Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN, I think. (A cynical person might thank that it's AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs, but I guess it's more likely that the cause is groupthink.)

Last summer I switched jobs from a company where we developed loads of cloud thingies ourselves, because there really weren't any good options around ten years ago when we started a product line that needed a high quality global service (involving processing, networking and storage). We had a lot of fun basically building our own little (if 5000+ machines qualifies as little) AWS/Google-style Cloud. I heard about Amazon Dynamo in 2007 and then we basically re-implemented it ourselves. We added lots of neat features like datacenter-aware global replication, etc.

When I joined the new company last June, it was basically just me. A few months later we hired a great python dev. I'm so happy to find that the level of the openly available products/services had caught up quite a bit by then, enabling us not to spend so much time on just making sure things were available all of the time, and ~infinitely scalable.

I spent a lot of time evaluating AWS vs GC, but my inevitable conclusion was that.. in a small company where you don't want to invest in a 24/7/365 devops team you should go for the Google App Engine.

I would really like it if Google found some pragmatic way to make App Engine work inside China though, at least for companies that have chinese ICP permits.

(Why hasn't AWS launched a PaaS? Lambda is so neutered that it doesn't really count.)

> App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN

No, it's the worse PAAS in existence. Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB, filtered headers, must perform http requests with custom SDK (horrible SDK BTW...). It is absolutely not worth it.

The new Google "managed VMs" or whatever are closer to what Appengine should have been all along.

I'm not saying AWS is great, it has a horrible UI, but AWS has none of these silly limitations.

App Engine screwed so many people over. First they couldn't get it working. Then they tripled the price. Fuck App Engine.

I can't imagine anyone reading HN who'd think this is the right solution in 2016. Even if you want to jump on the Google train (there are valid reasons for this, including free outbound bandwidth to YouTube and Google Drive...), there's no excuse for App Engine. Use the other Google cloud offerings. The container stuff is top notch.

I find the history of app engine and how it compared to the competition back then quite uninteresting. What I find interesting is how it works today.

They didn't "triple the price". They changed the model of what they charged and how. For some users, this definitely screwed them. For many others the list price could have gone up quite a bit, but with just a bit of performance tuning could have been perfectly fine. I speak from experience... the pricing shift incentivized me to do some refactoring, and my monthly bill dropped by ~50-60%.

And AppEngine is absolutely the right solution for some users, like people who don't want anything to do with sysadmin work, configuring containers, etc. (Like myself.)

Eh, I don't know that I agree that there's no reason for App Engine. For a simple, low traffic Django app it's both simpler and cheaper than say standing it up on GCE or GKE.

I hear you about the pricing change. We talk a lot about not getting pricing wrong internally (now), as that's exactly what happened. Initial trial pricing is ... dangerous.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

> Horrible proprietary NoSQL DB

First, why do you think Google Datastore is any more or less proprietary than AWS Dynamo? (Which has its own eccentricities- like having to forecast and/or overallocate capacity in advance; while with Datastore you only pay for actual usage?)

Oh; and you can also use Cloud SQL or BigTable from within AppEngine.

> must perform http requests with custom SDK

What do you mean?

Are you saying the raw sockets API doesn't allow you to use port 80? (I don't believe that to be the case).

The filtered headers thing is a common issue in many https load balancers, particularly ones like ours that have global anycast routing.

I've shown a bunch of people that a modern App Engine standard environment app can run stock Django talking to MySQL (which we manage for you with Cloud SQL) just fine. If you need native C-code extensions, sure use our new Flexible Environment (neé Managed VMs) but you don't need to for many simple apps.

Finally, as others have pointed out, App Engine is just one piece of our overall platform (though it was first, so it's common to have this misperception).

Disclosure: I work at Google on Compute Engine (so of course I want you to use our products).

> (Too many AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs?)

I don't think so. A good while ago GAE was incredibly limiting - it certainly was when I tried it. Python only (maybe also PHP?), forced to use Google Cloud whatever for storage, etc. By comparison, AWS was using MySQL databases and EC2 boxes that let you use whatever language you wanted.

I know things have come a long way since then, but the reputation persists.

Agreed; GAE's initial feature set was not great, and I think some of that launch stink unfortunately still sticks. As a counterpoint, you see lots and lots of love on HN for Heroku, which is a PaaS in much the same vein as GAE.

It's not protectionism; it's ignorance? ;)

Ignorance about getting locked into an ecosystem its harder to get out of? Hardly.

But heh! You do you, I'll keep my platform agnostic config management thank you very much. Life's too short to be beholden to any one vendor.

There is really no lockin at all if you use e.g. Flask via the WSGI interface. That is the beauty of it.

You can downgrade to manally managed servers with the the same codebase.

> You can downgrade to manally managed servers with the the same codebase.

Or you spend the few extra hours upfront wrapping your app in config management so it can run on any bare VM.

Don't be lazy! Not being able to run anywhere is technical debt. Unless you're running a hobby site that generates no revenue; in that case, do whatever.

YAGNI. Do it when you know that you need it.

YAGNI does not apply to risk mitigation.

I think Google would let us know in advance if they ever decided to retire AppEngine.

Reputations are hard to shake. When it launched GAE was one big vendor-lockin, and we all avoided it.

When GAE launched I found it to be a cool toy, played with it a little and dismissed it - way too much lock-in.

After revisiting it the past year.. I don't really understand why the in comparison pathetic AWS Lambda gets so much more attention, for instance.

> Python only (maybe also PHP?),

I think the order in which GAE added languages was Python, Java, Go, PHP.

> Python only (maybe also PHP?)

They now support Python, PHP, Java, Go.

And in beta, "flexible environment", which is like elastic beanstalk but more sensible: Python, Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby, <random docker images>.

While they are java keywords as we know them this is not a complete jdk, so many (almost single good one) libraries dont work. I remember spending a week trying to port itext pdf generation lib to gae. While it worked we got concerned by the legal issues of us riping code out of sun/ibm/harmony jdks to add missing jdk classes.

Java here is a pure marketing effort to convince a clueless manager saying hey we got java!

> Java here is a pure marketing effort to convince a clueless manager saying hey we got java!

What if there exist Java-based system that somehow can be deployed to GAE with minimum changes...? (e.g.: not needing itext)

What if there exist a company that the majority of developers prefer Java?

GAE vs. EC2 is kind of the wrong comparison though... GAE is kind of more like AWS Lambda, or maybe bit like ECS or Elastic Beanstalk (and even then not really).

> App Engine work inside China though

There is this: https://www.appscale.com/

It's an open source implementation of the App Engine APIs. The website doesn't make it very clear but the source is on Github: https://github.com/AppScale/appscale

Good point. AppScale has always been on GitHub under an Apache 2 license and has customers in production in China.

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