6 ms·

In my opinion Google App Engine is a non-starter for serious applications. I only know of experiments and toys running there. Look at their gallery of successfu

by diego 15y ago

In my opinion Google App Engine is a non-starter for serious applications. I only know of experiments and toys running there. Look at their gallery of successful applications: http://code.google.com/intl/it-IT/appengine/casestudies.html http://code.google.com/intl/it-IT/appengine/casestudies.html Contrast with AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

chucknthem 15y ago
There are definitely serious applications and businesses built on appengine, mostly started before their price hike coming out of Beta last November. http://www.optimizely.com http://www.optimizely.com (YC W10) and http://shoesofprey.com http://shoesofprey.com are two notable examples.
- taylorbuley 15y ago
  Rescuetime (YC W08) also uses it I believe
- dextorious 15y ago
  I wouldn't call those two "serious" examples -- especially since the competitors (Amazon, Heroku, Rackspace etc) have orders of magnitude more popular, complex and profitable services running on them. This is like saying, "Famous actors frequent my restaurant" and point to a picture of Ralph Macchio. OK, somewhat known, but De Niro, Brad Pitt, Clooney and co eat at the joint across the street.
  - jay_kyburz 15y ago
    Actually, I think its great for startups. If you're a small team trying to work out what your product is, how to sell it and who is going to buy it, you have more important things to do than learn how to set up and run a server. Once you've worked out you have a product that people want you can start thinking about managing your own servers. People complain about migration, but its really not that big a deal.
    - mgkimsal 15y ago
      So instead of learning how to admin a server - a skill that is transferable anywhere and is pretty much a commodity skill for most web-based startups when they're - you know, "starting up" - you suggest people tie themselves to a proprietary app engine and datastore which limits what you can do in ways that aren't really transportable anywhere else? Spending time learning about GAE oddities, pricing limits, language limits/restrictions and such... seems a pretty horrible waste of time for people to engage in.
      - vosper 15y ago
        I've been building apps professionally on GAE for the last year, and one of the reasons I'm leaving my job is because the knowledge is non-transferrable and the platform is not really growing, as far as I can tell. It's a dead-end career wise.
      - marshallp 15y ago
        Instead of learning to admin a server, and then follow up with admin for the rest of your life, you can hand that duty over to experts. Should hundreds of thousands of people be engaged in doing essentially the same thing. If you really thing appengine is shitty or overpriced, then it should be pretty easy for others to replicate and eat their lunch. The fact that no one else has managed to yet says a lot. As an anecdote, reddit frequently has outages, they run on aws. If they switched to gae they wouldn't, it's as simple as that.
        spartango 15y ago
        Reddit historically had an extremely poorly designed backend, resulting in lousy performance and thus the outages that people experienced at scale. This has little to do with AWS vs AppEngine, and more to do with suboptimal code being forced to run at extreme scales. Not the best anecdote, sorry. I'll say they're getting better now--for a while they were a major PITA for AWS folks.
        mgkimsal 15y ago
        Instead of learning to admin a server, and then follow up with admin for the rest of your life, you can hand that duty over to experts. Should hundreds of thousands of people be engaged in doing essentially the same thing. ================= Yep. Everything I've ever taken up in life I'm still doing X years later. I've never ever transferred a job to someone else, outsourced a task I learned, or hired someone to do what I do. Nope. 100% of the time I'm doing everything I ever used to. Still. WTF? I think most cell phone service is shitty and overpriced, but it doesn't mean anyone can just set up a competitor - it's extremely capital intensive to compete at that scale. Yeah, I forgot that GAE never goes down. http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231001916/google-app-engine-cloud-availability-plummets-sparks-outages.htm;jsessionid=N-cfzFiUyJn5f14hGhsH2w**.ecappj01 http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231001916/google-app-engine-cl... http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/browse_thread/thread/b4ed491a8b9ccce2 http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not... Reddit is one of the top 1% of the 1% in terms of traffic. I suspect GAE would probably have trouble with Reddit on a global 24/7 basis. Perhaps not as much as Reddit's having themselves at times, but nothing's perfect. And I suspect Reddit's pocketbook wouldn't be able to afford the marginal benefit GAE would provide.
  - nl 15y ago
    Pulse is pretty big: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kindle-fire.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin... Does Heroku have any particularly high-traffic sites?
    - jaggederest 15y ago
      At least a half dozen at that scale, I believe. Urban Dictionary, as an example. Here's another one I haven't heard of before now: http://success.heroku.com/Banjo http://success.heroku.com/Banjo
      - nl 15y ago
        Banjo only has 500K users[1]. Urban Dictionary is bigger (30MM page views/month[2]), but Pulse is an order of magnitude bigger ("100Ms of requests per day" [3]). Pulse ships on a lot of Android devices by default now. [1] http://ban.jo/blog/banjo-hits-500k-users-in-under-six-months http://ban.jo/blog/banjo-hits-500k-users-in-under-six-months [2] http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary [3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kindle-fire.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin...
  - jpulgarin 15y ago
    Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://www.khanacademy.org/) runs on App Engine.
    - wisty 15y ago
      Is Khan Academy a serious application, or just really good content? I think its smartest software is all JS anyway - you could host that on GoDaddy.
  - jfoster 15y ago
