

Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine? - japhyr

I see startups talking about Heroku and AWS all the time on HN, but I feel like I never see references to GAE.  Is anyone actually building their companies on top of GAE?
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TylerJewell
Hello. We are the publishers of Exo IDE, at <http://cloud-ide.com/> We are a
cloud IDE, with a focus on enabling creation of apps that will ultimately be
deployed to the cloud.

On any given week, we have up to 2000 projects that can be created. Those
projects can either be bound to a production PAAS or, in some cases, "no PAAS"
can be selected. For the large majority of projects, a production PAAS is
selected at the time of creation.

Of the projects that select a PAAS, we see about 60% of those projects select
GAE. This is a number that surprises us, as while we know that GAE is a leader
in the PAAS space, not sure that it's a 60% share holder as a relative
fraction on the number of PAAS projects created each week. While we haven't
published any case studies, we do have a number of projects that have been
published to GAE in a production sense. We've collected this data through
interviews and surveys.

Some things that may explain the results: 1) We do not have complete PAAS
coverage. We do not have Rackspace or dotCloud, for example, and we just added
AWS Beanstalk in the past two months. So maybe there is a normalization of the
data that needs to occur.

2) We provide GOOG oAuth as a logon mechanism. That binding, could imply an
overall tighter integration with GAE, and for developers who are PAAS
agnostic, may encourage them to select GAE over other selections.

3) We provide a Chrome Store plug-in, to make configuration even easier. We do
get some people who indicate they wish to do everything within the Google
realm.

4) We have spent time doing co-marketing with Google, so we may have gotten an
unusual influx of people who were already looking at GAE. But our referrer
metrics indicate that the large number of referrers we get are people from
Facebook, Twitter, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and direct.

We will watch this thread for the full conversation as we are interested in
hearing about other projects.

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japhyr
Thank you for the replies everyone, this is really helpful.

I asked because I have a student (11th grade) who wants to be a professional
programmer. He is taking the intermediate web development course, and I saw
that the main project is building a blog on top of GAE. I was not sure if GAE
is maintaining relevance, or if it is losing out to other platforms.

I know that at this point in his education most of what he learns by focusing
on GAE will be relevant. All of the platforms deal with the same server-side
and client-side issues, they just do it in their own way. I know that if he
understands how apps are built on top of GAE, he will be able to make sense of
whatever framework he chooses to learn next, deployed to whatever platform he
chooses to build on.

This helps share some perspective with him about GAE's role in the platform
space. I am happy to hear it is still quite relevant.

~~~
japhyr
I meant to clarify, he's taking the intermediate web development course
through udacity.

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johnbroccoli
Here's a list: <https://cloud.google.com/customers/> (It doesn't have only
startups, but it does have a few in there)

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alooPotato
We, streak.com, use GAE. We think its one of the best platform decisions we've
made. Zero admin time, scales without us worrying about it, etc.

We aren't really worried about the platform lockin (we think it will be hard
to migrate from any provider to any other provider anyways). Cost can be an
issue if you don't optimize or do things the appengine way. But at least you
have the decision - you can tradeoff $ for engineering time.

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linssen
I think Potato make a lot of use of it. They've got some tools in their GitHub
<https://github.com/potatolondon> and some really interesting projects in
their portfolio <http://p.ota.to/work/> (no surprise with Google among their
clients.) They do a lot of Django work.

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salimmadjd
We built an entire semantic content discovery engine on top of it. However,
had to shut it down when their price went up by 10X.

~~~
nixarn
With their new Python 2.7 multithreading support the price of GAE seem to have
gone down, I read about some gaming company that got their cost down to ~40%
of what it was before. So with that and coding around GAE's limitations I
think it's possible to use.

We're certainly looking into using it instead of AWS for our next projects
(games). Rovio also uses it for their Facebook games.

~~~
salimmadjd
Dedicated server from various vendors are probably so much cheaper than the
GAE or AWS. We should have just started with AWS and then stayed on AWS or
transfer to one of these dedicated server since our traffic was pretty steady.
Just a suggestions for others who are looking into this. Don't build your
business around google!

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markahern
Tethras (<http://tethras.com>) is built entirely on top of App Engine for
Python. We're a fully managed app translation service. We've found a lot of
the baked in features like map reduce and the search api really help us with
out with our translation memory and translation search implementations.

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ordinaryman
<http://creator.ifreetools.com>, an online database app builder, is built from
the ground up for hosting on Google App Engine.

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likeapub
Me. Www.likeapub.com the world's largest online pub is run with GAE. Only
paying two dollars per month for hosting.

~~~
likeapub
I compare amazon and gae and think that gae is cheaper if u r not sure if your
idea will work out or not.

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Nat0
Getaround's system is built on App Engine.

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jamesjguthrie
We use GAE for jsonengine at Hey Jimmy.

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rezendi
Pulse uses it extensively, iirc.

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srkiranraj
if I am not wrong, Khan Academy is built upon Google App Engine.

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GameGamer43
Udacity uses GAE.

