

Google App Engine: Free and still barely worth it - randomhack
http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/2008/04/Google-App-Engine-Free-and-still-barely-worth-it.aspx

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rob
First comment:

"Great post. Windows web hosting is still king and that will not change
anytime soon. Web hosting has grown such a loyal following that it still going
to be very popular. Most of the time businesses will choose Windows web
hosting over everything else because of the respect they have for Microsoft
and the products they produce."

WTF?

~~~
wmf
Blub thinking. People who have completely bought into the MS stack won't see
any value in App Engine.

------
iamelgringo
Google isn't about search, Google is all about the infrastructure. From my
perspective, Google's main competitive advantage has never really been their
dominance in search. I've always thought that their main innovations and their
chief advantage has been in terms of their infrastructure.

Arguably, Google has built the largest distributed computing cluster in the
world with proprietary OS and datastore that is finely tuned to run on that
cluster. They just don't advertise these facts too often. I'm sure that their
dataset is easily in the petascale, and I'm sure that a lot of it is running
in RAM to achieve the <400 millisecond response times they have.

So, compare Google's infrastructure expertise to your $6 hosting account at
Wally's Web Host, and I think that you start to see the difference. Wally
might well sell you 15,000 Gb/month of web transfer, but they _maybe_ might be
overselling what they can actually provide. And, how many other web hosts
offer to manage fault tolerant database replication for you? Heck, what's your
instance up time at Wally's Web Host? Last I checked, Google's had 15 minutes
of downtime since 2000.

With GAE, I Google isn't selling web hosting. What they are doing is offering
to outsource your sys admin duties for free. The verdict is still out, but I
would be interested in seeing the response of apps on GAE to first couple of
Slashdottings/Diggings/Boingboings. I'd venture a guess that they'll handle it
rather smoothly, and that the developer running the site will be able to
snooze through it, instead of panicking and trying to reboot the server, cache
the page in question, or have Apache serve the page as a static file. Not
having to panic each time your server pings your cell phone can only be a good
thing for developers.

~~~
greendestiny
App Engine isn't shared hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of 1 server. App
Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load.

~~~
SwellJoe
"App Engine is a portion of n servers automatically allocated by load."

Theoretically. Right now, unless I'm reading things wrong, the limits imposed
by the agreement are less than quite a small shared hosting account, and
pretty much any dedicated or VPS account, could serve each month. Is n
scalability really infinite, or even interesting, if it's less than a single
box could serve using standard tools?

I'm sure it'll expand in time, and maybe even in time to keep up with any app
you build on it that happens to be explosively successful. I'm just saying
that it's silly to imply that App Engine scales if you can't actually run
bigger applications on it than a single traditional host.

~~~
greendestiny
I'm not saying it will scale well, but it is designed to scale in a way a
shared host simply can't. If App Engine fails to scale because the bandwidth
is too expensive then Google can reduce the price. I don't think the article
even understands that this isn't simply another shared host. The joyent people
didn't get it with their 'give the people root'.

------
ashu
People just love misinterpreting products, comparing them to completely
unrelated things and just making noise. That's right. Making noise is the
goal. All else is secondary.

Can't people just say "Hey look, here's a new product which IS USEFUL to
somebody out there on earth and a damn nifty one at that." That somebody in
Google App Engine's case is a hacker who wants to quickly try out his hobbies
without worrying about all the mess that comes with managing a web host.

But no. We must compare. And we must make noise. Lots of it.

Perhaps it gives us a way to figure out which blogs / sites to NEVER visit.

~~~
randomhack
Perhaps. But OTOH the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being
generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary
when, according to the author, currently its only a nicely packaged free
webhost with many drawbacks. The operative word here is of course "currently".

edit : The article that the author links to is clearly over the top too so I
think this post is partly a very angry reaction to that article.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor
of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary..._

I just had a thought. Suppose that, hypothetically, several months ago a
service very much like the Google App Engine had been released by a small YC
company. And suppose that, hypothetically, that product was nearly out of beta
and was already hosting apps on a scalable platform with a standard set of
open-source APIs and minimal sysadmin hassle?

What level of press hysteria would this product be getting, do you think,
relative to this semi-complete beta from Google that doesn't yet have a clear
pricing or scaling model?

Would anyone on the Heroku team be willing to comment on the record? ;)

[Note: I haven't used Heroku enough to really compare it to Google App Engine.
However, _nobody_ has used Google App Engine enough to really compare it to
Heroku...]

------
toffer
My favorite quote from the linked article:

"Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources
Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications.
Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google
App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than
other companies, we just don't know."

No doubt a $6/mo. account at Dreamhost will scale better than Google.

~~~
randomhack
He is not saying that it will or will not scale better. He is only saying that
we simply dont have data to prove that Google will scale better. People are
invoking the Google brandname but a brandname shows almost nothing.

~~~
ashu
Normally, I would have agreed but in Google's case, there is so much evidence
to believe they will do a better job. Scaling is their biggest technological
achievement to date. The reason they are running away with products with such
great _performance_ is because of their success in getting things to scale
very well.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is just magical thinking. Google's services scale amazingly well because
their hardware and software were optimized, for _specific applications_ , by
_great programmers_ commanding _large budgets_. Google does not have a magic
bullet that can make any app in the world "scale", they are not going to rent
Steve Yegge to me for $14 per hour to help me design scalable apps, nor are
they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to ensure that
my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview will "scale"
out to 10 million hits per day.

Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations, it is going to have to pay
to exceed those limitations, and it is going to have to be carefully
architected in order to scale. The original poster notes, correctly, that half
of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-
month web host, and the other half -- the ones that will make or break the
value proposition -- haven't been stated yet.

