6 ms·

Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2

128 points by axiom 16y ago

jonpaul 16y ago
I really appreciate reading stories like this. For budding startups like mine, we need every available resource at our disposal on technology choices. I also think articles like this will encourage Google's engineers to keep making GAE a better platform. AFAIK, Google is also notorious for eating their own dog food. I was a bit taken back by the criticism on the last app-engine article. Quite frankly, sometimes you don't realize you the limitations until you hit them despite what the manual says. ("Every one's job is easy but your own.") If you haven't used GAE, you don't realize how easy it is to just get up and get going. It's absurdly simple. However, when you hit limitations you might encounter the sunk-cost fallacy, and that might propel you to keep working around its limitations.
- grandalf 16y ago
  I think Google sort of deserves some negative press after the major datastore problems of late (now fixed), but it's not reasonable to criticize the app engine platform itself. The so-called limitations are just reasonable trade-offs, and frankly they are less annoying than many that teams end up self-imposing in order to work around unexpected bottlenecks in their app.
petrilli 16y ago
The thing people "forget" is that the further up the stack you move, the more support is required because there's less and less the customer can do to diagnose a problem.
- d2viant 16y ago
  By "people", are you referring to Google? If so, I agree -- not having technical support available is a deal breaker for a system of that scale, especially if outages are as prevalent as the author claims.
  - qeorge 16y ago
    I think he means both Google and their customers. Google should get it, in that they need to offer support if they want to run this kind of business. But customers should also know that Google doesn't do support, and they will need support, so GAE is probably not a good fit. If that's right, I agree as well.
newtonstan 16y ago
Is it getting fashionable these days to blame Google App Engine? I am reading lots of horror stories about GAE!!
- axiom 16y ago
  Well, my motivation in writing the blog was in response to the people who replied to the last HN story on App Engine saying the author was clueless and just didn't know what he was doing. For what it's worth, there are a lot of other very bright people that have had the same issues and came to the same conclusion.
- fletchowns 16y ago
  I think it's just that developing for GAE is just so different from developing on a typical LAMP stack that there inevitably a fairly steep learning curve. That combined with the (well documented) limitations you just have to find new ways of solving problems. The fact that this author thinks that other article was a "good read" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in what this guy has to say. I don't know if developing on the App Engine is still as bad as it was before. Maybe it's changed in the last few months that we've been on EC2 From what I've heard, things have dramatically improved from how they were a few months ago.
- jskopek 16y ago
  I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. There have been a number of posts attacking App Engine recently, and a lot of good discussions have come out of them. The two things issues that seem to get brought up most are app design and reliability. - Reliability: App Engine reliability used to be horrible, but it's getting better. GAE was the first service I ever developed for where reliability was an issue. I've hosted apps on Linode, Slicehost, EC2, and my experience with those companies caused me to dismiss claims of downtime and the importance of an SLA. Nothing sucks more then seeing your system go down for days at a time, and not being able to do anything about it. I'm glad that GAE is addressing this issue, but I'd be wary of running anything commercial on their services without buying a business plan. - App Design: Pretty much everyone agrees that you have to write applications the way GAE wants you to, or you'll fail. The built in GAE Python library is great for writing simple, highly scalable websites, but it's too limited to develop complex applications on. Our application has over 20KLOC and uses numerous third party libraries. In practice, we found that it was difficult and time-consuming to write our application without turning to a more established framework like Django. We were also concerned with the vendor lock-in that would be caused by building on library that could only be run on GAE. Projects like TyphoonAE (http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/ http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/) are starting to make this less of an issue, but they aren't mature enough to provide an exit strategy. We built our application on appenginepatch, a third party port of Django to GAE. Django was not designed to run on a non-relational DB, and GAE was not designed to handle a heavy framework like Django. Our decision to build things our application on Django ultimately lead to most of our problems, but eventually saved our skin when we decided to switch away from GAE.
