6 ms·

I wouldn't call those two "serious" examples -- especially since the competitors (Amazon, Heroku, Rackspace etc) have orders of magnitude more popular, complex

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.
  - nischalshetty 15y ago
    I've been developing on appengine for over 2 years now. Thanks to the platform, I've never been worried about traffic spikes. Whether you get profiled on TC or a celebrity tweets about your app, you know it will run. Given, you would not learn admin skills, but you'll learn a lot of other things. I learnt how denormalized data in the datastore can help speed things up for your app. I learnt sharding thanks to app engine. The pricing has made me make use of memcache more often and trying to avoid hitting the datastore. When I look at it, I feel I've brought in more discipline in my code because of app engine. I am now in the habit of building APIs that would run instantly. If a http call takes too long, my instinct is to make it run as a background task and then return the result. I've learnt all of these because I've been on App Engine. I can see a significant improvement in what I'm building now. The apps we build now, all our users say it's "fast and responsive". A lot of that credit goes to App Engine and the things it has taught me. Nothing you learn in life is really a waste of time.
    - mgkimsal 15y ago
      Great that you've learned things, but nothing you've mentioned there is specific to GAE. Many people learned abour sharding and such well before GAE even existed (indeed, perhaps even before Google existed). This is akin to saying "Rails made me a better developer", which in and of itself is not bad or wrong, but isn't really terribly useful as a datapoint when deciding which framework to choose. Frameworks by their very nature (almost always) force concepts on you that improve your code. So too with GAE - by limiting some of what you can do, they can provide a more focused service.
      - sam2themax 15y ago
        That's because he/she was replying to the post above that said you can't learn any transferable skills from GAE. They were just mentioning some more abstract/general things they learned from GAE.
  - stickfigure 15y ago
    Learning how to admin a server is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about colorizing your bash prompt.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      Yeah, good luck stealing customers from someone else by developing for a third party's arbitrary stack, that they manage and update as they see fit, lacks tons of critical components, often sees unreported downtimes, and isn't flexible when your business needs change.
      - stickfigure 15y ago
        As someone who's been building major production applications on GAE for the last three years (and on traditional stacks for the decade prior), it's obvious that you haven't even cracked the manual. GAE is not perfect but it's a much faster environment to develop on than IaaS services like EC2. I spend 100% of my time developing features and 0% of my time developing infrastructure. "DevOps" isn't even a job description in my present company. It is true that there are occasionally some components (eg large memory indexes) that need to be "outsourced" to other parts of the cloud. It's trivial to do, but we judge each very carefully because of the added operational load.
    - scott_w 15y ago
      Learning how to admin a server is a simple enough task for a small-ish company. We set up on Rackspace Cloud in a couple of hours, and we're running just fine. We're lucky in that our core market doesn't give us traffic spikes. If and when we run into scaling problems, we'll have a learning experience but that's the same whether you're on App Engine, Amazon or just a cheap web-host running PHP/cPanel/MySQL for £20/year.
    - mgkimsal 15y ago
      Setting up a load balanced system and front-end web cache brings "zero value" to end users? You may as well make the same argument over design or for that matter development. Learning how to program a loop is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about nesting your loops. Learning how to use photoshop is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about reducing your PNGs.
  - cr4zy 15y ago
    GAE skills are also be transferable anywhere. It's by far the quickest way to setup little reliable API's like the stripe liason service I built to send email alerts about transactions with secure links to the card numbers. There's only a few transactions a week, so App Engine is free. It's also a great queuing service for running background tasks on an infrastructure that needs zero maintenance. The cloud is the future and GAE greatly increases your power as a developer, so I'd say learning App Engine will make you a commodity rather than someone with unwanted skills.
  - jfoster 15y ago
    AppScale: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
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.

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.
- nischalshetty 15y ago
  I've been developing on appengine for over 2 years now. Thanks to the platform, I've never been worried about traffic spikes. Whether you get profiled on TC or a celebrity tweets about your app, you know it will run. Given, you would not learn admin skills, but you'll learn a lot of other things. I learnt how denormalized data in the datastore can help speed things up for your app. I learnt sharding thanks to app engine. The pricing has made me make use of memcache more often and trying to avoid hitting the datastore. When I look at it, I feel I've brought in more discipline in my code because of app engine. I am now in the habit of building APIs that would run instantly. If a http call takes too long, my instinct is to make it run as a background task and then return the result. I've learnt all of these because I've been on App Engine. I can see a significant improvement in what I'm building now. The apps we build now, all our users say it's "fast and responsive". A lot of that credit goes to App Engine and the things it has taught me. Nothing you learn in life is really a waste of time.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    Great that you've learned things, but nothing you've mentioned there is specific to GAE. Many people learned abour sharding and such well before GAE even existed (indeed, perhaps even before Google existed). This is akin to saying "Rails made me a better developer", which in and of itself is not bad or wrong, but isn't really terribly useful as a datapoint when deciding which framework to choose. Frameworks by their very nature (almost always) force concepts on you that improve your code. So too with GAE - by limiting some of what you can do, they can provide a more focused service.
    - sam2themax 15y ago
      That's because he/she was replying to the post above that said you can't learn any transferable skills from GAE. They were just mentioning some more abstract/general things they learned from GAE.
- stickfigure 15y ago
  Learning how to admin a server is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about colorizing your bash prompt.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    Yeah, good luck stealing customers from someone else by developing for a third party's arbitrary stack, that they manage and update as they see fit, lacks tons of critical components, often sees unreported downtimes, and isn't flexible when your business needs change.
    - stickfigure 15y ago
      As someone who's been building major production applications on GAE for the last three years (and on traditional stacks for the decade prior), it's obvious that you haven't even cracked the manual. GAE is not perfect but it's a much faster environment to develop on than IaaS services like EC2. I spend 100% of my time developing features and 0% of my time developing infrastructure. "DevOps" isn't even a job description in my present company. It is true that there are occasionally some components (eg large memory indexes) that need to be "outsourced" to other parts of the cloud. It's trivial to do, but we judge each very carefully because of the added operational load.
  - scott_w 15y ago
    Learning how to admin a server is a simple enough task for a small-ish company. We set up on Rackspace Cloud in a couple of hours, and we're running just fine. We're lucky in that our core market doesn't give us traffic spikes. If and when we run into scaling problems, we'll have a learning experience but that's the same whether you're on App Engine, Amazon or just a cheap web-host running PHP/cPanel/MySQL for £20/year.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    Setting up a load balanced system and front-end web cache brings "zero value" to end users? You may as well make the same argument over design or for that matter development. Learning how to program a loop is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about nesting your loops. Learning how to use photoshop is a total waste of time which brings zero value to the end user. If I can hand that drudgery off to someone else, I'll be adding features and stealing your customers while you're giddy about reducing your PNGs.
- cr4zy 15y ago
  GAE skills are also be transferable anywhere. It's by far the quickest way to setup little reliable API's like the stripe liason service I built to send email alerts about transactions with secure links to the card numbers. There's only a few transactions a week, so App Engine is free. It's also a great queuing service for running background tasks on an infrastructure that needs zero maintenance. The cloud is the future and GAE greatly increases your power as a developer, so I'd say learning App Engine will make you a commodity rather than someone with unwanted skills.
- jfoster 15y ago
  AppScale: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

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.