    I think they are serious examples. Of course once they get to a certain size the cost of running on App Engine becomes exorbitant. At that point, there's two options: 1. Migrate away from Google-hosted App Engine to your own AppScale instances. 2. Negotiate a better rate with Google. In my experience App Engine has been fine for apps that only get a few hundred or thousand visits per day. The convenience of not worrying about the environment or deployment too much is a great enabler. It definitely depends on the type of app. You probably wouldn't want to run anything that is particularly heavy on datastore use. Using AJAX rather than full pageloads is a good way to keep bandwidth and response time (and therefore instance hours) down. For example, one of my apps is able to pre-load the most important AJAX calls, so it can handle running with high latency and I don't exceed the free instance hours.
- avree 15y ago
  We're built on appengine at Getaround.
- petekoomen 15y ago
  We (Optimizely) do use App Engine and have been very happy with it. We handle hundreds of millions of requests every day and make heavy use of both GAE and custom components running on EC2. EC2 does most of the heavy lifting, but our web front end is all on App Engine and the benefits (great deployment and mgmt tools) far outweigh the cost.
- foxylad 15y ago
  We built http://www.schoolbookings.net http://www.schoolbookings.net on Appengine. Over a thousand schools and half a million parents use it - not enormous numbers, but a very real and profitable business. We pay under a hundred dollars a month for extremely reliable and scalable infrastructure. I'm happy that our platform is designed and supported by the best sysadmins in the world - we've had less than five minutes of degraded service (high latency but still accessible) in the last six months. I'm soooooooooo glad we didn't choose AWS! Appengine is perfect for developer-centric startups. You can concentrate on your app instead of the infrastructure until you've got traction, and if you do hit the big time you'll be popping champagne corks instead of server cores. At that stage you'll be able to make an informed decision about hiring some kick-ass sysadmins to build your own platform, and migration really isn't as big a deal as some people make out. Python apps are WSGI compliant so will run with minimal modification on any WSGI server, and you can access all your data without difficulty. You would need to write some wrappers around API calls, but this isn't a huge deal and realistically you're going to have to do this for any platform migration.
Caligula 15y ago
I am curious why Dropbox isnt in the case studies list. They seem to be the biggest success of note that is entirely built on s3.
rbanffy 15y ago
http://btbuckets.com/ http://btbuckets.com/ runs the heavy lifting on App Engine. It's a lot of lifting. Another one I know of is http://www.enstore.com/ http://www.enstore.com/. Without seeing the code, it's hard to tell what's going on. I would suspect cascading ungrouped datastore puts and their index updates, but, from what's on the list, I can't even make an informed guess.
lanstein 15y ago
And 3scale is listed on both.
X-Istence 15y ago
There are quite a few businesses that are run on AppEngine that don't necessarily advertise the fact that they are running on AppEngine. I've worked with two clients that have extremely successful websites running on top of AppEngine and are happy with it, but the costs mentioned in the article are absolutely true and something that they chose to bite the bullet on for a one time transition. I can't imagine what it would cost to get all of the data out to do a migration.
lyddonb 15y ago
We use GAE for our app (http://www.webfilings.com/ http://www.webfilings.com/) and have had quite a bit of success with it. It really depends on your usage. For certain types of applications it makes a ton of sense and is still quite affordable.
tdavis 15y ago
Frankly, having worked on a serious AppEngine application for over a year, it most certainly is not. Of course, that isn't an absolute statement--perhaps some serious applications do exist on AppEngine, and leverage it in a way that doesn't cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs. The one I work on doesn't fall into that camp. I miss managing my own infrastructure more than anything.
- adaml_623 15y ago
  Sorry but are you saying that your serious AppEngine application _does_ cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs? Implying that it's more expensive than it might be on competing platforms?
  - tdavis 15y ago
    Yes, it's probably an order of magnitude more expensive when accounting for the countless hours spent pre-optimizing everything, tracking down intensely opaque performance issues, dealing with the AppEngine team's tendency to introduce changes that entirely alter performance characteristics without notice, and etc. This, of course, is on top of the now rather ludicrous cost associated with maintaining a write-heavy application that must be both highly concurrent and consistent, with a large number of composite indexes and relational schemes that the datastore was simply not designed to cater to. That isn't AppEngine's fault, but it is by no means a generic hosting platform and I truly believe that their goal of creating an "infinitely scalable" and robust system is directly at odds with providing a product that is a good choice for the majority of applications.
Impossible 15y ago
Humble Bundle (YC W11) uses GAE as well and is definitely a profitable business, although it runs on a much smaller scale than the big AWS applications. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-served-humble-indie.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-s...
nischalshetty 15y ago
AWS has been around for longer. Appengine just moved out of beta. There are a lot of "serious" applications on app engine. Many applications have their infra distributed over multiple providers. A combination of AWS and App engine will be more heard of in the future. Tweetdeck has (had?) a backend implementation on App engine - http://goo.gl/38nSU http://goo.gl/38nSU The point is, terming an infra stack as great as App engine as made for non serious applications is a gross misunderstanding of what the app engine is capable of. You should first give it a try, develop an app and then make a statement.

