This got heated pretty quickly... Regarding costing, it is very clear to me that PaaS, and particularly GAE are extremely cost effective as long as: You can easily achieve your business goals, They save you operational FTE
I think if you step outside of these bounds, then its time to migrate to something where you take more control and responsibility. The cost of doing so is obviously not free, the custom apis do cause vendor locking to an extent. I also think its very easy to underestimate the cost of an engineer (or team of) who can maintain a VM image, apache/nginx, load balancing, memcache, a performant search index, scale a SQL or NoSQL database, sync to a CDN and make it all elastic so you pay minimum server costs. None of that is particularly hard, but if you're at the scale where doing it on a PaaS is not cost effective, you probably need to do this well, or it'll just cost you more on every axis. But at some point, if you need to make this leap, you need to do it. My experience is that very few applications actually need to do this ever. On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:16:18 AM UTC+11, Jim wrote: > > 1970's? What on earth about my post made you think of the 1970's? My > description of geographically redundant, web based applications? Please > indeed. > > The link you provided is for a LAMP hosting service... basically what I > described in my third scenario about. That's apples-vs-oranges as compared > to GAE. > > I suggest you consult with the Application Architects where you work and > politely ask them to describe the differences to you. Clearly nobody here > is getting through to you and I don't have the time or the inclination. > > > > > On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 12:35:13 AM UTC-6, Rafael Sanches wrote: >> >> Guys, >> >> Please, we're not in 1970 anymore. There is no argue that appengine is >> the most expensive hosting on earth and possibly the universe. >> >> My company spend $4000 a month with appengine. We could host the same >> service with $50 in a more powerful environment: >> http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hetzner.de%2Fen%2Fhosting%2Fproduktmatrix%2Frootserver-produktmatrix-ex&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHB4pohCO2ZKGcxoTG5sY0nc6pvDw> >> >> With $300 we could make it redundant and more reliable and faster than >> appengine. >> A dedicated server is also more reliable, because of appengine infamous >> "hicupps" due to its scheduling system and instance boot time. >> In one of my services I rent a rack with 20 spaces and it's filled with >> only 10 severs. It means I can scale my servers with 10 more. That >> configuration costs $1000. >> Please, pay attention for 10 dedicated quad-core with 32GB of ram. How >> much would you pay in appengine for that type of throughput? I did the >> calculations: $60k. >> >> Please, it's incomparable price wise. There's no argue and let's not go >> there :) >> >> thanks >> rafa >> >> >> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Jim <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> 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. >>> >> >> -- 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.
