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I have a few applications running on App Engine and am using Google Apps to connect domains and do business e-mail. I've had these apps for over 2 years now and
by jwheeler79 13y ago
I have a few applications running on App Engine and am using Google Apps to connect domains and do business e-mail. I've had these apps for over 2 years now and they are my livelihood. I'm a Passive Income Hacker.
When App Engine and Google Apps made their debut, I poured hours into learning them. I evangelized them to other developers and balked at the idea of vendor lock-in affecting me. I knew that Google's "Do no evil" mantra was probably hyperbole, but I figured they couldn't be worse than Microsoft.
I COMPLETELY regret using App Engine and building a business based on Google technologies. I will not make the same mistake again. Since I have launched my apps, Google has
1. Completely changed the App Engine pricing model from one based on CPU time to datastore writes.
2. Deprecated their first attempt at a datastore and replaced it with one that costs 3x as much (called HRD). There's lots of reports of people having problems with their migration tools.
3. Created a $500/mo support plan that you need in order to get any sort of help from their engineers--even when you have a disruption localized to your environment.
4. Deprecated the ability to write to the Blobstore using an experimental API - However the API was experimental for 3 or 4 years, so a lot of people grew to depend on it.
5. Removed the ability to associate a domain with your app engine account for free through Google Apps. Now you have to pay $50/year or $5/month and you get an app engine credit you may or may not use.
6. Have taken away e-mail quota for new applications so you can only send 100 e-mails a day and you have to file a support request if you want to ramp it up. You may or may not be allowed.
7. Forced users to upgrade their MapReduce version to a new one which uses a completely different API and requires significant code rewrites.
8. Maintained a "take it or leave it" attitude with an iron fist.
When I started with App Engine. I bought into the idea that I'd have them take care of the infrastructure and I could "sit back and scale out." I've had to put so much work into maintaining my apps because of their infrastructural changes it's ridiculous. If I would have just gone with a VPS or EC2, I might have had to replicate a database and write some scripts to automate backups, but at least I would've been able to decide if I wanted to change my code or not. With App Engine, I've been completely at Google's mercy. All that, and NO database joins :-(
- recuter 13y agoDeprecating API's with repeated warnings and a long wind down period is perfectly acceptable. You were able to use the old Datastore & Blobstore for what, years? The $500/mo support plan is comparable to Amazon EC2. The email quotas and free tier in general were very generous, I don't understand the complaint that you can "only" send 100 e-mails for free - Amazon SES, Sendgrid, and all the others have similar limits in place. Emails cost fractions of pennies to send and its a simple API or SMTP, you can switch to any of the other providers. Bing to find one that gives you 12k transactional emails for free. :0) I agree the pricing changes shakeout came as an unpleasant surprise, but there's no free lunch. At least its a profitable/viable product now and won't be killed like Reader, I'm actually happy for that long term.
- jwheeler79 13y agoAnother major problem I have with the Datastore deprecation is the precedent it set. Datastore was a GA feature AFAIK. So, there's no real distinction between GA and experimental now. If something doesn't work out for Google, experimental or not, they're going to can it--that's the message they sent. They should've grandfathered people over and just bit the bullet. Maybe come up with a rule like: if you don't write to the old Datastore for 90 days, you never get it again. With that being said, long grace periods don't matter when you've got a terabyte of data in that thing--For me and a lot of developers, it's going to be risky business to migrate from Datastore to HRD, and I dread it. I'm not paying them to dread their infrastructural issues. No. That's the opposite of what I'm paying them for. The problem with at first having practically unlimited e-mail and then the new restriction is it limits the type of apps you can build without their permission. I understand the need to protect against misuse, but you'd think they would've gotten it right from day one since they manage the largest e-mail service on the planet. I don't know if you were there during the early days or not, but one of their strengths was support was very accessible. You could write about an issue on the newsgroup and an engineer would contact you personally, go into your app, unstuck your indexes or whatever. Going from that level of service to $500/mo once you're hooked stinks. It's the old bait and switch all the way.
- jbigelow76 13y agoQuick aside, "Passive Income Hacker" is a great turn of phrase, something that could maybe have a brand built around it. Apparently someone else agreed, the .com was snatched up sometime in the last two hours.
- jwheeler79 13y agolol - no kidding
- dolphenstein 13y agoTotally agree with the sentiment, but just a minor nitpick. You can still get a free Google Apps account for a domain name BUT you have to go through the App Engine admin console to do it. In Application Settings>Add Domain there is a "Signup for Google Apps" link that will let you create a single user account for free. They make you jump through hoops to get it!
- jwheeler79 13y agoNo - they changed this. See this post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-appengine/Announcing$20a$20credit/google-appengine/jC_K-YlmXhM/XPJYq1HUgusJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-appengine/...