Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

I have used GAE a lot. They have improved tremendously over the last couple of years and have also extended their services. However, as noted on in the previous comments - support sucks.

Advantages:

- Easy to set up.

- Cheap to start (somewhat like Heroku). Especially the moment you start optimizing for performance it's easy to cut down on the funds needed each month.

- Scalable. Google takes care of it.

- As someone mentioned versioning. It works as easy as changing the YAML file.

- Deployments are fast and painless.

- Amazing cloud administration with beautiful and easy UI. Unified logs.

- Ease of integration with other Google products and APIs.

Disadvantages:

- Lack of proper support.

- Documentation is sometimes lacking.

- Lock-in. Oh man does it hurt if you want to move away from GAE.

- For python for example, you can only used C based python modules.

- HTTP request 30 seconds. 10mb limit. Datastore is I believe 1mb. Blobstore 50mb.

- Gets expensive the moment apps become bigger (somewhat like Heroku).

I'd definitely wager where your app will be in a month, 3 months, six months and a year and see if GAE is a viable option. Think of API integrations as well.

> - Cheap to start

At development scale it's essentially free. I host some simple static sites essentially for free too because traffic is low enough that it never comes close to billing.

> - As someone mentioned versioning. It works as easy as changing the YAML file.

Pro Tip: incorporate this into your deploy scripts with `--version=whatever` to override the setting in app.yaml. Make the value in app.yaml a safe one (e.g. 'development') in case someone new to the team screws up.

> - HTTP request 30 seconds.

Depends on the scaling you choose. This is the default (automatic scaling), but you can choose manual_scaling (you set the number of instances) or basic_scaling (slightly less configurable than automatic scaling). Both of the alternatives put no limit on time to execute a request.

> Datastore is I believe 1mb. Blobstore 50mb.

IIRC cloud storge provides unlimited size, and it's pretty easy to write a blob there and reference it in datastore.

Can you please elaborate on your support experiences? There's varying levels of support, all the way up to employing essentially dedicated SREs that have a shared application uptime responsibility with customers (CREs).

(Work on Google Cloud)

Hey, first of thank you for your hard work! Let me redefine my argument - free level of support is somewhat lacking.

To be fair - this was like year and a half ago. Two separate issues. The previous company I worked at was where the issues occurred. First issue was something related to the NDB. I do not exactly recall what happened, as it was right when I got there. I do recall people being whining about delayed replies and ended up re-deploying to another instance.

Second issue was a fee for a service we have not used (big data/query I believe)- it took a while for the support to reply(something along the lines of couple of business days - billing support btw) and after we got ahold of them we have spent a lot of time on the phone trying to figure things out and we were still charged for that month. It was not much, but we could have purchased the current silver package for that money.

After the company started selling more products we upgraded to Gold package which was excellent. That's about the time I left.

Another separate instance was when I was not allowed to create more apps (even though I deleted more than 6-7) and I had to make a request for my account to create more. That took couple of days as well.

I think I started using GAE around 2011 and since then I have only seen improvements :)

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