

Revisiting Google App Engine's pricing changes - southpolesteve
http://www.gregtracy.com/revisiting-google-app-engines-pricing-changes

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bialecki
tl;dr - By doing a detailed analysis of his app, he was able to discover that
a lot of what he was using App Engine for wasn't being used or could be made
more efficient with relatively little effort.

Having worked on App Engine, I'm sure almost all (if not all) of the apps I've
built ended up in this situation. Because it was "free" there wasn't a lot of
reason to focus on being efficient (especially in terms of space). Getting an
app to work and serve its purpose while maintaining a level of perceived
performance was the top priority. Any work after that was usually not worth it
because the apps tended to be small in scope and non-critical.

That said, it feels like if I were to build on App Engine again, it would
require more development time to keep it free. With a couple of scripts to
setup a free micro EC2 instance, that might make it easier to build those
small apps there instead. Not sure if that's good or bad for App Engine, but I
suspect bad.

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stingraycharles
Could someone please explain to me why this is different from hosting your own
environment? In your own environment, $x / month gives you an environment that
can handle a certain amount of load. You can either spend time (= money) on
optimizizing your application so you get more bang for your buck from your
hosting environment, or you can spend that money on your monthly hosting bill.
And it's your job figuring out an optimal balance between those two things.

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jwomers
Great article. I haven't used App Engine before but plan to very soon. I was
just at the Google Developer conference in South Africa and the reason they
cited the price increase was to force more efficient implementations, implying
that the cheap pricing allowed people to be lazy. At the time I thought that
was a positive spin, but it seems to have worked in this case. Good work!

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neuromancer2600
What helped me was pushing frontend tasks into the backend to utilize the full
quota for those two. Adding some pre-checks to the tasks (e.g. asking
questions like "do I really need to scrape this page again now?) were helpful
as well.

Nevertheless, I feel that it has become a bit of a drag deploying a full-blown
web-app on App Engine as these restrictions are running against fast
iterations and quick deployments. I wish there were more tools to test the
loads locally.

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kanwisher
Or you could use a VPS like Linode/Slicehost and not have to deal with strange
pricing schemes and vendor lockin. Save money and time ;/

~~~
chrismsnz
Or you could use a PaaS provider like Google App Engine and not have to deal
with building, hosting and monitoring your own servers and stack of
technologies.

Not to mention effortless scale-up when you need it, predictable pricing and
built-in redundancy.

~~~
bad_user
PaaS providers offer anything but predictable pricing.

As for effortless scale-up and built-in redundancy, I kind of disagree ...
IMHO you cannot scale without complete control. Ask Reddit about it.

~~~
mseebach
I'm guessing you've never spend half an afternoon on a holiday finding an
Internet cafe, convincing them to let you run PuTTY and SSHing into your
"complete control" server to fix a trivial problem that brought down your app?

Comparing a bus arrival service for a 1/4 million population city with Reddit
is .. irrelevant, at best.

~~~
bad_user
I did spend afternoons getting servers back online - it certainly beats
praying to God for the restoration of your service in a timely manner.

~~~
mseebach
I'll take "Google screwed up, it'll be up when it's up" over "I screwed up,
I'm dropping everything and scrambling to fix it" any day of the week.

Also just to scope the discussion: I'm not talking about big, important things
- those with ops budgets and rotas - I'm talking about small/low-budget/side-
project type thing, like the OPs project.

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rwk
i'm glad he went back and corrected his wrong assumptions.

the ending of the article even made it seem like a tech happily ever
after...more efficient application and making the coder think. how novel.

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danssig
Ok, so he found that with some effort he can get the price down. But it's
still the case that if you build on the App Engine that you're locked into it.
Personally, if I had to rewrite my app to be more efficient anyway, I would be
moving to a platform that wont lock me in. After all, I'm sure they'll also
have altruistic reasons the next time the raise the price. And the next time.
And the next time. Etcetera.

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zachwill
After using App Engine for two projects at the beginning of this year, I have
to say that Heroku is better in almost every way (especially if your app is
already open-source and using git for version control). The ability to use an
actual production server (Gevent, for example) on a free dyno is awesome.

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ma2rten
I am using both at the monent. And I must say that Heroku defenetly has it's
advantages, but appengine has: lower latency (for me), more Apis, cdn built-
in, ability to run different/test different versions at the same time, backend
instances (Heroku has ec2 though), free webadmin with graphs and ability to
see errors etc.

~~~
kanwisher
At least for rails apps Heroku has newrelic built in which gives you far
better graphs then appengine.

