The comparison drawn in this post is valid as long as you assume a capped
~$60 budget such as spend by many hobby enthusiasts. Technically its apples
and oranges, as GAE scales out far beyond a single machine setup. But thats
not worth a lot as long as your budget isn't highly scalable as well,
Backend servers are a different story, but I find it very difficult to
compare the cost of front-ends to most other things. Yes, a dedicated
machine / VPS can handle more requests per second and doesn't impose
many of the restrictions faced on GAE (native code, etc...), but on
GAE there is no OS
I want to continue to use GAE. I understand the value immensely, and I
invested a whole year into building a significant codebase around it and its
limitations without caring about lock-in. If I can help keep Google honest
and encourage them to revise their pricing so it is more palatable, then
Some thoughts on your comments:
I don't think the amount of RAM supplied to a frontend instance is
particularly relevant - in most web architectures, frontend instances
just shuttle data back and forth between the user and backend data
services (datastore, memcache, facebook, etc). So it's
A few comments inline.
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 14:18, Jeff Schnitzer j...@infohazard.org wrote:
Some thoughts on your comments:
I don't think the amount of RAM supplied to a frontend instance is
particularly relevant - in most web architectures, frontend instances
just shuttle data back and
I agree that RAM for front end instances *should* not be particularly
relevant. And RAM *should* really only be relevant for backend instances.
However, RAM becomes more relevant as we try to push up the number of
parallel requests that can be handled by a single instance. For example,
suppose
These are all very relevant points for application design, but don't
particularly impact the proposed pricing changes... these are the same
limitations we have to live with today.
FWIW, Similarity does frequently load 50+ entities at a time (say, one
set of match results) each of which is a hefty