by diego 15y ago

chucknthem 15y ago

There are definitely serious applications and businesses built on appengine, mostly started before their price hike coming out of Beta last November. http://www.optimizely.com http://www.optimizely.com (YC W10) and http://shoesofprey.com http://shoesofprey.com are two notable examples.

taylorbuley 15y ago
Rescuetime (YC W08) also uses it I believe
dextorious 15y ago
I wouldn't call those two "serious" examples -- especially since the competitors (Amazon, Heroku, Rackspace etc) have orders of magnitude more popular, complex and profitable services running on them. This is like saying, "Famous actors frequent my restaurant" and point to a picture of Ralph Macchio. OK, somewhat known, but De Niro, Brad Pitt, Clooney and co eat at the joint across the street.
- jay_kyburz 15y ago
  Actually, I think its great for startups. If you're a small team trying to work out what your product is, how to sell it and who is going to buy it, you have more important things to do than learn how to set up and run a server. Once you've worked out you have a product that people want you can start thinking about managing your own servers. People complain about migration, but its really not that big a deal.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    So instead of learning how to admin a server - a skill that is transferable anywhere and is pretty much a commodity skill for most web-based startups when they're - you know, "starting up" - you suggest people tie themselves to a proprietary app engine and datastore which limits what you can do in ways that aren't really transportable anywhere else? Spending time learning about GAE oddities, pricing limits, language limits/restrictions and such... seems a pretty horrible waste of time for people to engage in.
    - vosper 15y ago
      I've been building apps professionally on GAE for the last year, and one of the reasons I'm leaving my job is because the knowledge is non-transferrable and the platform is not really growing, as far as I can tell. It's a dead-end career wise.
    - marshallp 15y ago
      Instead of learning to admin a server, and then follow up with admin for the rest of your life, you can hand that duty over to experts. Should hundreds of thousands of people be engaged in doing essentially the same thing. If you really thing appengine is shitty or overpriced, then it should be pretty easy for others to replicate and eat their lunch. The fact that no one else has managed to yet says a lot. As an anecdote, reddit frequently has outages, they run on aws. If they switched to gae they wouldn't, it's as simple as that.
      - spartango 15y ago
        Reddit historically had an extremely poorly designed backend, resulting in lousy performance and thus the outages that people experienced at scale. This has little to do with AWS vs AppEngine, and more to do with suboptimal code being forced to run at extreme scales. Not the best anecdote, sorry. I'll say they're getting better now--for a while they were a major PITA for AWS folks.
      - mgkimsal 15y ago
        Instead of learning to admin a server, and then follow up with admin for the rest of your life, you can hand that duty over to experts. Should hundreds of thousands of people be engaged in doing essentially the same thing. ================= Yep. Everything I've ever taken up in life I'm still doing X years later. I've never ever transferred a job to someone else, outsourced a task I learned, or hired someone to do what I do. Nope. 100% of the time I'm doing everything I ever used to. Still. WTF? I think most cell phone service is shitty and overpriced, but it doesn't mean anyone can just set up a competitor - it's extremely capital intensive to compete at that scale. Yeah, I forgot that GAE never goes down. http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231001916/google-app-engine-cloud-availability-plummets-sparks-outages.htm;jsessionid=N-cfzFiUyJn5f14hGhsH2w**.ecappj01 http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231001916/google-app-engine-cl... http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/browse_thread/thread/b4ed491a8b9ccce2 http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not... Reddit is one of the top 1% of the 1% in terms of traffic. I suspect GAE would probably have trouble with Reddit on a global 24/7 basis. Perhaps not as much as Reddit's having themselves at times, but nothing's perfect. And I suspect Reddit's pocketbook wouldn't be able to afford the marginal benefit GAE would provide.
