Dear Google: This issue is going to steadily erode the "goodwill" of even your best customers. It looks really bad.
Long ago it was suggested that one of the advantages of the new pricing system is that it would be more transparent. A year of experience later, the new pricing system is dramatically *less* transparent than the old one. In the old system, I could see what each request cost to service and predict from that. In the current system, I have no way of knowing what a request would cost - datastore ops is easy, but instance time is wildly unpredictable. The only way to figure out what an app will cost is to run it for a day. And pricing goes UP when service quality goes DOWN, which is inexcusable. The silly thing is that for multithreaded apps, the number if instances required is determined by megacycles used. So now we're back to (effectively) charging for CPU. The old pricing model, while screwy for single-threaded apps, makes WAY more sense for multithreaded apps. A better solution would have been to keep the old model, increase pricing to sustainable levels, and figure out how to push everyone onto multithreaded solutions - probably with some sort of price surcharge. This is really a mess. Jeff On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 1:20 AM, nischalshetty <[email protected]> wrote: > We have been on GAE/J from more than 2 years now. We have 2 products that > run on it. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed an unusually high latency for > one of our products and as a result a high number of instances being present > (I guess if latency increases, the number of instances would increase as > well to serve new requests). > > I logged a production issue (link) and the gae team took it up swiftly and > started work on fixing it. Though it took time to fix it, I was happy that > they were in touch while fixing the issue. > > Since the bump in instances was a result of the problem encountered due to a > degradation of GAE infrastructure, I thought it was right on my part to ask > for a refund of the extra billing charges that were levied. > > Our charges are usually in the range of $30 per day but during the 3 days > the charges were $86, $188 and $47 (attached the screenshot). That's pretty > steep and it does hurt our weekly budgets as we're a bootstrapped startup. > > When I contacted customer service and asked for a refund I was told that the > SLA is violated when there are exceptions thrown with error code 500. Since > that wasn't really the case here, we were denied the refund. > > In our case it was the latency(caused due to some problem with appengine) > that made our app take a big hit which means it isn't covered under SLA! In > case the GAE infrastructure degrades again, and instances spin up at a crazy > rate once more, it means we have to pay the charges. I dread if this problem > ever crops up again and stays for a week. > > This can happen to anyone due to any bug in appengine and I thought it was > good to give a heads up. If GAE causes a high number of instances to spin up > for no fault of yours, you would still end up paying the charges. > > -- > 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/-/hDVaF8zzxrQJ. > 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.
