Google App Engine Blog

It isn't really ready for prime-time. AppEngine still has some limits that make it hard to develop.

Examples:

The 1MB file upload limit. It's not that I want to have users uploading 500MB tars or something, but I don't want to put a message in my app saying, "please resize you photo to be less than 1MB before uploading where we'll probably alter the photo again."

They've indicated that you'll be able to purchase more storage and bandwidth which is great, but noticeably absent was the ability to send more than the 2,000 email limit (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/12/system-status-dashboard-quota-details.html). The problem might not be that I want to send more than 2,000 emails in a single day. The problem is that these quotas are rolling windows. Plus, the whole point is that AppEngine scales without me having to do anything. If it doesn't accommodate a decent sized social app, I might as well just put something on Slicehost or EC2 since at that low a usage rate, scaling isn't that hard.

There's no map/reduce or cron-like jobs. The datastore in AppEngine acts as a bit of a straight-jacket to ensure you don't do operations that don't scale. However, without map/reduce and cron jobs, it can mean that you just can't do certain things. And yes, I know that you could fake it by running another server, making an HTTP request to AppEngine and cutting up a process that might take a minute into chunks that AppEngine would execute, but that's just silly. The…

I'd rather have Google say "in order for GAE to stay alive, we've had to raise pricing on our current metrics to X", I can understand that, I can justify that, I can compare it and decide how to deal with it/optimize for it, but instead we got, "based on user popular feedback we're radically changing the way we measure usage, then charging some significant multiplier to whatever everybody is already paying so that it no longer makes sense to operate on our platform and you can't even really compare it in such a way as to make sense of the change, then we'll systematically not address anybody who asks us about this in forums or via other communications but we're going to do all this in the most frustratingly passive aggressive way possible" [1][2] Can anybody really believe that popular feedback to Google was "we're not being gouged nearly enough, Google, charge us 2000% more!"

[1]http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-app-engine-new-version-and.html

"Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help our customers is to graduate App Engine from preview status. "

"Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their App Engine investment with their business goals."

[2]http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-engine.html

"App Engine graduating from…

I was hoping that eventually App Engine would be implemented on top of GCE, with all the services App Engine now provides available for GCE, and move to container‐based sandbox, like OpenShift/Heroku/Elastic Beanstalk, instead of application‐based sandbox. Especially now that App Engine has switched to instance‐based pricing.

For example there’s this old thing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDRKNzdlazFTWldOUjJEekdOcDRBZmc6MQ#gid=0 (Google App Engine VM Runtime TT Sign‐up)[1]

Unfortunately, since all of this effort went into securing yet another runtime (PHP), I don’t think it will happen.

It would be great if at least it was possible to use Appscale over GCE or just the Datastore – which is by far the most attractive feature of App Engine, other than Task Queue – with custom deployment solution.

Google Cloud Datastore could deliver just that if you don’t mind paying twice:

You should be aware that Cloud Datastore has a serving component
that runs on Google App Engine, so there will be instance hour costs.

[1] “If you are interested in using VMs with your App Engine applications in the future, let us know by signing up here.” http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-engine-launches.html

As part of their pricing switch a few years ago, Google committed to a 3 year depcreation period for App Engine: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-engine.html

"For App Engine, leaving Preview will include providing all paid users a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, billing via invoice, a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses, and a new, easier to understand usage-based pricing structure for App Engine that is in line with the value App Engine provides. It will also reaffirm our deprecation policy whereby we will support deprecated versions of product APIs for 3 years, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to function."

A quick comparison of the TOS shows that Compute Engine doesn't have the same policy, but IANAL, so I could be missing something.

This just came out today:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/09/agile-paddling-with-app-engine-lessons.html

"All in all, we saw over 1,000,000 page views from 93 countries around the world, and experienced incredible stability and scalability from Google App Engine even when we were spiking 350 requests per second during the finals."

Dave Westwood of BuddyPoke shared a few slides on his performance:

http://files.meetup.com/1135107/BuddyPoke_AppEngine_Stats.pdf

It's a little hard to parse w/o more description, but basically he's done well serving what seems to be a large % of Brazil with a low error rate.

IMHO, the best ways to use app engine rely on (1) memcache to iron out any timeouts or datastore issues, and (2) a relatively rich client front-end so any problems on back-end can also be handled in a user-friendly way (like Gmail).

Hi Ryan, have you seen the recently announced support packages for the Google Cloud offerings? It's a multi-tiered approach, from Bronze (free, online) to Silver (premium, with email support) to Gold (premium, with 24x7 phone support), all the way to Platinum (premium, with a dedicated technical account team). Announcement here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/02/google-cloud-platform-introduces-new.html

Sign up here: https://cloud.google.com/support/packages

Basically, it's a way of agreeing with what I think is your point. Support does matter, and Google is taking it very seriously.

Would love to hear your thoughts once you've tried one of those support packages!