Hi Greg, Yet another "2nd 'next week' ending" has come and gone (for those playing at home, that makes 4 weeks).
The application we had been working on has been halted in light of the new pricing announcement, and we have been waiting for some good news for a while now. Is there any update you can give us? I feel your initial announcement was made a little prematurely, and by greedy corporates with dollar signs in their eyes, who are not at all in touch with the App Engine community. If they had been, they would have known that a major selling point of App Engine was its "pay for what you use" pricing model. As has been mentioned earlier, the new proposed prices are almost absurd when compared with other cloud computing providers. Even if App Engine finally gets full multithreading support, an App Engine instance will still cost over 10x that of an equivalent, less handicapped instance on Amazon EC2. Given the old (current?) pricing scheme, I think the logical thing would have been to start charging users for RAM consumption (which has already been mentioned in other threads). A "pay for what you use" hosting service can indeed work, just take a look at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Due to the overhead of running a PaaS as opposed to an IaaS, App Engine obviously cannot be as cheap as EC2, but a >10x price difference is definitely not a true reflection of this overhead. In my opinion, doubling the EC2 price to remove server administration headaches from developers would be reasonable, but beyond that it may not make sense for a developer to pay such a high premium when they can administer an EC2 stack themselves with less restrictions than App Engine, and save a considerable amount of money in the process. Sticking to your guns with this new pricing scheme could be the beginning of the end for App Engine. A company wishing to build the next big app can easily play with the numbers and realise that if they get decent user numbers in the future, the costs of App Engine would be astronomical compared with other cloud computing providers. With more PaaS providers coming into the market, and Google's reputation of being extremely price competitive, the new pricing has definitely been a big shock for most of us. On the other end of the scale, developers looking for a free ride to try out their hobby app are given extremely generous quotas, both with the old and new pricing models. If the need to support these developers has caused the rest of App Engine to become expensive, then I recommend substantially reducing the free quotas down to almost nothing (as a gesture of goodwill, old apps should probably keep their old free quotas). App Engine has been around long enough to have gained good exposure, and the free quotas have played a part in that, but now that the word is out it may be time to become more realistic with the amount of money lost to free riding apps. On a personal note (and as someone else mentioned in this group), I am both disappointed and embarrassed that I not only praised App Engine to other developers, managers and stakeholders when it was an unproven technology, but also that I have spent a considerable amount of time learning the system and new design patterns, along with a substantial amount of time developing on it. If a large change is not made to the new proposed pricing, I daresay the only developers and companies you will see using App Engine will be those that have already committed a large amount of resources on their project, and are too far in to be able to port across to a new system. All it then takes to pull the rug out from under App Engine's feet is someone building a commercial-grade, drop-in replacement for the App Engine stack, and charging a lot less for it. Nick On 6 June 2011 10:58, Gregory D'alesandre <[email protected]> wrote: > Sorry it has taken so long, but we are still working on clarifying some of > these areas internally, I will send an update soon, thanks for your > patience... > > Greg > > > On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Vanni Totaro <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Hi Greg, >> >> 2nd "next week" ending :) >> Any update for us? >> >> Regards, >> Vanni >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Google App Engine" group. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/alFhQ1RKWE1NWWtK. >> >> 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. > -- 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.
