GAE code especially parts built around the datastore aren't transferable to other platforms. A big part of what makes GAE work is stuff that doesn't work on other platforms. I work with VC's on a regular basis and I agree with them on this point. Betting the farm on technology that is still labeled beta and doesn't yet have pricing finalized is risky.
Imagine you had done the math and decided that you could rule the world building a Financial transaction Datamining service on GAE, had priced it to be competitive based on Maser/Slave, and then you discovered M/S doesn't have 100% up time, so you had to move to High Replication, but because you are a data mining service most of what you do are writes, and you are paying 3x for those, your competitive pricing just got less so. What would have seemed like a great bet 6 months ago wasn't. As a VC you may have just lost your investment because what looked to be the way to better mining at lower cost is now better at higher cost. Similarly, assume you had built your solution on Amazon RDS in it's Beta. I was there, it was priced at 1/8 what the release price was. We don't yet know what Google's final pricing will be, if you had built a business model on Master slave pricing, and it turns out that Introductory pricing is 50% of release pricing you could have planned for 1/6 of what you will actually pay at the end. As to Google End of Lining the product, well if you had built on Amazon you could run that on your own hardware or something like Liquid Web, pack up your code and just run. But GAE isn't so portable, anyone who has played with the datastore can tell you that a 50 gig datastore on the local install doesn't perform anything like the deployed version. Part of that is just that you can make calls to API's that will burn cpu at 150x Realtime for 3 seconds. To do that on your "local" you would need 150 CPUs for 3 seconds which a user can wait for, but they can't wait 75 seconds for that same thing to happen on 6 CPUs. I am a HUGE proponent of GAE, and I'm betting the farm on it, but as an analyst for Standard & Poor's I would NOT bet against any VC who declines to invest in a GAE powered start up prior to the removal of the beta Moniker and a finalization of the service's pricing this summer. -Brandon Brandon Wirtz LockerGnome.com: Corporate VP Business Strategy BlackWaterOps: President / Lead Mercenary Description: http://www.linkedin.com/img/signature/bg_slate_385x42.jpg Work: 510-992-6548 Toll Free: 866-400-4536 IM: [email protected] (Google Talk) Skype: drakegreene <http://www.lockergnome.com> Lockergnome.com <http://www.blackwaterops.com> BlackWater Ops -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jeff Schnitzer Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 8:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: RE: [google-appengine] Startup Weekend and Google App Engine I'm not a VC and haven't taken any money from them. But I will say throw my opinion into the ring: Of all the "causes-of-failure" a startup can experience, "Google shuts down appengine and team is wholly unable to migrate to new platform" is so far down the list that it might as well go next to meteor impacts and alien invasions. In an Goopocalypse scenario, any app can be migrated off of appengine. It just takes all the work that you would otherwise have to invest right now building out your own infrastructure. On the other hand, if using GAE provides a 10% reduction in the likelihood of catastrophic operational failure, this is a clear win. Not to mention cost savings by not hiring sysadmins, dbas, and build engineers. I'd like to meet one of these VCs and talk some clue into them. Jeff On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Tim < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> wrote: > > > On Monday, April 4, 2011 6:42:31 PM UTC+1, Brandon Wirtz wrote: >> >> Current thinking on VCs around App Engine Powered startups is >> unfortunately negative. VCs are aware that Google often kills beta >> products or drastically changes the economics of products they offer at a price. >> When GAE comes out of beta this may change, but currently the risk as >> a VC is that an App Engine Powered Startup gets to 10M users and 1M >> lines of code, and Google decides it isn't in the App engine >> business, any more. All of sudden you are homeless and without a compatible alternative. > > Isn't Typhoon > <http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/> http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/ > a good enough argument for having a compatible alternative ?? > I mean, it's not guaranteed to be 100% compatible (as a victim of many > "SQL database ports" and the like, I'd ask what ever is?) but it > matches the API, it's open source so you can trace what's gone wrong, > and you can run it up on your own hardware. And if you really wanted > to be sure, you could spend a week or so testing an anticipatory port > now - you might be pleasantly surprised, or maybe find some fixes to suggest back and help the project. >> >> Plus, I'm hoping Google will just buy me before I get to that point, >> and then if they close the project I'll already be paid out :-) > > You and me both pal, you and me both... :) > -- > T > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Google App Engine" group. > To post to this group, send email to <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > <http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en> http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en> http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
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