This is a really great discussion! On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Brandon Wirtz <[email protected]> wrote: > I may borrow this section for talks with VC's > > " GAE apps are difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to port because GAE > provides services at a much higher level than IaaS companies. If you write > to a lower-level platform, you need to invent all those services > *yourself*. This is not without CONSIDERABLE opportunity cost - it takes a > lot of work to run, maintain, and scale datastores, memcaching systems, > appservers. You need DBAs, you need sysadmins, you need security engineers, > you need build engineers. It all adds time and cost and risk."
All yours :-) > VCs often talk about "a bet on a bet". It is my belief that Google will be > a big player in the Cloud space and that part of that will be building out > GAE to compete with Amazon. I picked GAE specifically because GAE > leverages Google's knowledge of the things they do best, but more > importantly it leverages what Google does better than anyone else. Rather > than betting that I can hire a team of smart people to manage my > infrastructure, engineer my database, and give me world wide points of > presence I just pay an extra 2 pennies a Gig transferred, and they do it for > me. That's an easy decision from a cash flow perspective. I don't perceive Amazon as playing in the same space with Appengine, at least not yet. They're trying with Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, SQS, etc... but they have a *long* way to go. I presume they're still making too much money in the IaaS business to take PaaS seriously. The way I see it, the future of computing is driven by tools and environments that let you create a better product with less work. When the storage, caching, queueing, channel, deployment, and scaling facilities are all maintained by someone else, your team is massively more productive. It's like going from assembler to C. There is not a sliver of doubt in my mind that the future of web development looks something like Google App Engine, and right now there's nobody else competently playing in that space. Maybe Azure comes closest if you are in the .NET camp. > VCs are Anti-Google right now, so to those saying "does a VC really decline > you funding because you aren't on EC2?" yes. Google lost a whole lot of > friends with their recent changes to the Openness of Android, and the > conditions of it's use. There is a fear, founded or not, in the VC > community at the moment that Google will "become Apple" and that they will > only let certain apps play on their network, in their search results, and on > their platforms. This is interesting, and reinforces my growing belief that VCs are clueless and all the supposed experience they bring to the table is a net liability rather than an asset. There is a massive shift going on right now. Five years ago it made sense to try to build giant standalone products. Today you'd be crazy not to leverage the hell out of the myriad platform services available - Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Yelp, and millions of niche APIs. Like it or not, you either get in bed with them or you produce less interesting products. Facebook is the canonical example. Almost everything about developing on the Facebook platform is a trainwreck - anemic documentation, half-baked APIs, forums and bug database are black holes, and the bug count goes up every week rather than down. But for any consumer product, you simply cannot choose not to play the game. As a small player, I integrate with whatever platforms and services deliver a better customer experience. If that makes me a slave to Google and Facebook, so be it. Like Zynga, I will just have to learn to negotiate with the king once I have a big enough mob of angry pitchforks behind me. Ask the founders of Wesabe about why they lost to Mint. Nevermind, here's their answer: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint Reason #1 is they wasted time building their own financial aggregation platform rather then be beholden to Yodlee. Mint used Yodlee and spent all those extra resources on polishing the user experience. > We see this reflected in the recent changes to the rules for Google Search, > Google Adwords, Adsense and Android. For a VC this is scary. You may be > right in thinking "there are a million other things scarier than Google > making changes" when calculating the risk to a start up, but for a VC you > look at how many risks there are to failure more than the risk of each of > those things happening, because you can only measure known risks, not > unknown risks. If this is a general VC trend, I think this shows a terrific lack of experience by VCs. It dramatically underestimates the difficulty of building operations infrastructure at "web scale", and how easy it is to build on platforms like Google and Facebook in comparison. Which is not too surprising, because unless you've been hands-on developing software for the last five years, you will have completely missed the shift. I've led software development in several major companies, and I honestly think that writing software is easy, getting it deployed is hard. I had far more trouble dealing with operational issues than I ever did with code quality. Most webdev teams seem to have about as many ops-related engineers as actual product developers. About Android: This sounds like whining to me. What are folks going to do, build their own mobile OS from scratch? Good bloody luck. Even Nokia is threw in the towel. Like it or not, this is the world we play in, and the ante for "mobile OS" is in the tens - possibly hundreds - of millions of dollars. We're lucky that Google's scraps have so much meat on them. > Lastly, is perception. How much of the chatter on this forum is about if we > should move to HR, or if MS can be made to work. How much is about if there > is a way to know if some warning light went off at Google when there is down > time? Do you remember the thread about me saying that if you are going to > switch from one app to another on a domain managed by Apps for Domains, that > you should have a paid account and a CSR on the line when you do it? Try to > find how to get your Apps For Domains Pin, and how to get someone on the > phone at Google. I failed to mention that the CSR I talked to doing that > moved didn't know what an "appengine" is and I had to have them find someone > who did. If you have ever had a Google Docs outage, or if you were one of > the 150k people who had their email disappear 2 months ago in the Great > Gmail Failure of 2011, you can see how people would not trust Google with > their enterprise/mission critical applications. Every major company I've worked with has had significant downtime, usually do to some clueless ops guy flipping the wrong switch. People go nuts when GAE gets sick, but companies try not to advertise the hours of downtime that homebrew infrastructure generates. Hell, I had a major site go awol for an hour when my entire datacenter (365 Main) went offline. If I change the names to protect the guilty, I can recount plenty of stories of someone deleting the wrong database. Appengine's reliability needs to be put in the context of the practical alternative. Unless you're paying big $$$$ for a crack ops team, your downtime will be worse. If you're a startup, I *promise* that your downtime will be worse. > Azure sucks in so many ways, it is more expensive, it has more downtime, and > it doesn't scale up and down as quickly as GAE. But my projects on Azure > run just as well on a Windows Server farm, and when things go Boom I can get > a live human on the phone in 2 minutes. If something needs a Kick I can get > it. No digging through the forums to find out which URL I need to file a > ticket on, no wondering if someone dealt with my ticket, a real person on > the phone says, "I have taken care of that for you Brandon, is there > anything else I can do for you? No? Well we apologize that this happened and > I have issued you a credit for today's services. You have a great day and > thank you for using Microsoft Azure". I've heard some good things about Azure, but there's a big chasm between Redmond and the Bay Area that I'm not sure can be fixed just by producing a quality product. > Ikai, Nick, Wesley, and the rest of the Googlers in this forum are great... > And I'm sure they'd be happy to give us all their personal cell phone > numbers so it would be easy to get problems resolved.... But then they'd > get nothing done. Google's always been in the business of avoiding > technical support by building tech that just works... and that is a Great > philosophy, but it makes people in the investment world crazy, because when > bad things happen they want to know who to blame and when they will be fixed > and how it will never happen again. This strikes me as a fair criticism. If you've filled out any of the product surveys the appengine team has been circulating, it's clear they are thinking about the tech support issue. I wouldn't be surprised to see some attempt to address it soon. Jeff -- 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.
