

What’s better: Pricier Google App Engine, or nothing? - nextparadigms
http://gigaom.com/cloud/whats-better-pricier-google-app-engine-or-nothing/

======
buff-a
All this "we aren't a non-profit" and "oh poor us we have to make some money"
and "its better than if we turn it off", just deliberately misses the point:

 _It was news to us that they are losing so much money._

It was news because they spent the last three years telling us to jump through
insane hoops, locking ourselves thoroughly into a for-profit company, _on the
sole belief that doing so would allow efficiencies and scale not to be found
elsewhere_.

The complaint is not "you shouldn't make money off us". The complaint is _what
the fuck was all that bullshit we've been doing for three fucking years if it
didn't make any fucking difference - as demonstrated by your "viable billing
prices"?_

And what does it say about their competence? After three years, they only
discovered in May that they were measuring the wrong thing? Google? The
analysis company. Only in May someone decided to look at how all the
"brilliant GAE Way" actually impacted performance and resources? Nobody
thought, "this cpu billing is all very well, but we are actually running 20
bazillion machines to serve 5 web pages per second - maybe our model might be
wrong".

For the tiny guys, the free plan is viable. Perhaps for the giant guys, (I
don't know) the plan is viable. For everyone in the middle, it _is_ better to
go to EC2. The only people who say they are staying are those who do not have
the competence to move to EC2 or Heroku, i.e. non engineers every one of them.

So GAE used to be all "Hey, engineers, come code to our awesome paradigm
shifting api, and you can be efficient and scale."

Now GAE is, "Hey, MBAs and Muggles, have your monkeys write generic
java/python and we'll make it scale no matter what the cost (to you)!"

~~~
groks
On billing for instance/hours:

gregd, project manager: "We will also introduce a new pricing structure for
App Engine based on more transparent usage-based pricing."
<http://goo.gl/d78vS>

jonmac, engineer: "The system is large and complex, its hard to understand and
hard to explain." <http://goo.gl/6NzF1>

------
bane
I'd rather have Google say "in order for GAE to stay alive, we've had to raise
pricing on our current metrics to X", I can understand that, I can justify
that, I can compare it and decide how to deal with it/optimize for it, but
instead we got, "based on user popular feedback we're radically changing the
way we measure usage, then charging some significant multiplier to whatever
everybody is already paying so that it no longer makes sense to operate on our
platform and you can't even really compare it in such a way as to make sense
of the change, then we'll systematically not address anybody who asks us about
this in forums or via other communications but we're going to do all this in
the most frustratingly passive aggressive way possible" [1][2] Can anybody
really believe that popular feedback to Google was "we're not being gouged
_nearly_ enough, Google, charge us 2000% more!"

[1][http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-app-engine-
new...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-app-engine-new-version-
and.html)

"Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers
and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help our customers is to
graduate App Engine from preview status. "

"Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and
the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their
App Engine investment with their business goals."

[2][http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-
for-g...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-
app-engine.html)

"App Engine graduating from Preview later this year! Based on this feedback
we’ve decided to make some fairly large changes:"

"In order to become an official Google product we must restructure our pricing
model to obtain sustainable revenue. _Based on customer feedback this means
focusing on usage-based pricing and placing per-user, per-app pricing on hold
until further notice._ "

~~~
stickfigure
Google screwed up by trying to charge for CPU time in the first place. CPU
time is an overabundant resource in the cluster, RAM is precious. This change
was inevitable.

Look at Linode, Rackspacecloud, even EC2. They all charge primarily by the
megabyte. I don't like it either, but it's the unfortunate economic reality.

~~~
groks
Google doesn't seem to think that RAM is the limiting resource:

"Most frontend instances don't come near their RAM limit, and most of their
RAM consumption is on shared data like packages." -- nickjohnson
<http://goo.gl/SOeSF>

~~~
stickfigure
Actually, if you look at the context, this reinforces my point that RAM is the
limiting factor. Nick mentioned this to reassure some other user worried about
Google lowering the RAM limit. As long as Google is being conservative WRT
oversubscribing RAM, the instance RAM limit is the true measure of the cost of
an instance.

It's not about how much you use, it's about how much you _could_ use.

------
mtogo
> _Because looking elsewhere in the PaaS space, instance-based pricing — or
> something similar — is still the norm._

That's not the point. The point is that AppEngine boosted their pricing from
between 5x-25x depending on the project. People aren't mad that AppEngine is
using instance-based pricing, they're mad that they bought into a proprietary
system that has a lot of lock-in and then the system increased their pricing
by a ludicrous amount.

~~~
nandemo
What does it matter if they boosted by 10% or 2500%? If they boosted by 2500%,
could it be that the previous price was _really_ low?

What if they weren't charging any money before, and then started charging? It
would be an ∞% raise. Is it bad that they offered their service for free for a
while?

PS: feel free to point out what's wrong with my questions.

~~~
groks
"could it be the previous price was really low?"

We can answer this by comparing prices to other providers. For example:

Amazon (a standardised but not a cheap provider) used to charge $0.15/GB
bandwidth out but now charges $0.12/GB (and does not charge for bandwidth in):
<http://goo.gl/n1ZxZ> And this is tier one; it goes down to $0.05/GB or less
for bulk bandwidth.

