5 ms·

I wouldn't host anything of importance on GAE, since Google has this odd fascination with shuttering services with zero recourse for its user-base.

jmillikin 13y ago
Which paid services have Google shut down?
- asdfologist 13y ago
  Google Checkout.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  Google Answers
codonaut 13y ago
They do have a history of that, but AppEngine has a huge footprint right now, and Google is only expanding it's cloud platform with Compute Engine, redoing UI, etc. They're clearly investing a lot here, I don't think they'll close this as easily as Google Checkout or others
- ryan-allen 13y ago
  I supposed, but would you risk your business by locking yourself in to their platform?
  - zafirk 13y ago
    Peter Magnusson from the App Engine team recently wrote about the lock-in argument: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-what-lock-in/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-...
  - j_s 13y ago
    I recently discovered this project as a replacement if you're using Java on App Engine: http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf
    - kodablah 13y ago
      There is also https://github.com/AppScale/appscale https://github.com/AppScale/appscale
- benatkin 13y ago
  I thought Google Reader was too big to be shut down too. It had a small % of all users but a large % of power users.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    Free services are not guarnateed to remain open. Paid services can continue to live for a long time until market share shrinks so low. GAE can't. It has a deep root in the market.
mountaineer 13y ago
That, or drastically changing it's pricing.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Yes, or also not investing in it. GAE already feels like they're more interested in adding features that result in new customers over fixing bugs for the benefit of existing customers. Of the ~6000 defects ever opened for App Engine, ~1400 of them are still open. (issue tracker: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list)
ajessup 13y ago
Hey folks - App Engine actually has an explicit deprecation policy spelled out to make sure this can't happen. See https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  It clearly says they can do anything they want, but must give you 90 days of warning.
  - benatkin 13y ago
    Yeah, and in those 90 days if things break, they may not work as hard to get it back online, as they would have if there wasn't a deprecation.
  - orf 13y ago
    They would have to be suicidal to shutter appengine and only give 90 days notice. Won't happen.
    - evan_ 13y ago
      "Suicidal"? Realistically what would happen, do you think? They shut down Google Reader, which is probably used by 1000+ times as many people. The average user of Google Apps Engine apps probably has no idea where the service is hosted and will never understand why they should blame downtime on Google.
      - alanctgardner2 13y ago
        Comparing this to Google Reader is ridiculous. Google Reader was free, and it had a small potential market. Even if Google Reader had 100% of the market (which I'm sure people will say it did), the number of potential users was not huge, and the amount of revenue they could bring in was pretty small. Even if App Engine isn't tremendously valuable now, it's a growth market, and easily monetizable. Google isn't going to burn a bunch of customers who could be - if they end up being the next Netflix - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue. I wish people would stop with the hyperbolic Google Reader stuff. Google's bread and butter are web ads, and they're a shrinking market. As Facebook can attest, mobile is hard to monetize, and it makes a lot of sense to focus on areas where people can just pay you directly. AWS has already validated this market, Google has the capacity to deliver, they've just fumbled the execution wildly.
elq 13y ago
I'm under the impression that app engine is heavily used inside of google and its use is being evangelized. This leads me to believe that it won't be killed
- petersmagnusson 13y ago
  Correct, heavily used internally. In fact I'll be talking about that at Cloud Connect in Chicago soon.
petersmagnusson 13y ago
honestly, i thought HN crowd was above continued "omg reader shut down google can pull the plug on anything". (a) App Engine specifically (and Google Cloud Platform in general) is being sold to enterprise as well, with SLA and deprecation policies. (b) App Engine has been around since 2008 and is growing VERY strongly. (c) Even if worst case happens, fine, move your app to somewhere else. Deprecation is officially a year, plenty of time to move. Any company can deprecate any products. GAE has huge usage (over 3 million applications), and we have two (and counting) compatibility partners (CapeDwarf and AppScale) that you can move. (d) GAE does not lock you in. Won't rehash arguments here, see: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/0/110401818717224273095/posts/Uoj3pmhbCkH https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/0/110401818717224273095/po... cheers, P.
- saurik 13y ago
  They've shut down much more than Reader (seriously, who said anything about Reader? was that even a service a developer could rely on?). Even APIs they don't shut down, such as their OpenID login stack, they routinely replace (dropping a lot of the maintenance and support, which leads to weird failures) with "exciting new APIs" that have no migration path, such as with G+ Login (I am thankfully safe from this issue, as I did something crazy with Portable Contacts that have me Google user IDs that I started storing before we even knew what they meant; so, to be clear: I have very little personal axe to grind on this, but others should be wary). They thankfully decided to just go commercial-ish with Translate, but the same can't be said about Charts (which had a long deprecation window and a replacement, but the replacement is a fundamentally different kind of API that has different browser requirements and even different charting capabilities). They also happily will just shut down things like Google Checkout and offer no replacement at all for key use cases like "sell a physical product" (if you sell digital goods, you might be able to switch to Google Wallet Objects, an "exciting new API" released a couple weeks before Checkout was deprecated). Google Checkout was certainly also targetted at enterprises, had a clear business model behind it, and had existed since 2006: everyone who built on that one (again, not me: I avoided Checkout like the plague) got only six months to migrate to a different provider (and figure out how they are going to handle any refund requests from recent customers, which will surely be horribly irritating as they won't be able to just tell Checkout to refund the transaction anymore). There is simply a patterned lack of care for people who may have built things on their stacks. (Yes, some services have deprecation policies, but let's not forget that those guarantees were themselves attempts to regain faith due to a previous round of services that had been axed with little warning ;P. After the anger died down from that they started reversing course, shortening or removing the policy entirely after the previous guarantees expire. I can only imagine the people who keep citing these deprecation policies don't have much memory of how this has all been going down over the past few years ;P.) http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-depr... Yes: you might be able to find alternatives to migrate towards... but if, by just acknowledging this pattern, you could avoid that bullet--which could easily come at the "least convenient moment" (such as when you now have some competition out of nowhere while attempting to launch a new product and raise finding), requiring you to suddenly drop everything for a couple weeks coming up with a new implementation of key infrastructure before the clock runs out--why wouldn't you?
data_app 13y ago
That is the talking point of Google haters. Sounds like I am listening to Hannity on Hacker News.