woan 16y ago
Anyone have a happy story of GAE availability in particular? I am not so bothered and actually appreciate the programming model. Actually reading the story, seems like some of their architectural patterns may have run contrary to asynchronous intent. 98% availability is a deal breaker for most betting thyeir business and image.
- blantonl 16y ago
  I'll pile on this. I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine. I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are. I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so I'd love to see where App engine might fit in some of my business' architecture.
  - kljensen 16y ago
    I run two profitable businesses on app engine. The occasional downtime is a tolerable exchange for the numerous benefits. (I also use ec2 for computationally expensive jobs. The ec2 instances are started and stopped by gae.) Bottom line for me is this: on gae one dude, sans team, can be dangerous.
    - blantonl 16y ago
      Interesting perspective. I'm a "one dude" on EC2 and geeze I feel dangerous at times.... I haven't had any spectacular failures, but I've certainly had some close calls. I'd love to hear more about how you've leveraged GAE.
      - kljensen 16y ago
        Sure, my email is in my profile. The lack of sysadmin is key for me. I focus on the app with gae, not updating BLANK.
  - 16y ago
robinhouston 16y ago
There's an interesting detail in the final paragraph: “We pay about 1000x more for EC2 than we did for App Engine”. One of the rarely-mentioned virtues of App Engine is that it's really, astonishingly, cheap — as well as removing the system administration burden, which is also a cost in either time or money. For a large company, web application hosting is an insignificant cost, but for an unfunded startup it can be pivotal. (I first used App Engine in 2009, in answer to a requirement for a simple application that had to be both massively-scalable and run on a close-to-nonexistent budget. It was a perfect fit for that scenario.)
- axiom 16y ago
  Fully agreed. App Engine is insanely cheap. We loved this fact when we were first starting out, but after we realized how much time the various limitations were costing us I really really wished they would just let us pay them a few $k per month so the damn thing would just work. Probably the most serious challenge for the App Engine team has been dealing with the 95%+ of their userbase that will never pay them a cent for their services, but will suck all the life out of their platform.
- alecco 16y ago
  * App Engine's TCO is high because of development time * EC2's TCO is high because of operations time Hosting costs are usually not that important (except outliers like file sharing.)
- wmf 16y ago
  The real question IMO is whether the money saved by App Engine is more than the development cost of the premature scaling you have to do.
- mark_l_watson 16y ago
  re: very low cost: how true! The web app I run on AppEngine 24/7 is a low volume site so I never appreciated how much the daily free quota gets you until last summer when I took one of the Google Buzz firehose reading demos and modified it to extract what I wanted from the Buzz firehose (large volume of Buzz, Twitter, etc. social messages). I just used the daily free quota and my temporary app would run for 5 or 6 hours a day before hitting the quota. Lots of bandwidth and CPU use. That said, I never mind my monthly Amazon AWS bill because its a good value (and, for a long time it was free because of two grants they gave me). I also would like a plan from Google where I gave them some money every month; this may happen when version 1.4 is released because I am trying to decide between AWS and AppEngine for a new project. I am curious what having three instances always spun up will cost.
100k 16y ago
I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment. Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine-patch or django-norel working. Those also suck. There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way. Nope. Abandon your old frameworks. If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy. Yeah, there are problems with App Engine. It has downtime and things slow down. So does every other hosting platform. App Engine is getting better all the time. I've been working with it for about 6 months, and nearly every month there is a new release with great new features that make developing apps for the platform better. The new 1.4 release has tons of great features that will make working with App Engine easier, like reserved instances and warming requests.
- mark_l_watson 16y ago
  "If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy." You make a good point. I am not a Python programmer but I have tried a few AppEngine tiny experiments with Django and webapp. webapp was clearly designed for the platform. Similar case for Java: JDO or JPA never seemed like a good fit to the data store, but Objectify seems crafted to add a nice but thin layer on top of the low level APIs.
