Hi there We are a bit confused. From all the threads we see on this mailing list it seems that it is expensive to run small applications on GAE in practice and that many small developers are turning away from GAE (see note 1).
We are not a small developer. Our monthly cost will go from $10'000 to $20'000 per month. So we would think of us as medium/big customers. At this point we also would like to state that we LOVE developing system on Google AppEngine. Our only issue really is the operating cost. Amazon offers double the CPU power and 6x the amount of RAM (EC2 Small Instance) for the price of one Google Frontend instance. Amazon offers you a raw machine, you can do whatever you like in this machine and don't have the limitations of Google AppEngine's. You want to open a socket, you open one. You want to run a powerful fulltext search backend, you do so. This makes an amazon CPU hour much more powerful than a GAE one and should also be taken into account when thinking about pricing. So I just throw a number out and say Google is 4x more expensive than Amazon (see note 2) On the other hand, you have to worry yourself about scale, uptime, failovers, databases etc. etc. This seems to be Google's argument for the justification of the 4x higher prices then on amazon. Yes, of course it is very nice to not having to cary a pager and that someone else is taking care of your system, but this argument is pointless: For the extra $10'000 per month we are going to have to spend with the new pricing scheme we will just hire a site reliability engineer that does nothing but taking care of the EC2 servers. Fulltime. Yes he might have to stand up occasionally in the middle of the night, but most of the time he will not have to do anything for his $10'000 per month and we as the devs wont have to carry a pager either. We are really thinking about moving out of GAE. We would definitely not start another project with the size of ours on GAE. So I'd say for medium/big size projects GAE isn't ideal either. So who is Google targeting with Google AppEngine? We are indeed confused. With best regards, - Andrin, Founder of MiuMeet. Note 1) assuming that the discussions on this mailing list are a relevant sample of the what the average developer feels, which is probably not true Note 2) 2x the CPU cost, 6x the RAM cost, and you have the limitations of Google AppEngines framework. -- 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.
