

Ask HN: What's up with Google Appengine? - petervandijck

Are people actually using it? I get the feeling it never really took off, it's certainly no competition for AWS &#38; Co. But it being free hosting and all, I would have expected more action. I would have expected someone to make a Wordpress clone that one could then host for free on there, etc. Am I missing something?
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ordinaryman
_Are people actually using it?_

I quit my job betting on it.

You could actually build pretty decent services over GAE, while remaining
within the free quota, if you can be efficient with resources. Billing rates
are affordable too.

I am currently working on an ad-supported CRM (<http://crm.ifreetools.com>)
and online application builder (<http://creator.ifreetools.com>) over Google
App Engine. Both are multi-tenant apps and iFreeTools Creator is probably the
only online app builder which enables building customizable apps online over
Google App Engine.

The platform does have its restrictions, primarily to enable apps to scale
well. If one can get comfortable with working within those restrictions, it
gets easier.

 _Wordpress clone_

You should try out Bloggart : <http://github.com/Arachnid/bloggart>

..and its accompanying posts, aiming to also introduce developers to the GAE
platform : [http://blog.notdot.net/2009/10/Writing-a-blog-system-on-
App-...](http://blog.notdot.net/2009/10/Writing-a-blog-system-on-App-Engine)

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va_coder
The CRM tool looks really nice.

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mark_l_watson
AppEngine is being used, but I would bet not nearly to the degree that AWS is.
One thing that Google could do right away is to offer a (hopefully reasonable)
monthly fee to keep instances active - loading request times are a bummer and
it takes some effort to keep them reasonable (e.g., use Python, or use Java
without JDO or anything that takes a while to initialize).

Some things are great with AppEngine: admin web app, ease of deployment, and
being able to write Wave robots easily.

For long loading request times, it would be great to pay perhaps $5 to $10 a
month for always keeping one instance active.

~~~
va_coder
You would think the biggest, most successful data infrastructure company on
the planet could figure out a way to keep warm JVM's running at a reasonable
price.

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mbenjaminsmith
Used if for a year and then dropped it. They could make it work if 1) your
code was portable 2) they had an actual admin team you could talk to in
realtime 3) they dumped a handful of silly limitations.

Not a bad choice for a free CDN though. I still use it for that.

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iamdave
Heroku happened.

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primemod3
Frequent outages and "write to datastore" errors made me sad. (This was in
2009, don't know whether these issues have been fixed, but I won't be going
back.)

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phatbyte
I know some people use it as a web proxy :P

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tyleroderkirk
E.g. <https://proxy1china.appspot.com>

