I'm in a similar boat. I'm a small-business sysadmin turned developer. We can work with our current VPS service to add load balancing, alter our front-end to be easily cloneable, spin up extra frontends as demand requires, and continue to work on new features.
Or we can go to AppEngine, get rid of all the old VB wholesale during the re-write, not worry about server maintenance, and our current estimates put us at a 50% monthly cost reduction before adding in costs from our new features. The new features already running cost us less than $5 / month in AppEngine fees, but referring to the data is overloading the VPS. We've had to add in rate-limiting on the GAE side so we don't fry the VPS with data requests. GAE is 100% dependent on your use case. If you have lots of heavy burst traffic or need geographic redundancy, and don't have a lot of infrastructure support or budget, then it's great. If you spend just an hour or two each month tweaking resident instances and pre-pay amounts for instance hours, it gets even better. But it isn't for every project. On Monday, February 17, 2014 3:43:45 PM UTC-6, GregF wrote: > > As many people have said, it depends on your use case. In my case, I am an > application developer, not a sysadmin - I like to spend my time making > applications, not worrying about fine-tuning memcache, database > replication, software upgrades, and load balancers. Appengine has been > fantastic for me - my application took off from 0 to over a million users, > and I haven't needed to think about capacity issues, security or > availability. I like to say that if my app somehow got onto the Letterman > Show, I would be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels - I have > the best sysadmins in the word looking after my service. > > And all of this cost me less than $100 a month - and much less than that > when volumes were smaller. So Appengine has let me scale from zero to > serious volume without any pain, and sure, I could probably have saved a > few bucks hosting somewhere else, but it would have cost me days in extra > support time (and therefore dollars) and years of life expectancy because > of the stress involved. > > So I LOVE Appengine, and believe it offers very good value. I'm not saying > you have to love it too - in fact because you sound like you prefer to > build and maintaining your own stack, you'l probably hate it because all > the work is done for you - you're a sysadmin at heart. But for > developers, Appengine is an excellent platform. > > -- 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-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