jmillikin 13y ago

Which paid services have Google shut down?

asdfologist 13y ago
Google Checkout.
prostoalex 13y ago
Google Answers

codonaut 13y ago

They do have a history of that, but AppEngine has a huge footprint right now, and Google is only expanding it's cloud platform with Compute Engine, redoing UI, etc. They're clearly investing a lot here, I don't think they'll close this as easily as Google Checkout or others

ryan-allen 13y ago
I supposed, but would you risk your business by locking yourself in to their platform?
- zafirk 13y ago
  Peter Magnusson from the App Engine team recently wrote about the lock-in argument: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-what-lock-in/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-...
- j_s 13y ago
  I recently discovered this project as a replacement if you're using Java on App Engine: http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf
  - kodablah 13y ago
    There is also https://github.com/AppScale/appscale https://github.com/AppScale/appscale
benatkin 13y ago
I thought Google Reader was too big to be shut down too. It had a small % of all users but a large % of power users.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Free services are not guarnateed to remain open. Paid services can continue to live for a long time until market share shrinks so low. GAE can't. It has a deep root in the market.

mountaineer 13y ago

That, or drastically changing it's pricing.

jfoster 13y ago
Yes, or also not investing in it. GAE already feels like they're more interested in adding features that result in new customers over fixing bugs for the benefit of existing customers. Of the ~6000 defects ever opened for App Engine, ~1400 of them are still open. (issue tracker: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list)

ajessup 13y ago

Hey folks - App Engine actually has an explicit deprecation policy spelled out to make sure this can't happen. See https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms https://developers.google.com/appengine/terms

