The support pricing is a very sore point for me too. I can see why when GAE becomes perfect and all the "support calls" are because of user errors this might make sense. This is not the case as of yet. For instance, both last Saturday and tonight I am hitting "customer embarrassing and confidence loosing” hurdles because of GAE (see issues 10399 and 10503). Asking me, or any other paying user, to pay extra, so that I can timely report these issues and then GAE can timely repair them, and restore the service where is should have been in the first place, is adding insult to injury…
PK http://www.gae123.com On January 22, 2014 at 6:04:21 PM, Coto Augosto C. (c...@me.com) wrote: Absolutely agree. I used to rely on app engine services more than heroku or other PaaS but now I am disappointed after see that I have been billed for pagespeed while it was disabled and I was billed 3 months for back-end instances type B2 while we had B1. Other issue I had was when our application was down for 2 days and we didn't have a door to report it. We had to paid for gold support ($400) for gold support, I called and they fixed the issue in 3 minutes by restarting the instance. Do we have to pay to fix issues in Google end? I am pretty disappointed now :( On Jan 22, 2014 10:11 PM, "Doug Anderson" <d...@claystreet.com> wrote: I think GAE is trying to remain competitive with Amazon Web Services etc... and not with CDNs. App Engine and Google Cloud Storage *is* competitive with Amazon Cloud Services EXCEPT those services offer tiered pricing (lower prices) for high volume clients... to my knowledge App Engine doesn't offer that (at least not publicly advertised). App Engine isn't much of a CDN as far as I can tell (I don't think that's a prime objective). It would be hard to argue against augmenting with an actual CDN where appropriate. Certainly technologies like Docker and OpenStack go a long way toward helping a lone wolf build a maintainable stack but I think you'll find that if you run that stack on Amazon's cloud (for instance) that GAE pricing *is* competitive. So I would contend that your pricing argument is more of a generic Anyone's Cloud vs Custom Hardware argument. I can certainly save a ton of money by storing data on local hard drives vs the cloud but then I have to worry about redundancy, drive and fan failures, rebuilds, backups etc. If you want multi-site redundancy and/or need rapid scaling/growth costs go up and the cloud starts to look intriguing again. Each (cloud and custom hardware) still has its place imo... On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:58:42 PM UTC-5, Rafael Sanches wrote: Hi Doug, Just correcting your phrase a little bit: "that must be significant bandwidth even for YOU" We've cut thousands of dollars out of our total bill by serving the images ourselves, through a real cdn. Appengine output bandwidth is much more expensive than almost any other cdn out there. Again, keeping this thread on topic, my advices only make sense if you have your server bills are in the thousands and are struggling with server costs. If you're an early stage startup with < $100 bill or an overfunded startup or a big corporation, who cares? :) thanks rafa On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Doug Anderson <do...@claystreet.com> wrote: Yes, the tests I conducted were on the production server. I'd even be content if the resized images used the same default (quality=85) as the Images service. A switch to a more reasonable default would instantly cut all dynamically served images to nearly 1/2 the size... that must be significant bandwidth even for Google. It's either an oversight on Google's part OR they deliberately chose not to utilize the extra CPU bandwidth required for additional compression (???). Serving yourself allows additional flexibility (such as in your gist) but you don't get the cost benefits of the dynamic image service (no CPU charges) On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:09:37 PM UTC-5, Rafael Sanches wrote: Doug, Does that behaviour also happens in production? Compare prod vs dev. That's another reason why I prefered to run my own image serving, I control all the parameters and can also add things like watermarking, vertical cropping and WEBP formatting. thanks rafa On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Doug Anderson <do...@claystreet.com> wrote: Rafael & Kaan... since you both utilize dynamic image serving, do either of you have an issue concerning the size of dynamically served images? I filed the issue below a while ago and it has seemingly been ignored by Google. In short my grievance is that dynamically served images are effectively sized with JPEG quality = 100 (or very close to it). Thus, the dynamic images are typically 3x larger than a comparable image scaled statically via the the Images service with quality=65 and 2x larger than quality=85. My app saves a large reference image (1440x1080) and I use dynamic image serving for a variety of smaller sizes. For image heavy apps the difference really adds up... especially for mobile. My issue is below if you have an interest in this topic (your thoughts/feedback is much appreciated): https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=9979 On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 2:58:56 PM UTC-5, Rafael Sanches wrote: Jim, In 2014 a good engineer can create your own cloud infrastructure with 10 machines like the ones I suggested. Again, I am not saying that I don't like appengine. In fact, I love it and that's why I stick with it. I am saying it's over priced to run a service like Snapchat. I don't think there's any argument there. Kaan, This is my gift to you: https://gist.github.com/mufumbo/8547036 It extends all of the appengine image features: "=s/-c" and includes the most useful one: "=h" Depending on appengine's image serving is a limitation, since "vertical cropping" is extremely useful on many elegant websites. For example, play around with: http://c1.picmix.net/61757192=s682=h300 or http://c1.picmix.net/61757192=s300=h600 By the way, another way to reduce server costs is to pay the $400 or $200 a month in support. That way you get access to discounted instance hours. It decreased our bill a bit and give access to a place to get feedback when appengine is having problems or when you need to tweak your scheduling and performance parameters that you don't have access from XML config. About three months ago I spent a whole month optimizing my servers to reduce the costs from $10k to $5k. Even now, I feel it's too overpriced for the performance it's delivering. thanks rafa On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Kaan Soral <kaan...