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Comment by pdknsk | Hacker News Reader

I notice App Engine isn't mentioned in their stack. I'm a bit worried that Google abandons it once Snapchat moves off it. It has already been in maintenance mode for some years now (save for Managed VMs). The writing was on the wall when Guido left the team. Apparently Google still uses it internally (as the recent switch to Monorail made evident), so perhaps it's safe for a few more years.

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True that Google stills uses it internally, but external usage exists way beyond Snapchat (although they are a fun customer). App Engine hasn't been in maintenance mode, although we have set aside engineering cycles to improve the reliability and stability of the service in order to ensure the highest level of support for production-grade customers. In tandem, we've some large features such Go, PHP, full-text search, and Cloud Storage support. We've added integration with the Cloud Console as well as Cloud SDK to allow developers to build hybrid solutions that span, for example, App Engine and Compute Engine. And, yes, we've invested in the App Engine Managed VM environment with a host of new runtimes including Java 8, Python 3, Go, PHP, and Node.js. We have more coming there over the next 2-3 months. Guido leaving was tough, I used to share an office with him. That said, I'm not sure that his exit was the writing on the wall.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead for the App Engine product team.

Hi pdknsk,

I'm a Product Manager on App Engine and wanted to reach out and say that 100% we are invested in app engine and are working to make it your favorite platform. For example, we heard that GAE documentation needs enhancements and we've kicked off a large project to do just this. It's an ongoing effort as you can imagine, but please take a look at the new landing page and managed VM content as well as the left-hand nav reorg we did. Here is the link. More to come of course.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs

Please give the new set of docs a try and please give us feedback when you see errors or generally when the content is not up to par with what you expect. There is a feedback tool on the top right hand side of every page.

Thank you! Amir

Do you have any plans to launch a data center in India? AWS is launching one this year, and I imagine this will be a huge boon to the startup industry here.

As of 2016, AWS is the better bet.

While Google could potentially abandon App Engine, it's much more likely it will simply remain unchanged for a number of years (as indeed it has roughly been for the past few years, save for Managed VMs).

GCP is now offering an increasingly larger percentage of what App Engine used to offer, so really the future may look a lot more like just build your apps on GCE + PubSub + Cloud Datastore and don't even mess with App Engine at all.

Not sure if this has changed in the last few years, but Khan Academy heavily invested in App Engine: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkb...

To your first point though, streaming services typically are more focused on storage and egress (network) optimizations. App Engine has integration points with each, but its core workloads fall more in the dynamic web app and mobile backend realm. Within Spotify's architecture, there are places where App Engine makes sense (e.g. hosting their frontend APIs). That said, this is small relative to the rest of their architecture and understandably isn't the first area of focus when you're making a move to a new vendor.

With Lambda entering the space, I don't think they will remove app engine. Sounds like they should work hard on improving it.

Have you seen Google Cloud Functions? https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs

Disclaimer: Google Cloud Pub/Sub engineer here.

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