Hi guys, A few months back, I had a similar reflexion on current trends regarding AppEngine, which I called "the end of paas", which could be called "end of serverless" in a way
https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!search/paas|sort:date/google-appengine/DHMMv5r8qjU/A-VO3PXPDwAJ It's not very long, so I paste it here, since it is quite similar to what is being said here. It seems most of the services that made AppEngine a proper Platorm as a Service are now scheduled to be shut down, and users are advised to migrate. Migrate search to ElasticSearch, migrate memcache to Redis, and maybe at some point we'll be asked to migrate Ndb to MongoDB and GCS to whatever. I'm not complaining about the way the process is handled actually, there is enough time to consider the options and work on a migration scenario, there is no imminent deadline, at least for the moment. But I'm wondering what went wrong with the PaaS approach, and is it officially dead. Is this the end of GAE as a PaaS ? I truly believed PaaS was the future of cloud architectures: stop thinking in terms of servers, start thinking in terms of services. When I started working with AppEngine, I dreamed of CPU as a service, with no server granularity, and I was disappointed to find I still had to worry about servers, starting up a new server instance, choosing what type of instance would be best, a scaling strategy, etc. I was expecting servers as a service, i.e. serving my requests without me ever thinking in terms of servers. But at least there was Ndb, search, memcache, GCS and a few more. Now it seems all of these are on their way out, which makes me wonder: was there something wrong with the concept of PaaS itself, or is it just that these products didn't gain traction, and are now too costly to maintain with regards to their user base ? Actually, the one thing that was wrong with Paas from the very beginning was that it would lock a project into a given cloud. That was a risk to be reckoned for users, but it could have been seen as a feature for the cloud provider. Now is it for this reason that the mentionned services didn't make it ? Because users would have been wary of being locked in, and for that reason would prefer to use leading products deployed on leased servers ? One thing is for sure: once an application has migrated to more standard services, it will not be tied to GCP anymore. There was a major benefit to the PaaS concept: it was very cheap for startups. Deploying ElasticSearch on a the smallest possible cluster will start at around $200 a month, while the search usage of a small application could cost less than $10. Same for the shared memcache service offered by AppEngine. Now you are having to pay for running servers all night with very little transactions to handle. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this matter ? -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/6edf3459-a4d0-4ea4-9282-86cdb6a2672f%40googlegroups.com.
