Backend servers are a different story, but I find it very difficult to compare the cost of front-ends to most other things. Yes, a dedicated machine / VPS can handle more requests per second and doesn't impose many of the restrictions faced on GAE (native code, etc...), but on GAE there is no OS management overhead, no "low-level" software stack management, *and* GAE front-ends can scale up/down with demand *plus* they can be moved to a different data center when needed. That last points are the important ones. Look at the AWS outage, how much is it going to increase your costs and complexity to be able to handle those types of outages? It is included in the price of GAE. There is no way to know how bad it will hurt until we see how the adjustments they make to the system, specifically the scheduler, impact apps.
That said, I also wonder how friendly this new pricing is going to be for small and very large apps. I'm sure there will be several classes of applications that will need to reevaluate hosting options. When comparing prices, don't underestimate the value of the HR datastore, scalable front-ends, memcache, *and* the management costs of those things. I've managed geographically distributed databases, if you've not done it -- it is significantly more involved than you think (assuming you care about your data). Don't forget to factor in the cost of that management into your comparisons; if things run very smoothly it will still be several thousand dollars per year. Robert On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 11:01, Stefan Podkowinski <[email protected]> wrote: > The comparison drawn in this post is valid as long as you assume a capped > ~$60 budget such as spend by many hobby enthusiasts. Technically its apples > and oranges, as GAE scales out far beyond a single machine setup. But thats > not worth a lot as long as your budget isn't highly scalable as well, which > should be the case for most private projects hosted on GAE. > I'd very much like to see how much requests GAE (I'm using python) would be > able to handle after the scheduler changes compared to a $60 dedicated > system say running a node.js + mongoDB + memcache stack. If you'd need to > scale out such a dedicated system, my guess is it would financially ruin you > to do this with GAE if you have profitable business model behind it. > > -- > 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.
