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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

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.
- netaddict 16y ago
  App Engine has a billing plan if you want to use more resources than the free quota. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html It is a lot cheaper than AWS
zmmmmm 16y ago
I'm curious how this works out? When I look at the App Engine pricing it doesn't look cheap - see: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html What I see is Storage 0.15/GB/Month, CPU 0.10 / hr, Transfer 0.10/0.12 / GB. This seems basically on a par with EC2 except with EC2 you can get steep discounts for reserved instances or even use micro instances for some things. So how is it that App Engine comes out so much cheaper?
- chrisboesing 16y ago
  You only pay for CPU if you really use it and not for "standby". So if you have 100k requests in one month and each request takes 0.1 seconds you only have 10.000 seconds(or 166.66 hours or 2.7 hours) so you only pay $0.27 for that month. EC2 would bill you for 720 hours(30 days *24 hours). At a rate of $0.10 you would pay $72 instead of the $0.27. (For this example I'm not taking the free quota into account)
  - zmmmmm 16y ago
    Thanks. If I understand you right, it comes down to that GAE is counting the CPU on a per-request basis while EC2 is charging you per-hour - so if you load is highly variable (as many web startups would be) you get a big bonus because you're not billed for all the time between requests. If your load was heavy and consistent then it would be much more even.
    - chrisboesing 16y ago
      I agree that it would much more even if your load is consistent and heavy, but if it gets too heavy you run in a lot of problems with EC2. If you max out one instance, you would need to add another instance and as a result of that you would need a third instance as a load balancer. So if we take the numbers from the example I gave above and assume your instance maxes out add 100k requests and you get 110k request your cost would go from $72 to $216 ($72 for the load balancer and 2* $72 for the web/application server). That is 3x more but only an increase in traffic by 10% Of course the same math applies to your database server. GAE pricing scales linear no matter how big you are and you never have to worry about maxing it out. Of course you have some trade off's because of that, but that is what the article was about. I guess it's a question how you define heavy traffic. I've read somewhere that Zynga runs 10,000 EC2, at that scale adding another instance wouldn't have a huge impact, but I think if you have less than 15-20 instances (which is still huge) you're cheaper off with GAE. (Even though it sounds like I'm affiliated to GAE I'm not, I'm going to use EC2 because of the trade off's mention in the original article)
riobard 16y ago
The beauty of App Engine is that they bill based on CPU time. EC2 bills you based on wall clock time. Huge difference.

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.

netaddict 16y ago
App Engine has a billing plan if you want to use more resources than the free quota. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html It is a lot cheaper than AWS

zmmmmm 16y ago

I'm curious how this works out? When I look at the App Engine pricing it doesn't look cheap - see: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html What I see is Storage 0.15/GB/Month, CPU 0.10 / hr, Transfer 0.10/0.12 / GB. This seems basically on a par with EC2 except with EC2 you can get steep discounts for reserved instances or even use micro instances for some things. So how is it that App Engine comes out so much cheaper?

chrisboesing 16y ago
You only pay for CPU if you really use it and not for "standby". So if you have 100k requests in one month and each request takes 0.1 seconds you only have 10.000 seconds(or 166.66 hours or 2.7 hours) so you only pay $0.27 for that month. EC2 would bill you for 720 hours(30 days *24 hours). At a rate of $0.10 you would pay $72 instead of the $0.27. (For this example I'm not taking the free quota into account)
- zmmmmm 16y ago
  Thanks. If I understand you right, it comes down to that GAE is counting the CPU on a per-request basis while EC2 is charging you per-hour - so if you load is highly variable (as many web startups would be) you get a big bonus because you're not billed for all the time between requests. If your load was heavy and consistent then it would be much more even.
  - chrisboesing 16y ago
    I agree that it would much more even if your load is consistent and heavy, but if it gets too heavy you run in a lot of problems with EC2. If you max out one instance, you would need to add another instance and as a result of that you would need a third instance as a load balancer. So if we take the numbers from the example I gave above and assume your instance maxes out add 100k requests and you get 110k request your cost would go from $72 to $216 ($72 for the load balancer and 2* $72 for the web/application server). That is 3x more but only an increase in traffic by 10% Of course the same math applies to your database server. GAE pricing scales linear no matter how big you are and you never have to worry about maxing it out. Of course you have some trade off's because of that, but that is what the article was about. I guess it's a question how you define heavy traffic. I've read somewhere that Zynga runs 10,000 EC2, at that scale adding another instance wouldn't have a huge impact, but I think if you have less than 15-20 instances (which is still huge) you're cheaper off with GAE. (Even though it sounds like I'm affiliated to GAE I'm not, I'm going to use EC2 because of the trade off's mention in the original article)

riobard 16y ago

The beauty of App Engine is that they bill based on CPU time. EC2 bills you based on wall clock time. Huge difference.