I wanted to take a minute to update you on where we are with our GAE Experience since people often tell me I live in my own little world of rainbows and unicorns.
GAE Support sucks. I might as well send messages by carrier pigeons, and that is generous. Filling out a form for support is like putting a note in a bottle, putting that bottle in cement and chucking it in to the ocean and hoping support will see it when they are on a scuba trip. (or made to where cement shoes by the mob) (we have used the quota increase request forms at the two locations we know about, sent emails, nothing) Uptime is not too bad, but Slowtime is. Memcache gets slow, datastore gets really slow, chron jobs fire late (or not at all). This is worse on low traffic apps. For some reason if you can get 8 instances running life is happy. The world changes and the unicorns dance. Backends are worthless if you want them to do more than one thing. Autoscaling backends doesn't work. Bug just sits there, I'm told things work as expected. Apparently I should just expect that everyone will get a server busy error. Quota limits are really stupid. We moved a bunch of things off of GAE because GAE has really stupid limits on the amount of data you can download, and the amount of inter-app data you can use. We have apps that talk to apps, and we routinely bump against quota limits. Doesn't matter how much traffic we are doing, or what we are spending, you are rate limited on HTTP requests. Well if you consume an API, or use an api you own on another Appengine App, you will just magically explode when you get a traffic spike. So here is where we are at: We moved a lot of things off of AppEngine. We are going to try and salvage some of this with getting premier support. (though last time we were told it wouldn't make us happy, this time I'm going to pay the money, find out if I'm unhappy, and if I'm not we will leave, for real, for permanent) We love that AppEngine saves us from building infrastructure. It is great for rapid prototyping. When the scalability works it is awesome. When the quotas kick in and break us, (and it took 2 weeks to get the quotas lifted last time) it sucks and we look stupid. I am posting this here because the ONLY way to get support is to post a nasty message in the forums. Anything else is largely ignored. If you want a great product that works and you are ok with that it will work to the limits of what it does, and that your uptime will be good, but you won't have any insight in to your downtime, Appengine is great. If you need someone to tweak, change, or fix something. Or you want to be able to tell your CEO, "yeah they are fixing that as we speak" and not have it be a lie, this is not the place for you. -Brandon 650-281-1467 -- 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.
