

What are Google's long-term plans for Google App Engine? - rnc000

GAE as a platform is really great (good scalability, no maintenance overhead, low latency in most cases) but the extremely slow pace (compared to Amazon Web Services) for introducing new APIs and maturing the existing (ex.: increasing quotas and charging for the Search API, Prospective Search) makes me wonder: is Google really investing enough engineers to mature its platform? Will it pull the plug and stop offering it? Is the Premier support option really helpful? What are it's long-term plans? Where's the roadmap? These are very important questions considering it's PaaS and you'll be deeply committed to it "by design" once you Go Google.
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RyanZAG
I think no discussion of GAE's future should ever miss these very important
options:

<http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/index.html>

<http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf>

So even if Google shuts down GAE, you could transition without too much
trouble.

Regarding the question itself: GAE is just a friendly face on top of Google's
internal systems, and Google is deploying all of their new stuff onto it
directly for ease of maintenance. GAE is also well charged so that Google is
making a profit off it, so they have no reason to shut it down.

The big issue is if you are a small developer who cannot shell out huge
amounts for usage charges. Google is targeting GAE more towards Corporate and
the kind of budget a large business has, rather than towards a guy in his
basement doing hobby work. The charges are still pretty low though, but it's
not unlikely that they may raise in future.

Conclusion:

Deep pockets? Go for it, you can't really find a better scaling option for the
cost.

Want free hosting? Not a good choice, look elsewhere.

Indy dev who wants to pay very little and is willing to optimize caching to
lower costs? Solid choice, you can get the charges very low for even high
demand sites. Keep a sharp watch on billing trends, and test out your site on
AppScale / CapeDwarf to make sure you can transition off quickly if billing
gets out of hand.

~~~
sk55
"Want free hosting? Not a good choice, look elsewhere."

What are some better alternatives? And why are they better?

I've used GAE for some toy apps and a few websites with low traffic. It works
great.

~~~
m0shen
I'm not sure which criteria he's using for "better", but these guys give you a
lot, plus flexibility for nothing:

<http://www.appfog.com/>

<https://openshift.redhat.com/app/>

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TeeWEE
Lots of internal apps at google are written on top of appengine. For example
the android developers portal is written on top of it. So i woudnt worry too
much.

~~~
rnc000
Good point. But still, it's hard to believe that it's taking _years_ for
Google to add to GAE a mature Search API and support for multiple datacenter
locations, which are things Google does better than anyone.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Developers outside of Google are not really ready to cope with the daily
reality of being inside Google. Things that Google does "easily" like search
and multihoming with replication and failover and so forth are actually
tremendously difficult. App Engine customers are not willing to embrace the
limitations that Google's architecture dictates (indeed, App Engine customers
are constantly complaining about the few such very minor limitations to which
they are already exposed.)

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kawera
I use GAE on a few b2b, process oriented webapps of my own and also do GAE
consulting for large customers.

I've met a few times with their evangelists/sales/support people in my
country. They have always been very enthusiastic and are pushing very hard for
adoption by large corps and universities. I don't have the impression they
will pull the plug but... you never know.

As for the Premier support option, the few times I needed it they were very
responsive and helpful; I do recommend it if possible.

To a solo entrepreneur like me, GAE is a great option and I can't imagine
myself managing servers and a full stack, even if it is just
building/deploying an AMI. GAE is just too easy.

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bitcartel
This question applies to _all_ proprietary platforms. By tightly integrating
your application or service, you're pretty much at the mercy of the PAAS
provider.

To avoid vendor lock-in, check out the OpenShift platform [1] from Red Hat.
It's open source [2] so you can set it up on your own servers if you felt Red
Hat weren't providing the service you required.

[1] <https://openshift.redhat.com/community/paas>

[2] [https://openshift.redhat.com/community/open-
source/download-...](https://openshift.redhat.com/community/open-
source/download-origin)

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genwin
Lack of info from Google is a big problem for me. Who knows what the memcache
quota is, for example? [1] They drastically raised prices with little warning.
GAE doesn't seem professional enough to depend one's business on it, unless
it's a relatively tiny app.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8276292/google-app-
engine...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8276292/google-app-engine-
memcache-api-quotas)

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recuter
Understandably for a PAAS they tell you to treat memcache as if it wasn't
there and make no promises as to the quota.

The reason is that they can twiddle things around behind the scenes without
anybody architecting their app around a particular memcache performance
fingerprint. If you think about it, that's how you are supposed to treat
something ephemeral as memcache anyway, best effort availability, not to be
relied on.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Their datastore being a sort of blackbox
is more of a problem. Check out the Khan academy dev blog, this is not a
bottleneck.

~~~
thrownaway2424
That's not a very useful service if the memcache can disappear. It's difficult
to properly provision a service when the average case costs X and the worst
case costs 1000X because the cache layer is "ephemeral". When the cache is
working your cost utilization will look like shit and your financial
management is going to ask you to cut costs. Then you'll do that and when the
cache suddenly disappears, you'll suffer an outage because you are out of
capacity.

So I think it's not very reasonable to offer no-SLA components of a hosted
platform. It's either there with some assurances, or it might as well not
exist at all.

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woodyinsb
Great conversation. Our best info is that Google is committed to GAE and so
are we. AppScale can be the "on-ramp" to GAE and also your insurance policy if
"lock-in" is a concern. Run AppScale on top of EC2 or Eucalyptus (or others)
for portability across clouds.

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rnc000
If I sign up for the Premier support, would they answer these questions?