~~~
apathy
_This is just magical thinking._

Not really -- this is "it's less effort for them to deploy everything on their
existing, robust tools" thinking. I personally don't second-guess it, because
once a tool proves itself worthy at the GOOG, it tends to stick around for a
long, long time. Some of my cave-man Python code is probably still kicking
around in ops/SRE. (It's hard to write really bad Python, although there have
been valiant efforts over the years, and we're sure to see many more)

Your skepticism is warranted, but I just think it's misplaced. The one thing
that Google has proven they can do as well as, perhaps better than, anyone
else is get tasks to run transparently across a whole shitload of computers
and datacenters. Maybe everyone there is turning evil nowadays, I don't know,
I can't know -- what I do know is that it would be more effort to turn around
and fuck up the existing building blocks than to simply open them up (with
appropriate restrictions) via GAE. That's all.

Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think
that you're off the mark. JMHO

 _nor are they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to
ensure that my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview
will "scale" out to 10 million hits per day._

If the price is right, I'd bet you they would rent it... That's really what
AWS is all about. Although it will be a while before the GOOG has entire
excess datacenters' worth of capacity -- somehow, Google always managed to
soak up all the deployed capacity and then some, at all times. As someone
coming from a supercomputing background, I thought that was really fucking
cool, because when you're deploying racks an 18-wheeler at a time, you might
expect some lag between powering up and going to 1mW steady. Nope.

I've never seen a company that could scale infrastructure like Google, and I
worked at IBM Microelectronics a couple years before GOOG, along with another
one of the biggest websites on the planet, and deployed my own multihomed
network in the interim (as mentioned elsewhere, one of my bigger triumps as an
'architect' was beating Microsoft at their own game with a staff of 4 people
during that time). No one I have ever seen comes close to Google in terms of
operational efficiency, and I've seen a lot over the years.

 _Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations_

No shit, that's why it's free. I honestly cannot see how those limitations
will include a lack of fault tolerance, the provision of which is their
biggest selling point (IMHO). Everything else (again IMHO) pales in
comparison.

 _The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations
are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host_

For certain conditions -- you can't be a Pythonista or the comparison goes out
the window. Moreover, if you create several GAE accounts (do it! do it! Just
because I worked there doesn't mean I don't support taking advantage of them),
you now have a framework for freely deploying a bunch of pilot projects for $0
down and $0/month.

Just _don't marry yourself to the Google toolset_ (Users, ObjectStore) too
tightly and you get a LOT of good shit for free. AWS is more open and more
loosely coupled, so for many (most?) non-larval startups it's probably the
better choice _at this point in time_.

But if you're a cubicle dweller plotting your escape? _FUCKING GO FOR IT,
MAN!_ The price is right (free) and Django is an awesome framework for pilot
projects. If you strike it big... well, burn that bridge when you come to it.

Oddly enough, I'm going to have to invoke DHH's "build first, scale later"
maxim here -- "build first, limit lockin, migrate later" for many people. Not
all, maybe not even most, but for individual developers with a little self-
discipline, this is a HUGE step.

And (this is killer) nobody says you can't farm our your long-running jobs to
AWS/EC2 and call them via REST from your GAE app. Just like the ticket for
urllib2 support is mostly about RESTful auth and data transfer. A _LOT_ of us
want to decouple GAE from those bits -- instead of complaining, some of us are
working on it, and it seems like Guido and others at Google are _supporting_
the effort.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by the GOOG's
internal disorganization and 'organic' (to be generous) growth pattern. ;-)

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think
that you're off the mark. JMHO_

Why, thank you! In this case, my writing may be completely off base, but it
has achieved its victory condition: It has drawn you out to provide a very
intelligent level of argument. ;)

And I am operating at a severe disadvantage... all I know about Google (and
about Python and Django, for that matter) is what I read in the papers. You
really can't learn much about what's going on inside Google from the papers.

That's a big part of the problem here: with Google Apps the company seems to
be gearing up to make a transition toward more transparency, but they're not
quite there yet. I am fully willing to admit that Google's infrastructure
kicks the butt of a $7 web host... _once I know what I'm getting, what the
charge is, and what the service level will be_. I certainly agree that the
various limitations we can see now -- Python only, limited static files,
limits on peak bandwidth, no SSL for now, blah blah blah -- will all be
forgivable, even trivial, once we have confidence that Google will deliver
cheap scalability and rock-solid operational performance -- and once there are
well-understood approaches and tools for deploying Google Apps without
"marrying oneself to the Google toolset". But for much of their history
Google's reputation has been kind of like Batman's reputation: They're known
to be superheroes, they have many wonderful toys, they use them mostly for
good and we're very grateful... but they operate in the shadows, and folks
often complain that it's hard to get them on the phone to explain exactly why
your pagerank just dropped by fifty spots overnight, or exactly how they
control your ad revenue for false clicks.

I don't attribute any of that to malice, though. And it's early in the history
of the _beta_ of Google Apps (a real beta, not one of those legendary eternal
"betas"), so we must be patient. Certainly your words are cause for optimism.

------
cstejerean
If the ease of deployment was the only feature App Engine had it would still
be worth it. Running "appcfg.py update path_to_app/" to deploy your Python app
beats all other options.

And anyone complaining about static files and cron jobs doesn't understand
that those don't belong on your application server anyway. Google is providing
scaling for the application server and the data storage. Static files and cron
jobs can be easily scaled. Database servers not so much.

