Yeah, the people building small-scale apps shouldn't worry about the instance quota. They should worry about the "datastore operations" quota.
If, on average, every request queries for 10 entities... your app is limited to 5,000 requests per day. That's 3-4 requests per minute. Not much. And if you want to cross that limit even slightly, you're up to $9/mo. Per application. As an ardent capitalist, I don't expect Google to run appengine as a charity. But that's not why they offer a free tier. Google knows that it takes a large amount of retraining to get web developers on-board with appengine. There's a long learning curve, most of the knowledge doesn't apply to other cloud providers, and for some of us (ahem) it requires developing a whole new set of software tools. Becoming an appengine developer is a Very Serious Investment - even web stack experts require hundreds of hours of fumbling to achieve competency. The free tier is a carrot to get developers to make the investment. It says two things: 1) You can do your fumbling without having to pay for the privilege, and 2) you can write your small-scale/personal projects using the same technologies you use to build your big, expensive professional products. Don't underestimate the value of #2. For years as a JEE developer I envied LAMP folks who could throw a clunky site together in 5 minutes and host it on their Apache box. It's not that I couldn't throw a clunky site together in 5 minutes, it's that I couldn't host it without spending a lot of time and $$. A single LAMP box can handle hundreds of small projects... a Java box, not so much. Appengine changed this. One of the draws that made it worthwhile retraining myself was that I could build my hobby projects using the same painfully-acquired expertise I use to build commercial apps. I can quite confidently state that if it wasn't for the seduction of the free tier, I would not be using appengine today - I'd probably be using Coffeescript, Node.js, and MongoDB on some other provider. I'm fairly certain that Google is aware that there are thousands of engineers in the same position, which is why they plan to continue to support the free tier. The question is only how viable it will be. The $9/mo is not the end-all of the world to me; the worst that will happen is that users of some of my projects may see Out Of Quota messages towards the end of the day. For me (already invested), the value proposition of GAE is such that even if it's not useful for my hobby apps (or unviable commercial apps that turn into hobbies), it's not going to shake me off the platform. On the other hand, multi-hundred-dollar monthly bills for something that would cost $20/mo elsewhere *will* shake me off of the platform - at least the Python side. Jeff On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Brandon Wirtz <[email protected]> wrote: > >The 50k free database operations is a bit more nebulous since Google are > still scratching their heads over it. With correct memcache usage it really > should be enough, although that might be a bit of wishful thinking and > obviously depends significantly on your use case. > > > > > > As reference… > > > > Datastore API Calls > > [image: Description: 0%] > > 0% > > 183,470 of Unlimited > > Okay > > Memcache API Calls > > [image: Description: 0%] > > 0% > > 323,702 of Unlimited > > Okay > > > > Twice as many memcache calls as data store. This is pretty consistent > across my apps. > > > > My average Entity is about 5k… (this says a little lower) > > > > ** > > *Entity Kind* > > *# Entities* > > *Avg. Size/Entity* > > *Total Size* > > Kind1 > > 627,354 > > 4 Kbytes > > 2 GBytes > > > > > > Every request I have uses potentially: > > > > Configuration load: 1 memcache read OR 1 datastore read and 1 memcache > write > > > > Get Content: 1 memcache Read, OR 1 datastore Read, 1 Memcache Write, OR 1 > DataStore Write, 1 Memcache write > > > > > > I don’t know if this helps anyone, but I’m always interested in how apps > use their quotas, so I thought I would share. > > > > -- > 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. > -- 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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