I want to continue to use GAE. I understand the value immensely, and I invested a whole year into building a significant codebase around it and its limitations without caring about lock-in. If I can help keep Google honest and encourage them to revise their pricing so it is more palatable, then I am a happy camper. The alternative (re-writing my code and taking on some of the scalability features GAE gives me for free) is very unattractive.
Having said that, I think the datastore in GAE is the biggest selling point which is hardest to reproduce. This is what is distributed geographically. However, the price for that is separate from the hosting. The hosting is a compute instance (with CPU and RAM) running your code on a simplified and uniform stack. I think there should be a premium for the hosting, but a 4X to 8X should be explainable to the customers or revised. To your points (and I am making assumptions here just to respond to your points): - HR is charged separately from hosting (so should not be factored into why the GAE hosting is significantly more expensive) - simplification of stack to just app code makes operator management and app scaling easier for the admins, not harder (I worked with BEA/Oracle team where we created the JVM without OS, and that was a big selling point that Ops became much cheaper. It makes it cheaper than what u get for managed hosting.) - isolated instances (ie the instances don't communicate or know about each other) makes app scaling easier, not harder. (contrast with your typical J2EE app server where instances communicate via multicast or unicast and keep config and stuff in sync and auto deploy in live instances and maintain sessions in-process, etc). - I read somewhere that all app instances share the same memcache instance, and there's no guarantees on anything, so memcache implementation in AE is pretty simplistic, and can easily be reproduced on a VPS GAE main expensive piece is in the datastore scalability and features built on it, and that is charged separately. Most of the other bundled features which can be charged are charged separately. In summary, I'm not underestimating the GAE value (at all). I worked at BEA/Oracle for 10 years with WebLogic in engineering and with customers (I left last year to focus on some startup ideas) and appreciate the simplicity of the GAE model. I just think that a 4X or 8X cost against AWS seems like a high premium, and it would be nice to see some justification/explanation in Greg's response. NB. Regarding AWS outage, this was caused by storage problem, not the actual EC2 instances. The closest analogue in GAE land is the datastore, which is priced separately from hosting. -- 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.
