Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2
vijayp.ca
vijayp.ca
I think you are wrong about the costs of EC2. First off, you have to run your own servers on EC2. When one of those servers goes down in the middle of the night for some random unexplained reason, who are you going to call? Yourself? If you don't think EC2 servers go down, you are kidding yourself.
With GAE, I'll never have to hire IT staff to manage servers or networks.
The high replication datastore on GAE is amazing. I'll never have to worry about running out of capacity, backups, or downtime for that matter. I've been told that entire datacenters have gone offline and nobody even noticed. Now, that is reliability.
It sounds like a lot of your issues surrounded using XMPP on GAE. I think that is a perfectly valid thing to complain about. That said, just cause XMPP is expensive doesn't mean that all of GAE is expensive (or problematic). As you found out by writing your own C++ servers and what not, XMPP is a difficult service to provide reliably. Maybe that is worth that cost?
Note: I'm building my sporting event ticketing website entirely on GAE. People will be able to register for marathons, bike races, etc. It may cost a bit more for their service, but given that I won't have to hire any staff to manage servers or worry about adding capacity when thousands of people all want register for an event at the same time, I think that is worth it.
Note2: I'm a user of PartyChatApp. Thanks for providing it.
It's more than just a price/stability tradeoff. The problem is, as an App Engine user, one is totally at the mercy of any future price changes on App Engine because it is nearly impossible to seamlessly migrate away.
The DNS aliases (appspotchat.com, for instance) can only point to Google, and the API does not really work well on any other platform such as AppScale. So, as we discovered, at any time in the future, one's service could suddenly cost 10x as much, and one won't really have the option to move quickly. If one intends to scale, it's better to never get into that state in the first place, and develop on AWS instead. If EC2 raises its prices (highly unlikely since computing power is increasing and costs are decreasing), one can always move to rackspace or just get a private server.
It's of course true that writing stuff on App Engine can sometimes require a lot less engineering work. But the difference is not really that substantial when compared to the possibility of being stuck on a platform that all of a sudden makes your company unprofitable in unpredictable ways. Changing a running service is very hard. Avoiding the problem by not getting stuck on App Engine is not trivial, but in my opinion the right call.
a) You are upset about the fact that they increased their prices when they transitioned from a well documented beta service to a fully supported commercial offering.
b) You are upset that there is some features missing, such as the way DNS is handled.
c) You are upset that there is a proprietary nature about the service.
I think those are all pretty much valid concerns, but let me address them:
Yes, the costs did go up for some people, including you, it seems. But remember again, it wasn't just some random increase. They switched out of beta. There was never a hint at a promise that they would keep the prices at the same level.
As I mentioned before, they admitted they messed up in their messaging. They heard people screaming at them loud and clear and went back and actually adjusted a lot of their prices. You say that AWS won't increase prices because of costs decreasing, I can only hope that GAE, with a similar model will do the same.
That said, you really can't compare GAE with AWS because they are entirely different offerings. You absolutely need an IT staff (be it yourself or someone else) to run, monitor and manage those servers on AWS. You don't need that with GAE and I find that to be a massive selling point. I've seen first hand what happens when you have to hire IT staff or stay up at 3am figuring out what server problems you are having. It sucks because a) it is nearly impossible to hire good sysadmins right now, b) who wants to be on call 24/7? There is also the lack of the high replication datastore on AWS. There is nothing even close. Personally, I'm willing to have a bit of vendor lockin for those features.
Yes, features are missing. Google knows about it and has been doing regular releases of the SDK to address missing features. I'm pretty confident that as the service becomes more profitable for them, they will dedicate more resources to it. If not, then I have 3 years to migrate and find something else. For now, the feature set is good enough for me. That might not have been the case for you, but that isn't entirely the fault of anyone. It is still a maturing product.
That said, using it is well understood at this point and my co-founder is Jeff Schnitzer who wrote Objectify [1] which is the best way to tie Java to the datastore. Outside of Google, I think he understands the datastore more than anyone else on this planet. Thanks for the warning, but I think we will be ok. =)
Also note, I'm speaking from a Java perspective. Using Python has definitely had MT issues which are being resolved with the new version of Python 2.7 available there now. I'd still recommend using either Go or Java for your app.
The rest of my app is just a regular .war file, so really it is just the data layer that would need to be ported. Given that the data store is pretty much just a big hashmap, it really won't be that difficult to rewrite the underlying code for another nosql store like MongoDB. The hard part of the original 'schema' design is already done.
As part of GAE leaving beta, Google has given a 3 year EOL commitment. I'm actually glad it has left beta because that means we get something solid from them now. What I mean is that once they declare that they are killing GAE (if they ever announce that), you have 3 years to migrate. I'm ok with that term.
http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html 7.2.a: "For a period of 3 years after an announcement (the “Deprecation Period”), Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate the Deprecated Version of the Service and to respond to problems with the Deprecated Version of the Service deemed by Google in its discretion to be critical."
Seriously, I've done the research and I've used the different solutions that are available today. GAE is one of the best solutions out there at this time for my type of application, which is pretty much just a straight up webapp. The only difference I have is that I have really bursty traffic as a ton of people all try to register for an event at the same time and then go away. This means, I need something to truly auto scale up and down without requiring me to do work or know my load in advance. No other solution offers the level of PaaS that GAE offers and at the price.
Also keep in mind that if your time is not free, App Engine may be cheaper than EC2. At some point, renting out a colo and buying your own hardware is cheaper than EC2. And then at another point, it's cheaper to build and manage your own data center. It's all a continuum of effort and upfront costs vs. monthly costs.
Last month, the bill went from $4 a month, to $4 a week.
As far as I can tell, the site did not get any more popular than it was a month ago.
That is a ridiculous increase!
Needless to say, I took down the site.