On 22 May 2011 20:23, Anders <[email protected]> wrote: > That's a valid reason. Instead of having to deal with both ram and cpu to > base the price on instances. But it's still confusing to me. What if an > application has to spawn a new instance just because of traffic load and the > GAE server being overloaded by running too many other instances (with other > customers' applications) at the same time? If the server would not be so > crowded with other customers' apps running in the same server then a new > instance would not be needed. So then the customer has to pay for an > extremely expensive new instance just because Google has crammed too many > instances (from other customers) into each server! >
Some valid points. We have no control of App Engine scaling, so we might end up paying for more instances than we'd want. I'm not saying Google would deliberately spawn more instances than needed, but without understanding the characteristics of the applications, it's impossible for Google to make the decision on when to spawn new instances. The traffic may have gone by the time the new instances start, and we have no control over how quickly they're spun back down either. What I'd be interested to know, is whether "one CPU hour" under the next system means an hour of your app being "available to be served" or just when an actual instance is live. Eg., if your site gets no traffic for 6 hours and Google spin down the instance (assuming no reserved instances, ofcourse), would this still be billed at an hour per hour. On EC2/Azure/etc., this would still be billed. App Engine could still have a reasonable price advantage for small apps if this wasn't the case. However, I do wonder whether this change is partly to try and kill of the thousands of "dead" prototype-style apps people have thrown up. -- 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.
