Google App Engine for developers

niallkennedy.com

13 points·mechanical_fish··2 comments

Things I found particularly interesting:

The quotas are just a guideline as Google may cut off access to your application if you receive a traffic spike of an unspecified duration... Google App Engine already failed the Techcrunch effect and appears the platform is currently unable to handle referral traffic loads from a popular blog or news site typically associated with a product launch. The traffic spike cutoffs make me think twice about hosting anything of value on App Engine.

In other words, Google App Engine's vaunted scalability is, for the moment, vaporware. That would be understandable at this stage, but it means that it's impossible to evaluate the key advantage of the service.

I'd like to know how quickly Google will respond when my site is knocked offline by DOS attack: Will I be able to get them on the phone? Can any Google customers comment on that?

Static files are limited to 1MB... Applications are not uniquely identifiable by IP address... no SSL support... no image processing... Google user accounts...Google will store your user data and potentially mine its data for better ad targeting.

I'm not loving any of this.

The key thing to remember is that this is a preview release, available only to a small number of users. Google is probably keeping an eye on ways people are trying to break out of the sandbox and fixing bugs with their SDK and infrastructure.

Google is trying to get people to write applications in a way that CAN scale, not necessarily something that is scalable at the moment (see the resource limits). Once the pressing issues are ironed out I am expecting to see more reasonable terms (in the free to pretty cheap range).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com