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We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostl

We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostly in the eyes of Google's competitors. For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs. App Engine is a no brainer for me now. The amount I save on not needing an ops team for a long long time overcomes any slight misgivings that Google might abolish App Engine in a few years. I don't think App Engine is going anywhere, BTW. You look at the number of languages they are adding, the number of people they are hiring ... to compare that to Google Reader is a bit ridiculous.

phillmv 13y ago
Aren't you still stuck using their implementation of BigTable? I forget if that's changed. The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
  You mean Datastore. Yeah. I kinda like Datastore though. Maybe I'm just use to it. The limitations just make sense if you want to scale. They also have a RDBS you can use though ... I've never used it. Still haven't figured out a clean way to do geospatial stuff with Datastore, so that is one big caveat.
  - tburch 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you're doing, but using GeoHashes on GAE worked pretty well for me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
    - TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
      What did you do to get around the grid adjacency problem, where adjacent points can have different prefixes?
- nlake44 13y ago
  I've been working on AppScale (https://github.com/AppScale/appscale https://github.com/AppScale/appscale), the open source implementation of GAE, which implements the datastore API, along with most of the other GAE APIs. Your app is portable to any other hosting environment if the need ever comes.
  - mark_l_watson 13y ago
    I have looked at AppScale several times in the past, but have never run it. Can you share any experiences using it in production?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it. How is that an advantage over App Engine, given the existence of AppScale? [1] [1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-brings-choice-to-google-app-engine-developers.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-bri...
deleted 13y ago
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jmagoon 13y ago
Do you have a link or some info about the languages they are adding? We're very curious over here--would love to know if they plan to add support for something we already have.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
  I don't have any links ... but Dart support is coming (already have Python, Java, Go, and PHP). Also, with managed VMs you can basically run anything you want and still get Google to manage things for you. Manage VMs give you a sort of script you can define that apt-get installs the packages you need. You can also use Docker if you like to make your own VM images. Haven't used it yet, but it looks good based on the demos. They showed a demo with Node.js today.
  - mark_l_watson 13y ago
    That is good news about Dart support, so I hope you are correct about that! While no longer necessary because of managed VMs, it would be very good to have Ruby support also. I tried JRuby and Sinatra on AppEngine many years ago but the long loading request times were a killer. Plain Ruby and Sinatra would be good.
rogerbinns 13y ago
Have you found the configuration in appengine where you can limit the number of instances? It is highly annoying to us that Google is happy to run unlimited instances (all of which benefit them financially) but provide no way for customers (we are on their Enterprise plan) to limit that. Heck they can't even show us what the various charges are and point to a third party chrome extension.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
  You can configure the metrics that cause a new instance to be launched. I forget where that particular setting is ... somewhere in the console I'm sure. We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.
  - rogerbinns 13y ago
    There is no solution in the admin settings, nor according to their enterprise support. It is plain old tough luck. The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it. Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg they will start 4 at once even though only 1 is needed for the load). At one point they were starting hundreds of instances due to some of our aggressive inter-app traffic (thundering herd problem). Things would have worked fine if we could limit the number of instances, but tough luck there. It required considerable engineering and tuning to make the problem go away that would have trivially been solved (in the short/medium term) by limiting instance numbers.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      Hmm, you must be talking about something else, but there's a "min/max instances" slider in the console. I have set it to 1 for many of my apps, and they never go over 1 (or at least I don't get billed for it).

phillmv 13y ago

Aren't you still stuck using their implementation of BigTable? I forget if that's changed. The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
You mean Datastore. Yeah. I kinda like Datastore though. Maybe I'm just use to it. The limitations just make sense if you want to scale. They also have a RDBS you can use though ... I've never used it. Still haven't figured out a clean way to do geospatial stuff with Datastore, so that is one big caveat.
- tburch 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you're doing, but using GeoHashes on GAE worked pretty well for me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
  - TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
    What did you do to get around the grid adjacency problem, where adjacent points can have different prefixes?
nlake44 13y ago
I've been working on AppScale (https://github.com/AppScale/appscale https://github.com/AppScale/appscale), the open source implementation of GAE, which implements the datastore API, along with most of the other GAE APIs. Your app is portable to any other hosting environment if the need ever comes.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  I have looked at AppScale several times in the past, but have never run it. Can you share any experiences using it in production?
dragonwriter 13y ago
> The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it. How is that an advantage over App Engine, given the existence of AppScale? [1] [1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-brings-choice-to-google-app-engine-developers.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-bri...

deleted 13y ago

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jmagoon 13y ago

Do you have a link or some info about the languages they are adding? We're very curious over here--would love to know if they plan to add support for something we already have.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
I don't have any links ... but Dart support is coming (already have Python, Java, Go, and PHP). Also, with managed VMs you can basically run anything you want and still get Google to manage things for you. Manage VMs give you a sort of script you can define that apt-get installs the packages you need. You can also use Docker if you like to make your own VM images. Haven't used it yet, but it looks good based on the demos. They showed a demo with Node.js today.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  That is good news about Dart support, so I hope you are correct about that! While no longer necessary because of managed VMs, it would be very good to have Ruby support also. I tried JRuby and Sinatra on AppEngine many years ago but the long loading request times were a killer. Plain Ruby and Sinatra would be good.

rogerbinns 13y ago

Have you found the configuration in appengine where you can limit the number of instances? It is highly annoying to us that Google is happy to run unlimited instances (all of which benefit them financially) but provide no way for customers (we are on their Enterprise plan) to limit that. Heck they can't even show us what the various charges are and point to a third party chrome extension.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
You can configure the metrics that cause a new instance to be launched. I forget where that particular setting is ... somewhere in the console I'm sure. We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  There is no solution in the admin settings, nor according to their enterprise support. It is plain old tough luck. The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it. Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg they will start 4 at once even though only 1 is needed for the load). At one point they were starting hundreds of instances due to some of our aggressive inter-app traffic (thundering herd problem). Things would have worked fine if we could limit the number of instances, but tough luck there. It required considerable engineering and tuning to make the problem go away that would have trivially been solved (in the short/medium term) by limiting instance numbers.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Hmm, you must be talking about something else, but there's a "min/max instances" slider in the console. I have set it to 1 for many of my apps, and they never go over 1 (or at least I don't get billed for it).