Ask HN: What's up with Google Appengine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's up with Google Appengine?

15 pointspetervandijck10 comments

Are people actually using it? I get the feeling it never really took off, it's certainly no competition for AWS & Co. But it being free hosting and all, I would have expected more action. I would have expected someone to make a Wordpress clone that one could then host for free on there, etc. Am I missing something?

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Are people actually using it?

I quit my job betting on it.

You could actually build pretty decent services over GAE, while remaining within the free quota, if you can be efficient with resources. Billing rates are affordable too.

I am currently working on an ad-supported CRM (http://crm.ifreetools.com) and online application builder (http://creator.ifreetools.com) over Google App Engine. Both are multi-tenant apps and iFreeTools Creator is probably the only online app builder which enables building customizable apps online over Google App Engine.

The platform does have its restrictions, primarily to enable apps to scale well. If one can get comfortable with working within those restrictions, it gets easier.

Wordpress clone

You should try out Bloggart : http://github.com/Arachnid/bloggart

..and its accompanying posts, aiming to also introduce developers to the GAE platform : http://blog.notdot.net/2009/10/Writing-a-blog-system-on-App-...

The CRM tool looks really nice.

Thanks, good to hear that.

AppEngine is being used, but I would bet not nearly to the degree that AWS is. One thing that Google could do right away is to offer a (hopefully reasonable) monthly fee to keep instances active - loading request times are a bummer and it takes some effort to keep them reasonable (e.g., use Python, or use Java without JDO or anything that takes a while to initialize).

Some things are great with AppEngine: admin web app, ease of deployment, and being able to write Wave robots easily.

For long loading request times, it would be great to pay perhaps $5 to $10 a month for always keeping one instance active.

You would think the biggest, most successful data infrastructure company on the planet could figure out a way to keep warm JVM's running at a reasonable price.

Used if for a year and then dropped it. They could make it work if 1) your code was portable 2) they had an actual admin team you could talk to in realtime 3) they dumped a handful of silly limitations.

Not a bad choice for a free CDN though. I still use it for that.

Heroku happened.

Frequent outages and "write to datastore" errors made me sad. (This was in 2009, don't know whether these issues have been fixed, but I won't be going back.)

I know some people use it as a web proxy :P

E.g. https://proxy1china.appspot.com

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