

Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2 - BarkMore
http://www.vijayp.ca/blog/?p=162

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latchkey
Google hasn't made 'random' pricing changes. Sure, they didn't do the best job
of handling the switch from beta to a real live service, but they did listen
to the community and they learned a lot of lessons. I really don't think they
will make the same mistakes twice. Maybe you missed the meetup at Thirsty Bear
in SF where they bought us all drinks and apologized? Even Guido was there.

I think you are wrong about the costs of EC2. First off, you have to run your
own servers on EC2. When one of those servers goes down in the middle of the
night for some random unexplained reason, who are you going to call? Yourself?
If you don't think EC2 servers go down, you are kidding yourself.

With GAE, I'll never have to hire IT staff to manage servers or networks.

The high replication datastore on GAE is _amazing_. I'll never have to worry
about running out of capacity, backups, or downtime for that matter. I've been
told that entire datacenters have gone offline and nobody even noticed. Now,
that is reliability.

It sounds like a lot of your issues surrounded using XMPP on GAE. I think that
is a perfectly valid thing to complain about. That said, just cause XMPP is
expensive doesn't mean that all of GAE is expensive (or problematic). As you
found out by writing your own C++ servers and what not, XMPP is a difficult
service to provide reliably. Maybe that is worth that cost?

Note: I'm building my sporting event ticketing website entirely on GAE. People
will be able to register for marathons, bike races, etc. It may cost a bit
more for their service, but given that I won't have to hire any staff to
manage servers or worry about adding capacity when thousands of people all
want register for an event at the same time, I think that is worth it.

Note2: I'm a user of PartyChatApp. Thanks for providing it.

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vijayp
I never really meant to imply that App Engine doesn't make it a lot easier to
build and administer your code.

It's more than just a price/stability tradeoff. The problem is, as an App
Engine user, one is totally at the mercy of any future price changes on App
Engine because it is nearly impossible to seamlessly migrate away.

The DNS aliases (appspotchat.com, for instance) can only point to Google, and
the API does not really work well on any other platform such as AppScale. So,
as we discovered, at any time in the future, one's service could suddenly cost
10x as much, and one won't really have the option to move quickly. If one
intends to scale, it's better to never get into that state in the first place,
and develop on AWS instead. If EC2 raises its prices (highly unlikely since
computing power is increasing and costs are decreasing), one can always move
to rackspace or just get a private server.

It's of course true that writing stuff on App Engine can sometimes require a
lot less engineering work. But the difference is not really that substantial
when compared to the possibility of being stuck on a platform that all of a
sudden makes your company unprofitable in unpredictable ways. Changing a
running service is very hard. Avoiding the problem by not getting stuck on App
Engine is not trivial, but in my opinion the right call.

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latchkey
What I am hearing is a few things:

a) You are upset about the fact that they increased their prices when they
transitioned from a well documented beta service to a fully supported
commercial offering.

b) You are upset that there is some features missing, such as the way DNS is
handled.

c) You are upset that there is a proprietary nature about the service.

I think those are all pretty much valid concerns, but let me address them:

Yes, the costs did go up for some people, including you, it seems. But
remember again, it wasn't just some random increase. They switched out of
beta. There was never a hint at a promise that they would keep the prices at
the same level.

As I mentioned before, they admitted they messed up in their messaging. They
heard people screaming at them loud and clear and went back and actually
adjusted a lot of their prices. You say that AWS won't increase prices because
of costs decreasing, I can only hope that GAE, with a similar model will do
the same.

That said, you really can't compare GAE with AWS because they are entirely
different offerings. You absolutely need an IT staff (be it yourself or
someone else) to run, monitor and manage those servers on AWS. You don't need
that with GAE and I find that to be a massive selling point. I've seen first
hand what happens when you have to hire IT staff or stay up at 3am figuring
out what server problems you are having. It sucks because a) it is nearly
impossible to hire good sysadmins right now, b) who wants to be on call 24/7?
There is also the lack of the high replication datastore on AWS. There is
nothing even close. Personally, I'm willing to have a bit of vendor lockin for
those features.

Yes, features are missing. Google knows about it and has been doing regular
releases of the SDK to address missing features. I'm pretty confident that as
the service becomes more profitable for them, they will dedicate more
resources to it. If not, then I have 3 years to migrate and find something
else. For now, the feature set is good enough for me. That might not have been
the case for you, but that isn't entirely the fault of anyone. It is still a
maturing product.

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jrockway
Why do you think that Google's costs are less when sending messages inside
their "intranet" versus sending messages to and from the outside world? Their
network is huge and it's unlikely that your users XMPP accounts are managed by
a server in the same data centers as your App Engine instances. So it's not
costing Google more, it probably costs them the same.

Also keep in mind that if your time is not free, App Engine may be cheaper
than EC2. At some point, renting out a colo and buying your own hardware is
cheaper than EC2. And then at another point, it's cheaper to build and manage
your own data center. It's all a continuum of effort and upfront costs vs.
monthly costs.

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vinhboy
I build an image hosting site, similar to imgur, on GAE. Some people in brazil
are using it.

Last month, the bill went from $4 a month, to $4 a week.

As far as I can tell, the site did not get any more popular than it was a
month ago.

That is a ridiculous increase!

Needless to say, I took down the site.

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randall
PS- Partychat is amazing. If you use Google Apps for your biz, Partychat is
like the missing chatroom feature.

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hello_moto
Seems like the world is full of super-talented people these days...

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mike-cardwell
Can someone TLDR the TLDR for me please