- nl 15y ago
  Pulse is pretty big: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kindle-fire.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin... Does Heroku have any particularly high-traffic sites?
  - jaggederest 15y ago
    At least a half dozen at that scale, I believe. Urban Dictionary, as an example. Here's another one I haven't heard of before now: http://success.heroku.com/Banjo http://success.heroku.com/Banjo
    - nl 15y ago
      Banjo only has 500K users[1]. Urban Dictionary is bigger (30MM page views/month[2]), but Pulse is an order of magnitude bigger ("100Ms of requests per day" [3]). Pulse ships on a lot of Android devices by default now. [1] http://ban.jo/blog/banjo-hits-500k-users-in-under-six-months http://ban.jo/blog/banjo-hits-500k-users-in-under-six-months [2] http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary [3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kindle-fire.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin...
- jpulgarin 15y ago
  Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://www.khanacademy.org/) runs on App Engine.
  - wisty 15y ago
    Is Khan Academy a serious application, or just really good content? I think its smartest software is all JS anyway - you could host that on GoDaddy.
- jfoster 15y ago
  I think they are serious examples. Of course once they get to a certain size the cost of running on App Engine becomes exorbitant. At that point, there's two options: 1. Migrate away from Google-hosted App Engine to your own AppScale instances. 2. Negotiate a better rate with Google. In my experience App Engine has been fine for apps that only get a few hundred or thousand visits per day. The convenience of not worrying about the environment or deployment too much is a great enabler. It definitely depends on the type of app. You probably wouldn't want to run anything that is particularly heavy on datastore use. Using AJAX rather than full pageloads is a good way to keep bandwidth and response time (and therefore instance hours) down. For example, one of my apps is able to pre-load the most important AJAX calls, so it can handle running with high latency and I don't exceed the free instance hours.
avree 15y ago
We're built on appengine at Getaround.
petekoomen 15y ago
We (Optimizely) do use App Engine and have been very happy with it. We handle hundreds of millions of requests every day and make heavy use of both GAE and custom components running on EC2. EC2 does most of the heavy lifting, but our web front end is all on App Engine and the benefits (great deployment and mgmt tools) far outweigh the cost.
foxylad 15y ago
We built http://www.schoolbookings.net http://www.schoolbookings.net on Appengine. Over a thousand schools and half a million parents use it - not enormous numbers, but a very real and profitable business. We pay under a hundred dollars a month for extremely reliable and scalable infrastructure. I'm happy that our platform is designed and supported by the best sysadmins in the world - we've had less than five minutes of degraded service (high latency but still accessible) in the last six months. I'm soooooooooo glad we didn't choose AWS! Appengine is perfect for developer-centric startups. You can concentrate on your app instead of the infrastructure until you've got traction, and if you do hit the big time you'll be popping champagne corks instead of server cores. At that stage you'll be able to make an informed decision about hiring some kick-ass sysadmins to build your own platform, and migration really isn't as big a deal as some people make out. Python apps are WSGI compliant so will run with minimal modification on any WSGI server, and you can access all your data without difficulty. You would need to write some wrappers around API calls, but this isn't a huge deal and realistically you're going to have to do this for any platform migration.

