exactly jeff, well put. On Dec 14, 10:36 am, Jeff Schnitzer <[email protected]> wrote: > I think there is a legitimate gripe here which is that large-memory > instances are unreasonably expensive. > > There's some significant value-add for GAE's "whole package" - > automatic scaling, memcache, edge caching, deployment system, API > access (although these APIs are generally charged separately). This > makes the $60/mo for a basic (multithreaded) instance worthwhile. > It's expensive but it's convenient, and most frontend work fits fine > in the F1. Also it's a little bit of apples/oranges because the GAE # > is heap whereas an Amazon # is VM size, but this is probably less than > a factor of 2 difference. > > On the other hand, there are many application components whose primary > requirement is a significant chunk of RAM. All that Google > infrastructure is nice but it isn't nice enough to warrant a 10X > premium just for a measly 1G of RAM. And you can't even get more. > Seriously, a cheap amazon "standard" instance has significantly more > RAM than the most expensive GAE instance... lame. > > Consequently, backends are useful as a long-running frontend, but > absolutely useless as an in-memory index. We're priced into going the > inconvenient route of placing memory indexes in other cloud services. > > I've been generally accepting of GAE's recent pricing changes, but the > price of large-memory instances basically means I have to treat that > option as if it doesn't exist. Which means when Google adds all these > fancy features to support different kinds of instances, from my > perspective, they're wasting their time. I can't use them until they > make them cheaper. > > So here's my plea: a 256MB instance shouldn't cost twice as much as a > 128MB instance, and a 512MB instance shouldn't cost twice as much as a > 256MB instance. The price curve should drop off. There's a > reasonable premium to pay for running on GAE, but a factor of 10 isn't > it. > > Just for comparison... the largest GAE backend, at 1G, costs $460/mo. > A 1.5G linode instance costs $60/mo. And I can get a 4G linode > instance for $160/mo. And while it's not exactly an apples/apples > comparison, when I need RAM, the priority of all those other Google > niceties goes down considerably. And if I needed (say) four 1G > backends, you can absolutely bet that I will go with Linode and pocket > the extra $20k per year. > > Jeff
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