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Comment by bitcartel | Hacker News Reader

Today there's an outage, what would happen if tomorrow they decided to terminate all services?

Use an open-source PAAS like OpenShift or CloudFoundry to avoid vendor lock-in and give yourself the ability to run your application on your own servers if necessary.

Same thing applies to Heroku et al.

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That's why Google increased the price of GAE [0], so it would be profitable [1], which allows them to provide an SLA[2] that I can live with. Even deprecated GAE features work for at least a year before they're terminated [3].

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=gae+price+increase

[1] http://gigaom.com/2011/09/07/whats-better-pricier-google-app...

[2] https://developers.google.com/appengine/sla

[3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/app-engine-and-g...

Also, because I was curious if this deprecation policy was included cancellation of the entire service, yes it does:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---

7.2 Deprecation Policy.

Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):

- required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or

- doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.

This Deprecation Policy doesn't apply to versions, features, and functionality labeled as "experimental."

--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

So you have until 2015, or a year from the current date if that's less than a year away. I'd say that's a very reasonable amount of warning.

> We will use commercially reasonable efforts.

That sounds pretty damn ominous to me.

That's a pretty standard piece of legalese you'll see in most service agreements.

"Interpretation against the party that supplied the term

Where, after the interpretation of a contract term that has been supplied by one party, doubts remain as to the meaning of that term, an interpretation against that party is to be preferred ("contra proferentem")."

[0] http://www.trans-lex.org/926000

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Unicode's got you covered ✂ ✄

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Ooooh. Now to get my message mode to recognize and highlight those as well in Emacs.

I would worry more about Heruku given that SalesForce is losing money.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/13/marc-benioff-has-swagger-bu...

Google is insanely profitable and uses GAE internally for a large number of products. It would take years to re-write and shut down GAE.

You aren't trapped on Google AppEngine though. You can use your own servers with http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ if you want, and you will be able to use AppEngine apps on OpenShift soon when http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf is a bit more stable.

Have you really tried those with complex and high performance production system? Those aren't nearly comparable. Btw. You forgot TyhpoonAE.

Have not tried it yet - AppEngine works well enough at present. However, AppScale is just an API shim over memcache and a number of different databases such as Redis or mysql. I don't see any reason why it should not work just as well as building directly onto those, and the strict limits placed on the AppEngine DS should make it easy to shard mysql instances.

It's worth worrying about outages, because these "cloud hosting" providers are a single point of failure for their hosted sites.

Worrying about a complete shutdown is less reasonable. Sure, it's possible that a company might suddenly decide to shutter a profitable and massively popular service, but what are the chances? It's like worrying that Amazon will stop selling physical books.

A platform provider doesn't have to shut down - it could just decide that your money is no longer welcome (for whatever reason).

Lock-in I do worry about, but not because they might terminate the service. I'm pretty sure that they'd give us a year, and that year would be filled with all manner of startup looking to help the GAE orphans. At the very least, the open source GAE replacements would start getting a lot more attention.

I'm not saying "no risk", but I am saying "less risk than you think".

Valid points, all affected by the fact that GAE is open source. [0] [1]

[0] https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/source/browse/#svn...

[1] https://code.google.com/p/appengine-go/source/browse/

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