Hi Greg, thanks very much for your informative reply. I didn't intend to bash App Engine in that post, just to speculate that the underlying issue might lay in the inherent costs of running the architecture, rather than (say) some cynical, ill-advised business decision to squeeze the customers after maliciously locking them in, or only to offer services to huge clients. My surmise was just that, after so much excitement about its changing the world, App Engine's unique technology might be inherently expensive to run and inherently better suited to big clients. I took what you said about infrastructure to suggest there was a kernel of truth in my speculation.
I didn't fully follow your explanation of the costs, although I'm sure the full explanation is mostly proprietary information. But to my untrained eye, similar arguments apply to other services as well as to App Engine. You cited support, but there are many services which offer responsive basic support as well as deluxe hand-holding for an additional fee; the cost of providing that is the cost of labor. You cited additional services, but it looks to me like App Engine is charging many of those services in a very granular way (e.g. usage costs for blobstore, datastore, emails, xmpp, channels). For other services - take memcache for example - if you are using VPS/EC2/ Rackspace Cloud/colocated servers, you are still paying for the machine time to run those other services, one way or another. That leaves pieces like the scheduler and request queue, which look like infrastructure to Joe User. If App Engine's costs are higher for him to meet the same application requirements, that is either because he is buying more than he needs when he pays for App Engine (e.g. he doesn't use memcache, or doesn't actually need $9 of service) or because he is paying more per unit (e.g. because of the nifty scheduler and request queue that save him from certain aspects of scaling up when he wants to buy more capacity). My hypothesis was along the lines of things like the scheduler driving the costs, which in turn have driven the price increases. If that's the case, then maybe there is some prospect that Google or some upstart can reduce costs and disrupt the market, rather than retiring into some COBOL- esque niche as other prices decrease. Because everyone cares about per- unit prices, not just the low end or the high end. App Engine is something cool and unique I want to see more of, but it's still fundamentally fungible with other services and therefore vulnerable to competition on price, so I wonder if there are any economies to be had. And I also wonder now: is there anything the community can do to make the platform more cost-competitive? One component of the backlash here is that since 2008, a lot of people have developed a heavy investment in App Engine, not just in code written for the platform, but in knowledge, tooling, etc. In happier times and in open source, that kind of investment drives advocacy and contributions. As for free apps running very low traffic, I agree that EC2 is not suitable for those because the free tier only lasts a year and then increases dramatically, while App Engine will work fine for free just as long as traffic is very low. But what if traffic isn't very low? If you have the money you can scale up, but if your budget is low then in practice you can't scale up and the theoretical ability to do so with enough money is irrelevant. In these cases, forget EC2: there many free and very-cheap hosts for typical LAMP apps which will handle more traffic, and if you get some loyal fans then many LAMP apps can scale up to moderate traffic on a $20/mo host without excessive trouble. If you have a low budget, very high per-unit costs translate into a very low cap on available resources, and the theoretical ability to scale is wasted. So I couldn't recommend App Engine to people who want to run really cheap apps; if you anticipate ever handling much traffic, the only good reason I can see to use App Engine's free plan is that you need to develop your app before paying some premium to scale it up later with less effort. That's also how I see EC2's free usage tier. Personally, I have no complaints about this at all - I don't expect Google to give away services at a loss without expected benefit, I'm willing to pay market prices for services, and I try not to plan on writing apps which will never get much traffic ;) On Sep 5, 3:00 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote: > Hi Sasha, > > It is indeed more expensive to run App Engine than the alternatives you > mentioned for a few reasons: > - We have a lot of infrastructure built out around the core machines that we > don't charge for specifically but are included in the price of what you pay > for (the request queue, the scheduler, all of the free APIs, etc) > - It is a fully support service meaning there are people who keep it running > 24 hours a day, even when something goes wrong in a datacenter (which will > happen at some point) we ensure it is not up to you to fix it. > > There have been a number of posts to the list about people running really > small services that could fit on a single EC2 micro-instance, if what you > are running can fit on that, and you never expect to scale past that, EC2 > will likely be cheaper. But part of what you are getting with App Engine is > the ability to scale when you need to without having to completely > re-architect your app and without having to wake up if it happens in the > middle of the night to figure out how much capacity you need. Frankly > though, even on small apps, EC2 might not be cheaper if you have an app that > gets very little traffic as App Engine apps under the free quota are free > indefinitely whereas I don't believe any other service offers free capacity > indefinitely. > > Hope that helps explain it, > > Greg > > > > > > > > On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Sasha Hart <s...@sashahart.net> wrote: > > On Sep 2, 2:08 am, keakon lolicon <kea...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I wish I was the one who made a wrong decision. > > > Ouch. > > > It is sad that the billing changes seem to price a ton of > > international customers out of the market. > > > I wonder if recent events mean that the App Engine model (for lack of > > a more precise term - here I mean the technology, not the business) is > > just inherently much more costly than alternative models (like typical > > VPS or EC2). Does the price reflect additional technological overhead? > > Could others make changes to the model to run a similar service more > > cheaply? > > > -- > > 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. -- 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.
