Here's my situation:

-  I'm running an app as a public service, and I'd rather not have to charge 
for it.  Our google overlords have not given me any way to duck the new pricing 
for my do-gooder app, so I'm looking to game the system if I can. :)

- My app is used infrequently by humans, in short bursts.  Normal use would 
probably stay under the new free quotas, because the instance-alive-time x 
number-of-bursts-per-day < 24 hours.

- There are kiosks which show information from my app.  The kiosk gets a 
dynamic HTML page in one go, the page includes many DIVs to display to the user 
over the course of 4-5 minutes or so.  When it's gotten through all the DIVs, 
it refreshes from the server, to pick up any new updates.

In the old pricing model, this wasn't a problem.  But in the new model, the 
kiosk "heartbeats" are keeping an instance alive.  That burns up my free quota.

When a human uses the app to browse or update data, I have to pay for it 100% 
of the time.

So I'm wondering if anyone here has an idea of a different way to deal with the 
Kiosks, to allow my instances to go away completely between human interactions.

One idea I had was that when a user interaction happened, I could compute the 
Kiosk page and push it someplace.  I can't push it to the Kiosk itself, of 
course, so I'd have to push it someplace that the Kiosk could hit it without 
spinning up a new instance in GAE.  GAE has an edge cache, but I don't think 
there's any way for me to prime that.  I could push to a different GAE app that 
just handles the Kiosks, but that sounds like willfully creating multiple apps 
to avoid quota charges, which is verboten.

I could push it to Amazon S3.  That's not awful, and I've certainly done hybrid 
GAE/AWS apps before.  But a two cloud solution is certainly not my first choice 
on the complexity front.

A half-assed solution would be just to have the Kiosk go through the DIVs 
several times before refreshing.  That's not a horrible solution, but I'm 
hoping some clever developer here has a better idea…

Thoughts?

-Joshua

-- 
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.

Reply via email to