On May 12, 2:19 am, Vinuth Madinur <vinuth.madi...@gmail.com> wrote: > As companies age, they start looking for ways to make free money without > actual work. (Think of the big banks.) Sad to see signs Google is going that > way.
Actually the way I see it is that Google has given us a free ride for three years. Starting to charge for what they gave away free is not "free money" - it's "reducing losses". I feel it is in our interests that Appengine is a going concern - I think you'd hear many more screams if Google had announced they were closing it instead - so I'm actually glad that they are starting to get real about charging for it. Yes, it will mean thousands of developers leaving for cheaper pastures. But in the main, that will be the spammers and people who are hosting their personal 1 hit per day websites on Appengine because it's free. If losing them means better support for the rest of us, then I will cheerfully wave them goodbye. > If this move results in charging even for instances sitting idly (while > we don't even have direct control over the # of instances!) that would be a > pretty big change from "no evil". My app has light load and is set to > multithreaded yet AE keeps spawning new instances for no reason. I refuse to > pay for those. Quite right. But before you get too angry, they have said loud and clear that they will be putting a lot of work into the instance scheduler. It'll be interesting to see how this works - it's possible that the free 24 instance-hours will be equivalent to a current always- on instance, and that we'll pay only for extra instances over this. So (possibly) a free app would get an always-on instance for free. Extra (paid-for) instances will have to be killed after a certain idle period - maybe they'll give us control of that period, so we can balance the risk of cold startup against cost. I can also see their rationale in changing to charging by instance, because it's simpler to understand and probably maps to their costs more closely. Explaining instances to a pointy-haired-boss is a lot easier than talking application and API CPU hours. It's still worth optimising your app (or re-writing in Go) so it can handle more requests without spinning up new instances, although I agree it is less directly mapped. All in all, the cheapskate in me is sad I'll be paying more than I used to, but the rest of me is cautiously optimistic that this is a positive development for Appengine. Cheers Greg. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
