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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, se

by 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.
- grandalf 16y ago
  I love app engine. The datastore issues have been the only negative aspect of it. Yes, SSL support and naked domain support would be nice, but it's a very nice platform to develop on. Sure, the first time I wrote a toy app on app engine I ran into the so-called "limitations" b/c I didn't understand the way the platform is designed. But once you get it, it's really just a series of quite reasonable tradeoffs that you make in order to get effortless scaling. Yes, the platform could be a bit more reliable and in some areas a bit more mature, and yes, one of my projects almost failed b/c of the datastore issues over the last few months (angry users, etc.) But we made it through, and as of Nov 6, I get very few errors and things just work again. Is App Engine ready for every prime time app you might want to build? No. But it's definitely a platform to know about and to watch carefully. One other feature to note is the app versioning capabilities. You can simultaneously run lots of different versions of an app... useless at first, but extremely valuable later when you want to get aggressive and roll out updates gradually, etc. And, there is ZERO sysadmin work and NONE of the usual web server setup yak shaving.
davepeck 16y ago
Walk Score makes heavy use of GAE across many of its products, and is very happy with it. Despite the occasional downtime, the price/performance is on par with needs. Walk Score uses AWS where it needs heavy compute back-ends, but all front-ends (including API "front-ends") are GAE-based.

by woan 16y ago

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.
grandalf 16y ago
I love app engine. The datastore issues have been the only negative aspect of it. Yes, SSL support and naked domain support would be nice, but it's a very nice platform to develop on. Sure, the first time I wrote a toy app on app engine I ran into the so-called "limitations" b/c I didn't understand the way the platform is designed. But once you get it, it's really just a series of quite reasonable tradeoffs that you make in order to get effortless scaling. Yes, the platform could be a bit more reliable and in some areas a bit more mature, and yes, one of my projects almost failed b/c of the datastore issues over the last few months (angry users, etc.) But we made it through, and as of Nov 6, I get very few errors and things just work again. Is App Engine ready for every prime time app you might want to build? No. But it's definitely a platform to know about and to watch carefully. One other feature to note is the app versioning capabilities. You can simultaneously run lots of different versions of an app... useless at first, but extremely valuable later when you want to get aggressive and roll out updates gradually, etc. And, there is ZERO sysadmin work and NONE of the usual web server setup yak shaving.

davepeck 16y ago

Walk Score makes heavy use of GAE across many of its products, and is very happy with it. Despite the occasional downtime, the price/performance is on par with needs. Walk Score uses AWS where it needs heavy compute back-ends, but all front-ends (including API "front-ends") are GAE-based.