

Google App Engine for developers - mechanical_fish
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/04/google-app-engine.html

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mechanical_fish
Things I found particularly interesting:

 _The quotas are just a guideline as Google may cut off access to your
application if you receive a traffic spike of an unspecified duration...
Google App Engine already failed the Techcrunch effect and appears the
platform is currently unable to handle referral traffic loads from a popular
blog or news site typically associated with a product launch. The traffic
spike cutoffs make me think twice about hosting anything of value on App
Engine._

In other words, Google App Engine's vaunted scalability is, for the moment,
vaporware. That would be understandable at this stage, but it means that it's
impossible to evaluate the key advantage of the service.

I'd like to know how quickly Google will respond when my site is knocked
offline by DOS attack: Will I be able to get them on the phone? Can any Google
customers comment on that?

 _Static files are limited to 1MB... Applications are not uniquely
identifiable by IP address... no SSL support... no image processing... Google
user accounts...Google will store your user data and potentially mine its data
for better ad targeting._

I'm not loving any of this.

~~~
cstejerean
The key thing to remember is that this is a preview release, available only to
a small number of users. Google is probably keeping an eye on ways people are
trying to break out of the sandbox and fixing bugs with their SDK and
infrastructure.

Google is trying to get people to write applications in a way that CAN scale,
not necessarily something that is scalable at the moment (see the resource
limits). Once the pressing issues are ironed out I am expecting to see more
reasonable terms (in the free to pretty cheap range).