- Swizec 16y ago
  Personally I very much like django-nonrel. It gives me pretty much the same constraints as webapp, while still maintaining enough of my old worldview that the culture shock isn't too big. Yes, you still have to adapt to the AppEngine way of doing things. But the adaptation is much simpler ... and I completely dislike the way webapp does a lot of things judging from the examples Google provides. I like my world nice and full of free-floating functions. Wrapping things into nearly meaningless objects hurts my brain.
- grandalf 16y ago
  What's wrong with the Webapp framework? I like it quite a bit -- it's light, fast, and simple, almost like Sinatra but with a bit less syntactic elegance.
Nemisis7654 16y ago
Wow, these stories about the horrors of GAE are a little bit scary for me. I was starting to develop a project with a friend in our spare time, and we decided to go with GAE. We've only gotten as far as the end of the tutorial and are reading the documentation for GAE, but I have a question: As a college student who is looking to build a project on the side as a means for experience and a way to handle an issue we have, should I look into something other than GAE? I really do not intend to make our idea a startup or anything. Any help would be appreciated!
- Swizec 16y ago
  Go with GAE. There's a lot less overhead with things you really don't want to be dealing with.
  - Nemisis7654 16y ago
    With GAE would you suggest I use a web framework like webapp or the built in Django?
jread 16y ago
For what it is worth, we've had 99.998% uptime for static files on appengine - not using datastore or any other features (about 11 minutes of legitimate outages the past year). During the same time period we've had 100% uptime for m1.small servers in EC2's US East and West regions, 99.989% uptime for EU West and 99.997% for APAC. http://cloudharmony.com/status http://cloudharmony.com/status
endlessvoid94 16y ago
For a much better solution, give Djangy a try: http://www.djangy.com http://www.djangy.com - it's heroku for django (and eventually other WSGI frameworks)
Kilimanjaro 16y ago
I love AppEngine. It takes you time to unwrap your head from SQL and wrap it around the datastore but that's the only thing you have to overcome, believe me. I'll tell you my story, a desktop developer gone web, starting with php and cheap hosting from godaddy, spending hundreds a month for my pet projects. Then I learned GAE was free, so why pay for monthly hosting when you can get it for free for your pet projects? I have hundreds of them so I took the plunge and started to learn python. Damn easy, not going back to php, ever. Don't waste your time with java unless your corporate overlords dictate it. Python is ten times easier and you can go from zero to ninja in one day. Or less. I started with the hello world example using webapp, no need for frameworks at all, even if you come from django, drop it. Webapp can do it all with a couple of utilities and the template engine (same as django) in a couple of lines. You'll be amazed at how simple it is to build an app, of any size, once you master the basics about models, sessions, authentication, etc. You don't need sql connections, chmod configs, apache htaccess, and stuff like that. Just get some data and render it with a template. Fucking easy! Don't believe me? You lose, not me. Give it a try, you'll be surprised. I am a happy GAE user and my next startup (which I hope will have a million visits a day) runs on AppEngine and no worries at all about handling them all. Google will be there for me. GAE 1.4 will come with Channel API, an easy way to send messages back and forth, we just got multitenancy, longer task queues and cron jobs, xmpp, etc. You get it all at no cost, you pay only a couple of dollars when you need it, when you get slashdotted, dugg or techcrunched. No sweat, no sysadmins running like headless chickens, no server rooms burning. And that, my friend, that is peace of mind.
andresmh 16y ago
Is downtime associated with how complex the GAE app is? I'm planning to host primarily static files and I'm wondering if downtime is an issue at all in this case.
timinman 16y ago
I've been developing with jruby on GAE for about a year. http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/ http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/ There has been a good deal to learn, and some changes to adapt to along the way for the jruby library - which is to be expected. My sites are mostly noncommercial and don't get a ton of traffic, so their generous free/cheap plan was an incentive I couldn't pass up. Alternatively you can do very little for free on Heroku (the other 'free' hosting option for Ruby). It's been a good experience overall, but this last month I have spent weeks pulling my hair out trying to do a join. I have a work-a-round in place now, so hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here on. If I do run into performance issues I may have to switch, but then it won't be to hard to migrate and I've still had a free development environment which has pushed me to learn and cost me nothing.

