

Going from loving AppEngine to hating it in 9 days. - StavrosK
http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/going-from-loving-appengine-to-hating-it-in-9

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jmitcheson
The author's experience sure sounds frustrating, but they sound like problems
with App Engine's administration rather than the actual platform or SDK's.
Here is the relevant part

"I head over to the AppEngine billing page and enable billing. However, after
enabling billing, I realized I had used the wrong credit card, and tried to
disable it again so I could change credit cards. AppEngine notified me that,
by doing this, I would not be able to re-enable billing for another seven
days"

For those unfamiliar with App Engine, enabling billing unlocks certain usage
quotas and platform features.

~~~
StavrosK
That's exactly it. However, the lack of support and braindead billing/limit
policies was what actually lost us money, rather than any platform failing.

I also forgot to mention that the huge queue of mails that couldn't be sent
used 5 instances all the time to iterate, so that kept using resources and
costing us money for doing nothing.

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chipsy
I found a reasonably safe way to use App Engine:

-Make the "app" part of a stack, not the entire app.

-Only do one task at a time.

-Fit the task well within free quotas.

This goes against the nominal model of the service, but it's effective as a
way to supplement a stack which needs some "grunt work" offloaded, and if you
encounter problems, rewriting elsewhere is not painful.

------
baremetal
What do they expect using an external service to provide such an essential
component of their product.

~~~
StavrosK
It's not an external service, the entire product runs on AppEngine.

