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Comment by thoughtpalette | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine has been a pretty terrible experience in comparison to AWS services.

Can you expand on details?

Also, why are you comparing App Engine (Platform as a Service) with AWS (Infrastructure as a Service)? Wouldn’t AWS vs. Google Compute Engine be a better comparison?

Can't speak for the parent, but the entire US offering is hosted at a single datacenter, allegedly with 3 zones, but there were a couple times during our evaluation of them when all zones went unavailable.

They really need a us-east and a us-west. Not just for availability, but for latency-critical applications, too.

This is not correct. GCE is now (1-Oct) available in the South Carolina data center (us-east).

Ah, I stand corrected. Thank you, it's been a while since we gave up on them.

Yes, app engine does not seem very mature yet. I observed abismal performance of CPU-bound tasks (10 times slower than on my own machine with the same nominal specs). Also, when I tried to unlock the free trial, the whole admin console got locked for a few days to verify my credit card without option to undo anything. Also, I once requested a support call (from the app engine admin page), which I received within seconds, only to find out that the calling employee has never heard of "google app engine" before.

It single handedly allowed us to build what we did! We tried going to AWS once, and almost got burned with the number of choices available and number of decisions to make.

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