On Wednesday, May 11, 2011 8:16:32 PM UTC+3, Greg D wrote: > > Instance hours are billed for the instances being up for an app. This is > one of the reasons that we are changing our scheduler, to ensure we aren't > creating instances that aren't needed and that we are taking down instances > once they are no longer needed. Does that help clarify? >
Well, not all idle instances are the same. Most of my webapps use only about 10-12 Mb of memory / instance, and therefore having 5-10 of such instances idling around costs very little and should be charged accordingly. One might argue that there's no need to have that many if they are idle, but in fact there are use cases for that. For example if the requests (from the same client) come in bursts and should be processed concurrently. It's the use-cases like these that are very well covered by the metered usage pricing. And if the resources are priced correctly, Google still makes money on them. But if you go ahead and dumb the pricing down to "instance-hours" and charge for idle instances (no matter how much memory they consume) you would lose a client and there's no reason to do that -- you would have made money on him w/ fine-grained resource pricing. What I'm getting at is that the current pricing model is much closer to the model that would describe what it costs you to provide the service and therefore is the correct one to use. I understand that there are people who have no idea what kind of resources their software consumes and can't predict their costs, but the new model hardly solves that problem. -Sergey http://self.maluke.com/ -- 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.