128 points by axiom 16y ago

I really appreciate reading stories like this. For budding startups like mine, we need every available resource at our disposal on technology choices. I also think articles like this will encourage Google's engineers to keep making GAE a better platform. AFAIK, Google is also notorious for eating their own dog food. I was a bit taken back by the criticism on the last app-engine article. Quite frankly, sometimes you don't realize you the limitations until you hit them despite what the manual says. ("Every one's job is easy but your own.") If you haven't used GAE, you don't realize how easy it is to just get up and get going. It's absurdly simple. However, when you hit limitations you might encounter the sunk-cost fallacy, and that might propel you to keep working around its limitations.

grandalf 16y ago
I think Google sort of deserves some negative press after the major datastore problems of late (now fixed), but it's not reasonable to criticize the app engine platform itself. The so-called limitations are just reasonable trade-offs, and frankly they are less annoying than many that teams end up self-imposing in order to work around unexpected bottlenecks in their app.

petrilli 16y ago

The thing people "forget" is that the further up the stack you move, the more support is required because there's less and less the customer can do to diagnose a problem.

d2viant 16y ago
By "people", are you referring to Google? If so, I agree -- not having technical support available is a deal breaker for a system of that scale, especially if outages are as prevalent as the author claims.
- qeorge 16y ago
  I think he means both Google and their customers. Google should get it, in that they need to offer support if they want to run this kind of business. But customers should also know that Google doesn't do support, and they will need support, so GAE is probably not a good fit. If that's right, I agree as well.

newtonstan 16y ago

Is it getting fashionable these days to blame Google App Engine? I am reading lots of horror stories about GAE!!

axiom 16y ago
Well, my motivation in writing the blog was in response to the people who replied to the last HN story on App Engine saying the author was clueless and just didn't know what he was doing. For what it's worth, there are a lot of other very bright people that have had the same issues and came to the same conclusion.
fletchowns 16y ago
I think it's just that developing for GAE is just so different from developing on a typical LAMP stack that there inevitably a fairly steep learning curve. That combined with the (well documented) limitations you just have to find new ways of solving problems. The fact that this author thinks that other article was a "good read" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in what this guy has to say. I don't know if developing on the App Engine is still as bad as it was before. Maybe it's changed in the last few months that we've been on EC2 From what I've heard, things have dramatically improved from how they were a few months ago.
jskopek 16y ago
I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. There have been a number of posts attacking App Engine recently, and a lot of good discussions have come out of them. The two things issues that seem to get brought up most are app design and reliability. - Reliability: App Engine reliability used to be horrible, but it's getting better. GAE was the first service I ever developed for where reliability was an issue. I've hosted apps on Linode, Slicehost, EC2, and my experience with those companies caused me to dismiss claims of downtime and the importance of an SLA. Nothing sucks more then seeing your system go down for days at a time, and not being able to do anything about it. I'm glad that GAE is addressing this issue, but I'd be wary of running anything commercial on their services without buying a business plan. - App Design: Pretty much everyone agrees that you have to write applications the way GAE wants you to, or you'll fail. The built in GAE Python library is great for writing simple, highly scalable websites, but it's too limited to develop complex applications on. Our application has over 20KLOC and uses numerous third party libraries. In practice, we found that it was difficult and time-consuming to write our application without turning to a more established framework like Django. We were also concerned with the vendor lock-in that would be caused by building on library that could only be run on GAE. Projects like TyphoonAE (http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/ http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/) are starting to make this less of an issue, but they aren't mature enough to provide an exit strategy. We built our application on appenginepatch, a third party port of Django to GAE. Django was not designed to run on a non-relational DB, and GAE was not designed to handle a heavy framework like Django. Our decision to build things our application on Django ultimately lead to most of our problems, but eventually saved our skin when we decided to switch away from GAE.

