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Do people really use App engine? I mean that is the most limited cloud platform of all, its interface is just horrible and confusing and it supports just a hand

by aikah 11y ago

Do people really use App engine? I mean that is the most limited cloud platform of all, its interface is just horrible and confusing and it supports just a handful of technologies with drastic limitations. Who in their right mind would want to pay for this? It is a bad product, and the very definition of vendor lock-in. I'm curious about actual users.

zoidb 11y ago
as far as I know Khan Academy still runs on google app engine
- nly 11y ago
  Snapchat
jfoster 11y ago
Technically, there are vendors other than Google. Red Hat have an implementation called CapeDwarf. There's also AppScale. There was another called TyphoonAE, but I haven't noticed any signs of life from that one in quite some time. The big unknown for me is how usable any of those implementations are, and whether there is such a thing as a decent migration path (for data) from Google to them, and vice-versa.
tnuc 11y ago
For a system that serves up webpages and has a decent database back end, it works and works well. The overhead required to fit what you are serving to fit within App Engine isn't major. With a lot of other systems you have a lot of infrastructure type issues that you have to deal with. What it costs on setting up App Engine, you save on configuring a different system. You are not going to get App Engine to do what you would normally use for a server and yes it is limited. App Engine appears to have ceased new development and is now moving toward managed VMs. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ There are a lot of good and bad tools and technologies. App Engine is a great tool for some things but useless for others.
stickfigure 11y ago
Do people really use App engine? Yes. I'm one of them, and I keep coming back to it. The short answer for why is that no matter what you think of it, GAE delivers on one basic promise: No ops/devops. I've scaled applications to thousands of QPS with teams of one or two people, and I never even had to adjust the # of instances (scaling is automatic). I've never had to worry about the database getting overloaded. It's just "write code and deploy". Out of curiosity, what cloud provider interface do you think is better? Certainly not AWS. And which limitations do you consider so drastic?
- jfoster 11y ago
  What you mention is what I love about it, too. What I don't like is the uncertainty; feels as though Google may kill it at any moment, and they do a really poor job of working on features that people care about. (SSL on naked domains, modern language support, etc.)
  - stickfigure 11y ago
    I get the impression that Google has been putting a lot of resources into GAE all this time, but mostly into retiring technical debt and integrating it with the new expansive "cloud platform" vision. I also get the impression that nothing happens quickly in Google-land :-( That said, even "as-is" without any major changes on the horizon, GAE is pretty solid. My only major complaint right now is Java8, but given the choice between suffering with Java7 for another year and hiring an ops staff, I'll pick the former. I had to make "the platform" choice again just a couple weeks ago for a new startup, and still picked old-style GAE - not even the new Managed VMs, which I don't think are reliable enough yet. Naked domains aren't an itch of mine, apparently.
  - mkawia 11y ago
    They can't kill it , Snapchat runs on it and they are so proud of that , they even mentioned it in the last Google io

by aikah 11y ago

zoidb 11y ago

as far as I know Khan Academy still runs on google app engine

nly 11y ago
Snapchat

jfoster 11y ago

Technically, there are vendors other than Google. Red Hat have an implementation called CapeDwarf. There's also AppScale. There was another called TyphoonAE, but I haven't noticed any signs of life from that one in quite some time. The big unknown for me is how usable any of those implementations are, and whether there is such a thing as a decent migration path (for data) from Google to them, and vice-versa.

tnuc 11y ago

For a system that serves up webpages and has a decent database back end, it works and works well. The overhead required to fit what you are serving to fit within App Engine isn't major. With a lot of other systems you have a lot of infrastructure type issues that you have to deal with. What it costs on setting up App Engine, you save on configuring a different system. You are not going to get App Engine to do what you would normally use for a server and yes it is limited. App Engine appears to have ceased new development and is now moving toward managed VMs. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ There are a lot of good and bad tools and technologies. App Engine is a great tool for some things but useless for others.

stickfigure 11y ago

Do people really use App engine? Yes. I'm one of them, and I keep coming back to it. The short answer for why is that no matter what you think of it, GAE delivers on one basic promise: No ops/devops. I've scaled applications to thousands of QPS with teams of one or two people, and I never even had to adjust the # of instances (scaling is automatic). I've never had to worry about the database getting overloaded. It's just "write code and deploy". Out of curiosity, what cloud provider interface do you think is better? Certainly not AWS. And which limitations do you consider so drastic?

jfoster 11y ago
What you mention is what I love about it, too. What I don't like is the uncertainty; feels as though Google may kill it at any moment, and they do a really poor job of working on features that people care about. (SSL on naked domains, modern language support, etc.)
- stickfigure 11y ago
  I get the impression that Google has been putting a lot of resources into GAE all this time, but mostly into retiring technical debt and integrating it with the new expansive "cloud platform" vision. I also get the impression that nothing happens quickly in Google-land :-( That said, even "as-is" without any major changes on the horizon, GAE is pretty solid. My only major complaint right now is Java8, but given the choice between suffering with Java7 for another year and hiring an ops staff, I'll pick the former. I had to make "the platform" choice again just a couple weeks ago for a new startup, and still picked old-style GAE - not even the new Managed VMs, which I don't think are reliable enough yet. Naked domains aren't an itch of mine, apparently.
- mkawia 11y ago
  They can't kill it , Snapchat runs on it and they are so proud of that , they even mentioned it in the last Google io