I've seen many variations of this statement, "Google App Engine is expensive!", and it always strikes me as a bit off. I supppose it depends on your perspective and your requirements.
For the past three years I've been running a small start-up building a SaaS analytics application. For the prior 25 years or so I built enterprise apps for some well-known software houses. The last 12 years I was building SaaS-based software products serving top-tier global financial institutions. During that time I worked on projects where we built, from the ground up, 2 different web-based solutions which wound up serving tens-of-thousands of end-users and very large volumes of system-to-system (B2B type) transaction volumes. When we created our infrastructure for these systems we needed multiple geographically dispersed data centers, high levels of fault-tolerance within any given data center, n-tier architecture, secure systems, scalable databases and front-end servers, system, security and network monitoring and administration, etc. When you spec that all out from scratch, you will have a hard time doing it for less than several hundred thousand dollars capex with big ongoing opex expense. Any growth beyond your initial headroom will require additional capex expenditure and incremental ongoing opex. Depending on the profile of your application and the system load, at some point you will pass the threshold of it being cheaper to build and maintain your own equivalent infrastructure, but that threshold is very, very high. So it makes me think people who say GAE is 'expensive' are not making a comparison such as this. Maybe they don't really need everything that GAE offers. Or perhaps they are comparing GAE to other cloud offerings such as AWS? Amazon's pricing doesn't seem to be radically different than Google's to me, for similar services. And given that Amazon's PaaS solution is not yet as complete at GAE, I think that any complete appliation built on AWS is going to require some level of system-engineering. System engineers are not cheap. One of the things we like about GAE is that, at this point in our corporate evolution, we can focus entirely on our Customers and our Software and not spend money or time configuring hardware, OS and other "low level" stuff that we (as application software guys) don't want to mess with. There are very real hard and soft monetary benefits to this. Or maybe when people say "expensive" they mean as compared to other "cloud" offerings that are more along the lines of rented physical or virtual machines. Yes, some of these can be cheap compared to GAE. But these are really apples-to-oranges comparisons when you consider all the things you need to provision a global, "utility-grade" (aspirationally, anyway) SaaS offering. So I guess this post is a long-winded way of me saying "GAE Expensive? Really? What exactly do you mean by that? Compared to what?" On Monday, January 20, 2014 4:19:54 AM UTC-6, coto wrote: > > We all should be surprised, because Google App Engine is very expensive!! > > On Sunday, January 19, 2014 5:23:13 AM UTC-3, alex wrote: >> >> Why were you surprised? > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
