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Comment by vicpara | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine is rubbish compared to most of other PaaS or SaaS providers. Rubbish because of the unreliable infrastructure (instances that get quickly out of sync), slow reads and writes, memory footprint your instances are allowed to have so that Google scales better and their API usability.

I really doubt they will be able to come up with something meaningful.

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I work on Google Cloud Platform, and I don't see any of the things you mentioned about App Engine. If you want a larger memory footprint, I suggest you look at the Flexible Environment (formerly Managed VMs), which lets you use any size VM you like.

We also have new Cloud Platform client libraries for many languages - start at https://cloud.google.com/docs/ for Go, PHP, Java, Python, .NET, Ruby and Javascript (Node.js)

App Engine hasn't stood still. I'd encourage you to take another look.

I'm not orchestrating a 1000k-node cluster, but for my needs, the google cloud has been excellent. It seems they are doing something right if they're attracting Linode/DO customers like me and AWS customers at the same time.

From the benchmarks I've seen, their computing instances also over much better perfomance/$ than AWS, especially in IO.

(But I have no experience with app engine so we could both be right)

AppEngine is a somewhat clunky experience because of the walled garden nature it presents. For example, you can't write to a local filesystem in the way that you normally would, no listen sockets, etc.

And, while I don't have as drastic an opinion as others, there are operational issues. The most recent one was mysteriously disappearing outbound emails. These are worse than they should be, because there's no real way to escalate and get someone's attention, even if you're willing to pay for it. The support model is not the same as for the newer Cloud services.

>I'm not orchestrating a 1000k-node cluster

Is this right? Do you really mean 1 million nodes? Even if only 1000 nodes, who are the people using the high end of computing power, and for what?

Let's put it this way: I am indeed not orchestrating a 1 million node cluster and the statement is therefore technically true, which some say is the superior truth anyway :)

Could you share some fact with us?

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