@gmail.com> wrote: I think he gets it much more than you give him credit for Hetzner example, as I interpret it, and think about it myself, is about the price of computing/ram/bandwith, although it's not comparable 1:1, it's important to know how cheap computing and hosting has become over the years, especially in this last 5-10 years It was really interesting to hear about your story Rafael, it was the approximate reason why I started this discussion, to learn and speculate about major services The 2000$ to 300$ cdn comparison is interesting, however no other service that I know of matches the extreme capabilities of google images service I use the =s/-c resizing/cropping extensively, that's why I could never easily replace appengine, or the cdn You seem to have lived my worst case scenario, going out of money and having to ask others for money. Anyway if you don't mind it would be great to learn more about your product/story, but I'm guessing it's better to keep things as private as possible :) On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 9:16:18 PM UTC+2, Jim wrote: 1970's? What on earth about my post made you think of the 1970's? My description of geographically redundant, web based applications? Please indeed. The link you provided is for a LAMP hosting service... basically what I described in my third scenario about. That's apples-vs-oranges as compared to GAE. I suggest you consult with the Application Architects where you work and politely ask them to describe the differences to you. Clearly nobody here is getting through to you and I don't have the time or the inclination. On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 12:35:13 AM UTC-6, Rafael Sanches wrote: Guys, Please, we're not in 1970 anymore. There is no argue that appengine is the most expensive hosting on earth and possibly the universe. My company spend $4000 a month with appengine. We could host the same service with $50 in a more powerful environment: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex With $300 we could make it redundant and more reliable and faster than appengine. A dedicated server is also more reliable, because of appengine infamous "hicupps" due to its scheduling system and instance boot time. In one of my services I rent a rack with 20 spaces and it's filled with only 10 severs. It means I can scale my servers with 10 more. That configuration costs $1000. Please, pay attention for 10 dedicated quad-core with 32GB of ram. How much would you pay in appengine for that type of throughput? I did the calculations: $60k. Please, it's incomparable price wise. There's no argue and let's not go there :) thanks rafa On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Jim <jeb6...@gmail.com> wrote: I've seen many variations of this statement, "Google App Engine is expensive!", and it always strikes me as a bit off. I supppose it depends on your perspective and your requirements. For the past three years I've been running a small start-up building a SaaS analytics application. For the prior 25 years or so I built enterprise apps for some well-known software houses. The last 12 years I was building SaaS-based software products serving top-tier global financial institutions. During that time I worked on projects where we built, from the ground up, 2 different web-based solutions which wound up serving tens-of-thousands of end-users and very large volumes of system-to-system (B2B type) transaction volumes. When we created our infrastructure for these systems we needed multiple geographically dispersed data centers, high levels of fault-tolerance within any given data center, n-tier architecture, secure systems, scalable databases and front-end servers, system, security and network monitoring and administration, etc. When you spec that all out from scratch, you will have a hard time doing it for less than several hundred thousand dollars capex with big ongoing opex expense. Any growth beyond your initial headroom will require additional capex expenditure and incremental ongoing opex. Depending on the profile of your application and the system load, at some point you will pass the threshold of it being cheaper to build and maintain your own equivalent infrastructure, but that threshold is very, very high. So it makes me think people who say GAE is 'expensive' are not making a comparison such as this. Maybe they don't really need everything that GAE offers. Or perhaps they are comparing GAE to other cloud offerings such as AWS? Amazon's pricing doesn't seem to be radically different than Google's to me, for similar services. And given that Amazon's PaaS solution is not yet as complete at GAE, I think that any complete appliation built on AWS is going to require some level of system-engineering. System engineers are not cheap. One of the things we like about GAE is that, at this point in our corporate evolution, we can focus entirely on our Customers and our Software and not spend money or time configuring hardware, OS and other "low level" stuff that we (as application software guys) don't want to mess with. There are very real hard and soft monetary benefits to this. Or maybe when people say "expensive" they mean as compared to other "cloud" offerings that are more along the lines of rented physical or virtual machines. Yes, some of these can be cheap compared to GAE. But these are really apples-to-oranges comparisons when you consider all the things you need to provision a global, "utility-grade" (aspirationally, anyway) SaaS offering. So I guess this post is a long-winded way of me saying "GAE Expensive? Really? What exactly do you mean by that? Compared to what?" On Monday, January 20, 2014 4:19:54 AM UTC-6, coto wrote: We all should be surprised, because Google App Engine is very expensive!! On Sunday, January 19, 2014 5:23:13 AM UTC-3, alex wrote: Why were you surprised? -- 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 google-appengi...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. 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