woan 16y ago

Anyone have a happy story of GAE availability in particular? I am not so bothered and actually appreciate the programming model. Actually reading the story, seems like some of their architectural patterns may have run contrary to asynchronous intent. 98% availability is a deal breaker for most betting thyeir business and image.

blantonl 16y ago
I'll pile on this. I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine. I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are. I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so I'd love to see where App engine might fit in some of my business' architecture.
- kljensen 16y ago
  I run two profitable businesses on app engine. The occasional downtime is a tolerable exchange for the numerous benefits. (I also use ec2 for computationally expensive jobs. The ec2 instances are started and stopped by gae.) Bottom line for me is this: on gae one dude, sans team, can be dangerous.
  - blantonl 16y ago
    Interesting perspective. I'm a "one dude" on EC2 and geeze I feel dangerous at times.... I haven't had any spectacular failures, but I've certainly had some close calls. I'd love to hear more about how you've leveraged GAE.
    - kljensen 16y ago
      Sure, my email is in my profile. The lack of sysadmin is key for me. I focus on the app with gae, not updating BLANK.
- 16y ago

robinhouston 16y ago

There's an interesting detail in the final paragraph: “We pay about 1000x more for EC2 than we did for App Engine”. One of the rarely-mentioned virtues of App Engine is that it's really, astonishingly, cheap — as well as removing the system administration burden, which is also a cost in either time or money. For a large company, web application hosting is an insignificant cost, but for an unfunded startup it can be pivotal. (I first used App Engine in 2009, in answer to a requirement for a simple application that had to be both massively-scalable and run on a close-to-nonexistent budget. It was a perfect fit for that scenario.)

axiom 16y ago
Fully agreed. App Engine is insanely cheap. We loved this fact when we were first starting out, but after we realized how much time the various limitations were costing us I really really wished they would just let us pay them a few $k per month so the damn thing would just work. Probably the most serious challenge for the App Engine team has been dealing with the 95%+ of their userbase that will never pay them a cent for their services, but will suck all the life out of their platform.
alecco 16y ago
* App Engine's TCO is high because of development time * EC2's TCO is high because of operations time Hosting costs are usually not that important (except outliers like file sharing.)
wmf 16y ago
The real question IMO is whether the money saved by App Engine is more than the development cost of the premature scaling you have to do.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
re: very low cost: how true! The web app I run on AppEngine 24/7 is a low volume site so I never appreciated how much the daily free quota gets you until last summer when I took one of the Google Buzz firehose reading demos and modified it to extract what I wanted from the Buzz firehose (large volume of Buzz, Twitter, etc. social messages). I just used the daily free quota and my temporary app would run for 5 or 6 hours a day before hitting the quota. Lots of bandwidth and CPU use. That said, I never mind my monthly Amazon AWS bill because its a good value (and, for a long time it was free because of two grants they gave me). I also would like a plan from Google where I gave them some money every month; this may happen when version 1.4 is released because I am trying to decide between AWS and AppEngine for a new project. I am curious what having three instances always spun up will cost.

100k 16y ago

I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment. Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine-patch or django-norel working. Those also suck. There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way. Nope. Abandon your old frameworks. If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy. Yeah, there are problems with App Engine. It has downtime and things slow down. So does every other hosting platform. App Engine is getting better all the time. I've been working with it for about 6 months, and nearly every month there is a new release with great new features that make developing apps for the platform better. The new 1.4 release has tons of great features that will make working with App Engine easier, like reserved instances and warming requests.

mark_l_watson 16y ago
"If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy." You make a good point. I am not a Python programmer but I have tried a few AppEngine tiny experiments with Django and webapp. webapp was clearly designed for the platform. Similar case for Java: JDO or JPA never seemed like a good fit to the data store, but Objectify seems crafted to add a nice but thin layer on top of the low level APIs.
Swizec 16y ago
Personally I very much like django-nonrel. It gives me pretty much the same constraints as webapp, while still maintaining enough of my old worldview that the culture shock isn't too big. Yes, you still have to adapt to the AppEngine way of doing things. But the adaptation is much simpler ... and I completely dislike the way webapp does a lot of things judging from the examples Google provides. I like my world nice and full of free-floating functions. Wrapping things into nearly meaningless objects hurts my brain.
grandalf 16y ago
What's wrong with the Webapp framework? I like it quite a bit -- it's light, fast, and simple, almost like Sinatra but with a bit less syntactic elegance.