jcampbell1 13y ago
It clearly says they can do anything they want, but must give you 90 days of warning.
- benatkin 13y ago
  Yeah, and in those 90 days if things break, they may not work as hard to get it back online, as they would have if there wasn't a deprecation.
- orf 13y ago
  They would have to be suicidal to shutter appengine and only give 90 days notice. Won't happen.
  - evan_ 13y ago
    "Suicidal"? Realistically what would happen, do you think? They shut down Google Reader, which is probably used by 1000+ times as many people. The average user of Google Apps Engine apps probably has no idea where the service is hosted and will never understand why they should blame downtime on Google.
    - alanctgardner2 13y ago
      Comparing this to Google Reader is ridiculous. Google Reader was free, and it had a small potential market. Even if Google Reader had 100% of the market (which I'm sure people will say it did), the number of potential users was not huge, and the amount of revenue they could bring in was pretty small. Even if App Engine isn't tremendously valuable now, it's a growth market, and easily monetizable. Google isn't going to burn a bunch of customers who could be - if they end up being the next Netflix - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue. I wish people would stop with the hyperbolic Google Reader stuff. Google's bread and butter are web ads, and they're a shrinking market. As Facebook can attest, mobile is hard to monetize, and it makes a lot of sense to focus on areas where people can just pay you directly. AWS has already validated this market, Google has the capacity to deliver, they've just fumbled the execution wildly.

elq 13y ago

I'm under the impression that app engine is heavily used inside of google and its use is being evangelized. This leads me to believe that it won't be killed

petersmagnusson 13y ago
Correct, heavily used internally. In fact I'll be talking about that at Cloud Connect in Chicago soon.

petersmagnusson 13y ago

honestly, i thought HN crowd was above continued "omg reader shut down google can pull the plug on anything". (a) App Engine specifically (and Google Cloud Platform in general) is being sold to enterprise as well, with SLA and deprecation policies. (b) App Engine has been around since 2008 and is growing VERY strongly. (c) Even if worst case happens, fine, move your app to somewhere else. Deprecation is officially a year, plenty of time to move. Any company can deprecate any products. GAE has huge usage (over 3 million applications), and we have two (and counting) compatibility partners (CapeDwarf and AppScale) that you can move. (d) GAE does not lock you in. Won't rehash arguments here, see: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/0/110401818717224273095/posts/Uoj3pmhbCkH https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/0/110401818717224273095/po... cheers, P.

saurik 13y ago
They've shut down much more than Reader (seriously, who said anything about Reader? was that even a service a developer could rely on?). Even APIs they don't shut down, such as their OpenID login stack, they routinely replace (dropping a lot of the maintenance and support, which leads to weird failures) with "exciting new APIs" that have no migration path, such as with G+ Login (I am thankfully safe from this issue, as I did something crazy with Portable Contacts that have me Google user IDs that I started storing before we even knew what they meant; so, to be clear: I have very little personal axe to grind on this, but others should be wary). They thankfully decided to just go commercial-ish with Translate, but the same can't be said about Charts (which had a long deprecation window and a replacement, but the replacement is a fundamentally different kind of API that has different browser requirements and even different charting capabilities). They also happily will just shut down things like Google Checkout and offer no replacement at all for key use cases like "sell a physical product" (if you sell digital goods, you might be able to switch to Google Wallet Objects, an "exciting new API" released a couple weeks before Checkout was deprecated). Google Checkout was certainly also targetted at enterprises, had a clear business model behind it, and had existed since 2006: everyone who built on that one (again, not me: I avoided Checkout like the plague) got only six months to migrate to a different provider (and figure out how they are going to handle any refund requests from recent customers, which will surely be horribly irritating as they won't be able to just tell Checkout to refund the transaction anymore). There is simply a patterned lack of care for people who may have built things on their stacks. (Yes, some services have deprecation policies, but let's not forget that those guarantees were themselves attempts to regain faith due to a previous round of services that had been axed with little warning ;P. After the anger died down from that they started reversing course, shortening or removing the policy entirely after the previous guarantees expire. I can only imagine the people who keep citing these deprecation policies don't have much memory of how this has all been going down over the past few years ;P.) http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-depr... Yes: you might be able to find alternatives to migrate towards... but if, by just acknowledging this pattern, you could avoid that bullet--which could easily come at the "least convenient moment" (such as when you now have some competition out of nowhere while attempting to launch a new product and raise finding), requiring you to suddenly drop everything for a couple weeks coming up with a new implementation of key infrastructure before the clock runs out--why wouldn't you?

data_app 13y ago

That is the talking point of Google haters. Sounds like I am listening to Hannity on Hacker News.