Hello all, I would like to kick off this discussion because I think the Google AppEngine team is missing an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the competitors.
First, a quick rundown of why I've chosen AppEngine many years ago and why I continue to use/recommend it: - the free tier (important to try stuff out) - managed services (like Memcache, Datastore, Taskqueues, CloudSQL) - automatic scaling / failover - automatic patching / updating / tuning of the instances In short, I want to focus on delivering the solution to my stakeholders and I don't have the time to become ops (even though ops is very important). Also, I have confidence in the world-class ops team at Google that they will keep my app secure and well-performing. Of course this is not to say that everything is rosy. One big painpoint was/is the lag of updating the runtimes (only recently did we get Java 8 - god knows when we'll get Java 9 - and Python 3 isn't even discussed - even though major libraries are dropping support for Python 2 soon). The other one is the inability to "bring your own libraries" if they require native code. And finally sometimes there is a general flakyness to AppEngine, but that's just a fact of life when running on such a large distributed system. So the new AppEngine flex offering comes out which is basically "we run your docker image using the autoscaler". Which is great, but looses many of the advantages of AppEngine standard: - free tier? forget it - managed services? some yes, some no (like memcache), some in beta with limitations (like taskqueue - I think you can't submit push tasks with AppEngine Flex) - the big one for me: NO automatic updating / patching / tuning / optimizing of your runtime environment (see the discussion at [1]) So basically: I'm paying more (since AppEngine flex is more expensive) and I get less performance (since Google engineers are not assisting me in tuning Nginx / the JVM / etc inside my container) and I have to play ops by following the security discussions for the different parts of my stack and diligently rebuild/patch my containers. At this point I'm like: screw it, there is very little difference between running a bunch of docker images on the Google Cloud vs any other competitor. But this could be very easily be fixed: - offer a "no questions asked, here are $300 / month" tier on Google Cloud which the user can spend on anything (including running AppEngine flex instances, CloudSQL instances, etc). It could even be $10 / day to avoid the "because of a bug I just used up my monthly allowance" kind of situations - allow flexible environments to scale down to 0 instances. The "it's slow to start up" seem bull, since a docker container is just like a process - isolated using namespaces, cgroups, etc. So it's not like you have to boot a VM to serve the first request - have an official base image (based on Debian for example) and say: as long as your docker images are derived "FROM google-appengine-flex-base:latest", we promise to update/tune the underlying packages and apply it to your instances without you having to do anything - commit to provide complete access to all the Google Cloud Services in a select number of programming languages (lets say C/C++ / Java - which covers the JVM languages / C# - covering the .NET languages / Python 3 / PHP - and the other languages can wrap the C library). This is not some genius idea, so I guess the explanation for why this hasn't happened is internal politiking. Thus I would like to ask you: get off of that and make AppEngine a great PaaS again (currently it's just a good one). Regards, Attila [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/QulhjoBGlHc -- 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 google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/33a993b7-cee1-4fea-a2ce-05e52a9e199d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