Nemisis7654 16y ago

Wow, these stories about the horrors of GAE are a little bit scary for me. I was starting to develop a project with a friend in our spare time, and we decided to go with GAE. We've only gotten as far as the end of the tutorial and are reading the documentation for GAE, but I have a question: As a college student who is looking to build a project on the side as a means for experience and a way to handle an issue we have, should I look into something other than GAE? I really do not intend to make our idea a startup or anything. Any help would be appreciated!

Swizec 16y ago
Go with GAE. There's a lot less overhead with things you really don't want to be dealing with.
- Nemisis7654 16y ago
  With GAE would you suggest I use a web framework like webapp or the built in Django?

jread 16y ago

For what it is worth, we've had 99.998% uptime for static files on appengine - not using datastore or any other features (about 11 minutes of legitimate outages the past year). During the same time period we've had 100% uptime for m1.small servers in EC2's US East and West regions, 99.989% uptime for EU West and 99.997% for APAC. http://cloudharmony.com/status http://cloudharmony.com/status

endlessvoid94 16y ago

For a much better solution, give Djangy a try: http://www.djangy.com http://www.djangy.com - it's heroku for django (and eventually other WSGI frameworks)

Kilimanjaro 16y ago

I love AppEngine. It takes you time to unwrap your head from SQL and wrap it around the datastore but that's the only thing you have to overcome, believe me. I'll tell you my story, a desktop developer gone web, starting with php and cheap hosting from godaddy, spending hundreds a month for my pet projects. Then I learned GAE was free, so why pay for monthly hosting when you can get it for free for your pet projects? I have hundreds of them so I took the plunge and started to learn python. Damn easy, not going back to php, ever. Don't waste your time with java unless your corporate overlords dictate it. Python is ten times easier and you can go from zero to ninja in one day. Or less. I started with the hello world example using webapp, no need for frameworks at all, even if you come from django, drop it. Webapp can do it all with a couple of utilities and the template engine (same as django) in a couple of lines. You'll be amazed at how simple it is to build an app, of any size, once you master the basics about models, sessions, authentication, etc. You don't need sql connections, chmod configs, apache htaccess, and stuff like that. Just get some data and render it with a template. Fucking easy! Don't believe me? You lose, not me. Give it a try, you'll be surprised. I am a happy GAE user and my next startup (which I hope will have a million visits a day) runs on AppEngine and no worries at all about handling them all. Google will be there for me. GAE 1.4 will come with Channel API, an easy way to send messages back and forth, we just got multitenancy, longer task queues and cron jobs, xmpp, etc. You get it all at no cost, you pay only a couple of dollars when you need it, when you get slashdotted, dugg or techcrunched. No sweat, no sysadmins running like headless chickens, no server rooms burning. And that, my friend, that is peace of mind.

andresmh 16y ago

Is downtime associated with how complex the GAE app is? I'm planning to host primarily static files and I'm wondering if downtime is an issue at all in this case.

timinman 16y ago

I've been developing with jruby on GAE for about a year. http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/ http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/ There has been a good deal to learn, and some changes to adapt to along the way for the jruby library - which is to be expected. My sites are mostly noncommercial and don't get a ton of traffic, so their generous free/cheap plan was an incentive I couldn't pass up. Alternatively you can do very little for free on Heroku (the other 'free' hosting option for Ruby). It's been a good experience overall, but this last month I have spent weeks pulling my hair out trying to do a join. I have a work-a-round in place now, so hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here on. If I do run into performance issues I may have to switch, but then it won't be to hard to migrate and I've still had a free development environment which has pushed me to learn and cost me nothing.