier to move somewhere else. You might not be able to switch to SQL, but you can at least switch to MongoDB or some other NoSQL database.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Which version of Django is Django-nonrel? Did they only change the backend? I've browsed their site a bit but they don't answer the important questions...
    - wkornewald 16y ago
      It's based on the latest trunk code. The only changes are in the ORM layer and they're pretty small (maybe less than 100 lines). Which other questions do you want to see answered on the website?
      - StavrosK 16y ago
        Actually, this exact response tells me 95% of what I need to know. Another good thing to know would be how easy it is to use existing apps with it (provided they don't use JOINs, of course), but it looks like I need to give it a try, thanks!
        wkornewald 16y ago
        If they don't use JOINs or aggregates your apps might just run unmodified. In some cases you'll need extra index definitions, either for djangoappengine or django-dbindexer, but you can keep those separate from your app, so you don't need to fork the code. BTW, I've updated the docs and added a short note that should answer your original questions.
jparise 16y ago
Alternatively, Amazon will be offering a "free usage" tier (starting November 1) that has pretty generous usage limits to help you get a project off the ground. If it outgrows those limits, you're already running on reasonable infrastructure and can move into the next paid AWS tier. http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/

apl 16y ago

I'd argue that it's exactly the other way around. GAE offers massive scalability at relatively little cost, at least theoretically, but you lose flexibility. (For instance, you're limited to a very specific database backend and so on.) A cheap VPS, on the other hand, gives you free reign. But scaling isn't trivial - you have to take care of it yourself. Learn and fiddle around on a VPS, deploy on GAE or EC2 or whatever cloud computing service suits your needs.

wkornewald 16y ago

It's because a little VPS won't give you a fail-safe system. For a SaaS startup you'll need to have several machines in a redundant cluster and ideally you'll also have machines in at least two data centers. The people who use App Engine for their business all have the same dream: Build the app, click deploy, and have Google handle all the annoying server stuff. Obviously, App Engine isn't quite there, yet. It's not fast enough, it's not stable enough, and it has a limited feature set. Clearly, we're early adopters. However, App Engine is going in the right direction and once the problems are gone people will ask "Why not just use App Engine?" (or whatever other PaaS) instead of "Why not just use a VPS?".

pjscott 16y ago
Because I'm feeling pedantic today: you meant to say "a fault-tolerant system". A fail-safe system is one which fails in a safe way. An example would be a CPU that shuts itself down if it's overheating, rather than risk permanent damage. If anything, a fail-safe system may be more prone to failure because of its cautious approach to dealing with faults. There are some pretty cool examples on the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe
- wkornewald 16y ago
  OK, thanks. Will try to remember that. :)

atomical 16y ago

How easy or hard is it to move your code from AppEngine to something else? I avoided it because there isn't enough support for Django. And I love Django!

wkornewald 16y ago
Did you try Django-nonrel? It supports a lot of Django features out of the box (even the admin). Also, it makes it a lot easier to move somewhere else. You might not be able to switch to SQL, but you can at least switch to MongoDB or some other NoSQL database.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Which version of Django is Django-nonrel? Did they only change the backend? I've browsed their site a bit but they don't answer the important questions...
  - wkornewald 16y ago
    It's based on the latest trunk code. The only changes are in the ORM layer and they're pretty small (maybe less than 100 lines). Which other questions do you want to see answered on the website?
    - StavrosK 16y ago
      Actually, this exact response tells me 95% of what I need to know. Another good thing to know would be how easy it is to use existing apps with it (provided they don't use JOINs, of course), but it looks like I need to give it a try, thanks!
      - wkornewald 16y ago
        If they don't use JOINs or aggregates your apps might just run unmodified. In some cases you'll need extra index definitions, either for djangoappengine or django-dbindexer, but you can keep those separate from your app, so you don't need to fork the code. BTW, I've updated the docs and added a short note that should answer your original questions.

jparise 16y ago

Alternatively, Amazon will be offering a "free usage" tier (starting November 1) that has pretty generous usage limits to help you get a project off the ground. If it outgrows those limits, you're already running on reasonable infrastructure and can move into the next paid AWS tier. http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/