I generally am sympathetic to "GAE costs more because it offers more". But there's a finite limit to what that "more" is worth. 2X? 3X?
Consider that those 10 B1s are barely keeping up with a load of 2k users. A single $11/mo Node instance handles more than 10k users in my tests. As we've been talking about this, Richard's user #s are growing, and now he needs more than 10 B1s. So to put this in proper comparison, even _with_ the discount that isn't currently available, we're comparing cost to support 10k users: 50 B1s = $1,800/mo 2 Node instances (the second for redundancy) = $22/mo We're talking almost 100X. Two full orders of magnitude more expensive. But yes, I would happily offer the score-server service for $360/mo, let alone $1800! However, Richard is smart enough to run these on his own. My VPS instances have uptimes of 129 days, and that's just because I did a kernel upgrade. BTW, my goal in having this conversation is to encourage you guys to make backends either: 1) a lot cheaper or 2) perform a *lot* better. Ideally both. Jeff On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Takashi Matsuo <[email protected]> wrote: > First of all, thank you for the detailed cost comparison and the > honest feedback. We really appreciate it. > > The data itself is not very far from what I observed in my test. > Certainly, we should try making the backends cheaper. The easiest fix > will be this issue: > http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7411 > > It will reduce the cost by 5/8(if the discount rate is the same as the > one for frontend), so it'll be $360/month for 10 B1s. > > Besides the cost, we should also improve the performance itself. > > You might say 'It's still insane', however, I don't think so, because > App Engine backends provides other goodies like high availability, > redundancy, maintenance-free nature from the start. > > Please think this way. Would you like to offer a score-server service > for Richard by yourself at a cost of $360/month? Besides running a > single node.js server, you also need to run a spare server, need to > create a monitoring/fail-over mechanism, need to have a support > channel when in trouble, and sometimes need to diagnose any network > problem between App Engine and your server. > > If the answer is yes, probably it's a good business chance for you ;) > > I'm not saying that App Engine is perfect, but i just wanted to point > out that your comparison lacks(maybe it's intentional) a consideration > for the important aspects of App Engine. > > However, your feedback is still invaluable to us. Thank you as always. > > Regards, > > -- Takashi > > > On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Kristopher Giesing >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Do we know for sure that front ends are any faster? Their individual >>> throughput limits might just be masked by having more of them spin up. >> >> I expect frontends are about the same. But frontends can't aggregate >> scores so they aren't really an issue in this test. If you want to >> feel even worse for Richard, he's paying for what seems like an >> unreasonable number of F1 instances too... but for some reason that >> seems less frustrating than the totally unnecessary need to add a >> second equivalent number of backends. >> >> Jeff >> >> -- >> 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. >> > > > > -- > Takashi Matsuo | Developer Advocate | [email protected] > > -- > 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.