Appengine used to charge $0.12/GB out, but under the new pricing will charge
$0.15/GB out (and still charges $0.10/GB in): <http://goo.gl/QgA3n>

Does this suggest that Google was running a charity, that it is merely
covering it's costs, and that Google's world-renowned infrastructure costs
more than Amazon's?

~~~
nandemo
Thanks for the answer. I think that if it turns out to be too expensive,
people will find alternatives. Maybe people who already use it and think that
the development cost in order to migrate is too high will suck it up, but new
customers will just go to other providers.

------
stickfigure
_Among the core changes is a switch from true resources-based pricing to
instance-based pricing, which means that applications written to be as
efficient as possible to consume minimal resources are now relatively
meaningless_

The author is completely clueless here.

The GAE change is that "true resources-based pricing" switched from an
overabundant, almost irrelevant resource (CPU time) to the _actual_ resource
in short supply - RAM.

For web servers, it doesn't matter how much CPU time you use, it only matters
how much RAM you occupy. Linode, Rackspace, and most other VPS providers*
charge this way. Most server CPUs are sitting around blocked on I/O -
especially ones running single-threaded synchronous web servers (I'm looking
at you, Rails).

The new GAE pricing is still based on true resources - the ones that matter,
not the ones that are irrelevant.

* AWS is fairly unique with a hybrid billing approach.

~~~
ww520
If RAM is the one GAE charging for, then they are massively overcharging the
apps. Spawning a new process off a parent process takes very little memory.
Most of the memory of the child processes are shared with the parent process.
That's how Python/Ruby/Perl/whatnot web apps work. They spawn a new process to
handle each request because it's really cheap on CPU and RAM to do so.

The first GAE instance process on a server would take up fair amount of RAM.
The next one takes very little. Yet Google charges for the second one fully.

~~~
Scaevolus
Each instance on GAE runs on a different physical server.

~~~
ww520
You have source for that? Otherwise those must be really pony physical servers
cause people are getting Out-Of-Memory error at around 100 megs.

~~~
stickfigure
I suspect what he meant is that when GAE spins up a new instance of your app,
it will try to locate it on a different server.

This is a natural way to prevent hot instances from overwhelming a single box
in the cluster.

------
buff-a
_Customers were upset about the pricing changes then, but fervor has picked up
in intensity lately because the new App Engine model goes into effect later
this month._

No, the fervor picked up in intensity because they only now gave us the new
metrics, and the price of them, and they are _fucking insane_.

~~~
StavrosK
By "only now" do you mean "months ago"?

We knew how much instances would cost, it just looks like nobody bothered to
do the math until Google built it into the billing.

~~~
andypants
Well, before google built it into the billing, nobody could really know how
many 'instance-hours' they were using, and it turned out to be a lot more than
expected.

------
lsc
wow. This is a little shocking; prices just don't go up in the hosting
industry. I mean, if you are charging for hardware/bandwidth, just stop
lowering your prices and your margin goes up rather quickly.

------
recoiledsnake
What's worse, not being able to easily migrate your GAE specific code to
another provider or suddenly having to pay through your nose?

No one is trying undermine the fact that Google has to turn a profit, but they
should've have either been frank about the pricing from the very beginning so
that people would have made an informed choice, or retooled the platform so
that it didn't require all that custom plumbing and would not have done all
that optimization to use the least resources thats now useless if you want to
migrate elsewhere.

This can be called a classic bait and switch if it was done intentionally. At
the very least Google should offer grandfathered pricing for people who
already depend on GAE.

~~~
foxylad
Python, Java and Go are all "open" languages and don't limit you to Appengine,
and Google allows you to download your data without restriction. The only
lock-in is the APIs, and even there the datastore API is the only one that
isn't built on a very standard interface. Given the datastore is distributed
and therefore can't expose an exact replica of the MySQL API, how could Google
lock you in LESS? Oh, and lets not forget that you can run your code UNCHANGED
on Appscale or Typhoon AE on any IAAS or VPS you like.

This article is right - Google needed to make Appengine pay for itself. And
when you factor in how much it costs to provide a scalable service from
redundant servers, Appengine is still good value. For example, most of the
grumblers are muttering about migrating to AWS, but when they realise that
they need at least two instances in diverse locations; or make that two
instances in each location if their service might become too popular for one
server to handle; and ELB to route requests to the servers; and how tricky it
is to keep their data consistent on all those servers; and what a hassle a
serious backup regime is; and how much time it takes to manage the whole
thing... I'm picking they'll suddenly go rather quiet.

Or maybe they're happy to run their site on a single AWS instance. In which
case, they should do just that - Appengine is not the right tool for them
anyway.

I run several profitable apps on Appengine, and until now paid cents a month
to Google. I've always known that isn't sustainable for them, and that they'd
have to get serious about pricing someday. I for one am happy to pay a couple
of orders of magnitude more for the certainty that my platform will persist.

~~~
danssig
Ironically, raising the price orders of magnitude probably made the platform
much less likely to persist.

------
wavephorm
I can't help but think their pricing policies will ultimately undermine the
platform. People that haven't already started developing on GAE are surely
watching this, and probably glad they didn't start. Nobody likes bait and
switch.

How will Google encourage a new developers to start working with GAE when
platform-neutral providers (AWS, linode) are getting cheaper and better all
the time?

~~~
richardw
I think the real competitors are Heroku et al. Places where you don't have to
think about file systems and upgrading and security and deployment as much as
with e.g. AWS.

