First of all, I must say that I agree with almost all the negative said about new pricing policy in this thread (maybe except the PHP thing - I don't think PHP would attrat by a lot of mature paying developers, I think it's the opposite). Even though I understand Google makes money, not charity, I cannot find any logic in the new pricing policy - no one single positive or logical point, only negative (and it's not that the new pricing policy makes things a bit more expensive... it's that the new pricing policy makes things excessively expensive with no arguments for it).
The main points I want to pay attention to: = 15 minutes startup/shutdown+start fee = I can't believe instances' startup/shutdown is that long - instances are not even fully virtualized OSes, I bet they are started and shutdown in hundreds of milliseconds (or at least in seconds)! I don't believe instance is reserved when it is shutdown and then started back in less than 15 minutes. Even if my beliefs are wrong, I can't influence these problems and don't understand why I have to pay for the issues googlers didn't manage to resolve. = instance hours vs ram hours = Provided official arguments (i. e. "optimize memory usage") for instance hours make no sense. If I am told ram and cpu are not billed and the only thing that is billed is instance hours the first things I will do is fill up instance memory with cache, refactor all the code optimized for latency and CPU to be CPU and memory intensive instead and... make a cron job to disturb my app on a regular basis not to restart instance. Free quota will be still enough for small apps but those will stably consume more resources (constantly memory at max for instance, CPU intensity all day long instead of short bursts that must be simple to shard with those big numbers google have). If you introduced new CPU hours and new RAM mbs/hours quotas instead of old CPU hours or new instance hours, it would make much more sense. By the way, I may be thinking too much of googlers development potential, but really... isn't memory overselled (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overselling) in appengine? = 50k quota for datastore ops = That's the killer (will kill appengine :) feature of new pricing policy. Vendor lock-in, nosql instead of sql (I can't say it's worse... it's unaccustomed)... with new pricing policy you go even further - files instead of nosql. Yeap, that's really what datastore will be used like when one need to decrease number of datastore ops - nearly pure old file write/read. By the way, memory consumption (both because of bigger entities and memcache usage intensity) and cpu intensity will increase (maybe that's the point you made instance hours so expensive? predictions?). Conclusion. I was looking closely at appengine, getting used to it for nearly a year, wrote some testing apps. Two weeks ago I started real business project for my employer with billed estimates of several hundred dollars a month (not that much though). Our bad we didn't see this thread earlier. With estimates of several thousand dollars a month based on new pricing policy (especially instance hours + datastore ops) the project will surely migrate to another cloud hosting. Thanks we are not yet very much vendor locked-in and have time to rewrite code. By the way, I will continue hosting very small utility projects on appengine for my sole purpose consuming no more than free quota. Googlers, it seems to me you want the pie you saw in the sky. Thanks for your time spent reading. -- 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.
