I've certainly felt that App Engine hasn't been a significant priority for Google for quite some time. Legitimate bug reports can go unacknowledged for years. The velocity of change has been largely centered around increased language support rather than significant service expansion and/or bug fixes. It comes across as "We've invested in this GAE ecosystem. What can we do to get more people to adopt it before we invest too much more?" So rather than expand/enhance the services themselves they focused on additional language bindings. Now, it feels like they've realized even the additional language bindings weren't enough.
The recent announcements around the Google Cloud Platform Live event make it pretty clear that Google realizes it can't tackle the cloud alone. With Kubernetes/Google Container Engine, bitnami, and Managed VMs for App Engine it's clear Google is building around Google Compute Engine in much the same way Amazon built AWS around EC2. I'm sure at some point all App Engine instances will be migrated to Compute Engine. Other than VMs for App Engine going beta I don't think there were any GAE service expansion announcements at the Live event. So this new, open, cooperate, run anything approach is the shiny new toy in the Google Cloud group (I don't see this as a bad thing... just more evidence that legacy GAE core services are NOT a priority). There's A LOT to like about GAE... I REALLY like the dynamic image serving service, IP geo-location with every request, ndb w/ integrated auto memcaching, and NOT having to worry about OS and web server configuration!!! GAE's ease of use is an area where Google actually has an advantage over AWS. But as a developer there's an uneasy feeling about adopting a proprietary platform like GAE when you see legitimate bugs remaining stale for years at a time and the rate of service expansion/enhancement seems almost stagnate. All the new announcements seem to be pointing somewhere beyond legacy GAE which just reinforces the uneasy feeling. - Doug On Tuesday, October 28, 2014 5:11:15 PM UTC-4, Emanuele Ziglioli wrote: > > I would find hard to disagree: > > *IBM, Google, and Oracle are all equally at pains to deliver a message >> that makes them uniquely attractive. In this regard, Google's inability to >> recover from the botched roll-out of Google App Engine (GAE) will surely go >> down as one of the oddest business cases. It launched the product with >> great fanfare. But developers who flocked to it initially found a difficult >> platform that supported only a subset of Java and a very old version of >> Python. Moreover, the interfaces to the proprietary database were poorly >> thought out, so that almost everything in GAE required platform-specific >> code-arounds. While GAE has improved in a limited sense since then, Google >> has not done what Microsoft did — revamp the product from top to bottom to >> make it easy to use. Nor has it leveraged its natural connection to >> developers. One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google.* > > > http://www.drdobbs.com/cloud/whose-cloud-will-you-use/240169229 > > > -- 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/d/optout.
