I will sorely miss Appengine, as it was a uniquely simple way to get reliability and scalability.
And it was unique to Google. Other things, like containers, vms, and databases, AWS also has them. So I think the strategy is foolish. If Appengine is de-emphasized, I won't be confident putting resources in Firebase, which seems to be just the next Appengine. I will move to things that historically have been more stable, and that means, I am afraid, AWS. As much as I admire Google's technical skills, for the things I and my startups do, we need to be able to focus on developing new features rather than porting what we have from services that are going to be deprecated periodically. Luca On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 1:02 PM Joshua Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > It’s interesting to look at what Google is doing with Firebase. > > 1. They are encouraging us to move more of the processing into the client, > which while often architecturally foolish, does eliminate the need for some > of the PaaS stuff. > > 2. They have a serverless/cloud functions thing over there, which overlaps > a lot with the PaaS stuff we’ve been able to do in GAE. I haven’t dug into > that too much, but on the surface it looks like the spaghetti antipattern. > > Given that this is google, and that it’s PaaS all over again, I think the > risk of putting *any* eggs in the Firebase basket seems almost unbearably > high. Is Google going to turn their back on Firebase when the next shiny > object distracts them? Why should we believe that *any* service google > offers will last more than their committed 3 years? > > I’m super tired of having to go back and rewrite my critical business > infrastructure every few years. > > (Google’s competitors in the PaaS space don’t inspire any more confidence, > so this isn’t so much a google problem as a cloud problem, I think.) > > -Joshua > > On Mar 20, 2020, at 12:59 PM, Patrice B <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Hi guys, > > A few months back, I had a similar reflexion on current trends regarding > AppEngine, which I called "the end of paas", which could be called "end of > serverless" in a way > > > https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!search/paas|sort:date/google-appengine/DHMMv5r8qjU/A-VO3PXPDwAJ > > It's not very long, so I paste it here, since it is quite similar to what > is being said here. > > It seems most of the services that made AppEngine a proper Platorm as a > Service are now scheduled to be shut down, and users are advised to > migrate. Migrate search to ElasticSearch, migrate memcache to Redis, and > maybe at some point we'll be asked to migrate Ndb to MongoDB and GCS to > whatever. I'm not complaining about the way the process is handled > actually, there is enough time to consider the options and work on a > migration scenario, there is no imminent deadline, at least for the > moment. But I'm wondering what went wrong with the PaaS approach, and is > it officially dead. > > Is this the end of GAE as a PaaS ? I truly believed PaaS was the future > of cloud architectures: stop thinking in terms of servers, start thinking > in terms of services. When I started working with AppEngine, I dreamed of > CPU as a service, with no server granularity, and I was disappointed to > find I still had to worry about servers, starting up a new server instance, > choosing what type of instance would be best, a scaling strategy, etc. I > was expecting servers as a service, i.e. serving my requests without me > ever thinking in terms of servers. But at least there was Ndb, search, > memcache, GCS and a few more. > > Now it seems all of these are on their way out, which makes me wonder: was > there something wrong with the concept of PaaS itself, or is it just that > these products didn't gain traction, and are now too costly to maintain > with regards to their user base ? Actually, the one thing that was wrong > with Paas from the very beginning was that it would lock a project into a > given cloud. That was a risk to be reckoned for users, but it could have > been seen as a feature for the cloud provider. Now is it for this reason > that the mentionned services didn't make it ? Because users would have > been wary of being locked in, and for that reason would prefer to use > leading products deployed on leased servers ? One thing is for sure: > once an application has migrated to more standard services, it will not be > tied to GCP anymore. > > There was a major benefit to the PaaS concept: it was very cheap for > startups. Deploying ElasticSearch on a the smallest possible cluster will > start at around $200 a month, while the search usage of a small application > could cost less than $10. Same for the shared memcache service offered by > AppEngine. Now you are having to pay for running servers all night with > very little transactions to handle. > > I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this matter ? > > > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/6edf3459-a4d0-4ea4-9282-86cdb6a2672f%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/6edf3459-a4d0-4ea4-9282-86cdb6a2672f%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/5644BD34-868F-48F8-8FD7-87B8C0FA6AD6%40gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/5644BD34-868F-48F8-8FD7-87B8C0FA6AD6%40gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/CAPgu2uKUr7mY89NYrOWG0kJa9a1V%2Bc0395-5csqq7JycE7u4nQ%40mail.gmail.com.
