

App Engine 1.6 out with Python 2.7, Map/Reduce in the SDK - jconley
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/app-engine-160-out-of-preview-release.html

======
tosh
From my POV google app engine is still the only PaaS offering that can scale
the data-tier. Scaling the application instances is a lot easier and most
other PaaS providers struggle with that too.

I think if you look at the big picture GAE is as good as it gets at the moment
and there is quite a gap to the second place when it comes to automatic
scaling.

Am I missing something? Disclaimer: we are very happy and excited GAE
customers with <https://blossom.io>

~~~
bad_user
I'm a GAE user for a personal app -- basically I use it for serving comments
on my personal blog, similar to whatever Disqus is doing but I prefer the
control. I also built on it 2 other personal apps that I later shut down.

IMHO, GAE is great for quick prototypes. Even for apps built for personal
usage is great as the free quota is still reasonable, and compared to shitty
PHP hosting services it's heaven-like. As far as the free quota goes it's also
a lot better than Heroku.

However, I feel very restricted on GAE. My current project at work that pays
my bills would never fit into it. Even if it did, because of the stuff we do
asynchronously and because of how Google charges for API calls, the bills
would go through the roof.

    
    
        the only PaaS offering that can scale the data-tier
    

Yes it is. However, you can also scale the data-tier _by yourself_. Yes, it
takes engineering, but it really isn't that difficult if you're planning ahead
a little, which you have to do with GAE anyway. I think this old article from
2009 about how Friendfeed used MySQL to do sharding is a classic by now, but
in case you haven't read it: <http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-
uses-mysql>

My biggest problem with GAE is that it is hard to migrate from when it no
longer suits your needs. Not impossible, not extremely difficult, but
difficult nonetheless taking away precious resources you'd rather invest in
something else.

But as far as PaaS goes if you're in to that, it works great.

------
dmnd
Python 2.7 may be present in the SDK (which is great!), but it's still in
experimental mode:

"Unfortunately, being on the bleeding edge means that we may make backwards-
incompatible changes. We will inform the community once the Python 2.7 runtime
is no longer experimental."

[http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/python27/newin2...](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/python27/newin27.html).

------
alpb
I guess nobody is interested in (or hates) App Engine anymore after pricing
plan changes. That's what I think due to no comments in such a post.

~~~
LeafStorm
Now that we have ep.io, Gondor, and all the other PaaS things that support
Python, the ability to upload an application and scale it as much as we want
isn't limited to App Engine anymore. Whereas back when it came out, it was the
only service of its kind for Python. (Heroku might not have even been out for
Ruby, though my memory's a bit fuzzy at that point.)

And pretty much all the other vendors use plain old SQL databases and don't
have everything as a platform-specific API like App Engine does. So when the
prices went up, my guess is that people realized, "Hey, why should I lock
myself in to this one vendor that could raise the prices again, when I can go
with other vendors that would be easier to migrate between [or switch to
hosting myself later]?"

~~~
angkec
Are there good python PaaS that doesn't lock you in? I'm looking for one for
our next project (or migrate the current project away from App Engine). I
guess I just don't trust Google any more.

~~~
LeafStorm
I have had an amazing experience with ep.io. The invite list is a mile long,
but if you have something that you already know you want to build, you can
e-mail the team and they'll let you jump the queue (I think it's more they
simply haven't sat down and powered through their list yet than any lack of
capacity on their part).

The team is very friendly, and they have an incredibly generous free quota as
compared to other services (2 GB of files/database, 5 GB/month of bandwidth,
and 16 MB of Redis - _per app_ ). They use plain old WSGI for the server,
Postgres for the database, and they'll install any packages you put in a
requirements.txt file, so no lockin. Haven't used Django with it, but so far
my experiences with Flask are great.

------
PanosJee
Map/Reduce is still horrible. Python 2.7 is a much awaited addition

------
tszming
They have released a full MapReduce framework for Python, but still no SSL
support?

Are they serious?