Caligula 15y ago

I am curious why Dropbox isnt in the case studies list. They seem to be the biggest success of note that is entirely built on s3.

rbanffy 15y ago

http://btbuckets.com/ http://btbuckets.com/ runs the heavy lifting on App Engine. It's a lot of lifting. Another one I know of is http://www.enstore.com/ http://www.enstore.com/. Without seeing the code, it's hard to tell what's going on. I would suspect cascading ungrouped datastore puts and their index updates, but, from what's on the list, I can't even make an informed guess.

lanstein 15y ago

And 3scale is listed on both.

X-Istence 15y ago

There are quite a few businesses that are run on AppEngine that don't necessarily advertise the fact that they are running on AppEngine. I've worked with two clients that have extremely successful websites running on top of AppEngine and are happy with it, but the costs mentioned in the article are absolutely true and something that they chose to bite the bullet on for a one time transition. I can't imagine what it would cost to get all of the data out to do a migration.

lyddonb 15y ago

We use GAE for our app (http://www.webfilings.com/ http://www.webfilings.com/) and have had quite a bit of success with it. It really depends on your usage. For certain types of applications it makes a ton of sense and is still quite affordable.

tdavis 15y ago

Frankly, having worked on a serious AppEngine application for over a year, it most certainly is not. Of course, that isn't an absolute statement--perhaps some serious applications do exist on AppEngine, and leverage it in a way that doesn't cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs. The one I work on doesn't fall into that camp. I miss managing my own infrastructure more than anything.

adaml_623 15y ago
Sorry but are you saying that your serious AppEngine application _does_ cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs? Implying that it's more expensive than it might be on competing platforms?
- tdavis 15y ago
  Yes, it's probably an order of magnitude more expensive when accounting for the countless hours spent pre-optimizing everything, tracking down intensely opaque performance issues, dealing with the AppEngine team's tendency to introduce changes that entirely alter performance characteristics without notice, and etc. This, of course, is on top of the now rather ludicrous cost associated with maintaining a write-heavy application that must be both highly concurrent and consistent, with a large number of composite indexes and relational schemes that the datastore was simply not designed to cater to. That isn't AppEngine's fault, but it is by no means a generic hosting platform and I truly believe that their goal of creating an "infinitely scalable" and robust system is directly at odds with providing a product that is a good choice for the majority of applications.

Impossible 15y ago

Humble Bundle (YC W11) uses GAE as well and is definitely a profitable business, although it runs on a much smaller scale than the big AWS applications. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-served-humble-indie.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-s...

nischalshetty 15y ago

AWS has been around for longer. Appengine just moved out of beta. There are a lot of "serious" applications on app engine. Many applications have their infra distributed over multiple providers. A combination of AWS and App engine will be more heard of in the future. Tweetdeck has (had?) a backend implementation on App engine - http://goo.gl/38nSU http://goo.gl/38nSU The point is, terming an infra stack as great as App engine as made for non serious applications is a gross misunderstanding of what the app engine is capable of. You should first give it a try, develop an app and then make a statement.