Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?
I see startups talking about Heroku and AWS all the time on HN, but I feel like I never see references to GAE. Is anyone actually building their companies on top of GAE?
On any given week, we have up to 2000 projects that can be created. Those projects can either be bound to a production PAAS or, in some cases, "no PAAS" can be selected. For the large majority of projects, a production PAAS is selected at the time of creation.
Of the projects that select a PAAS, we see about 60% of those projects select GAE. This is a number that surprises us, as while we know that GAE is a leader in the PAAS space, not sure that it's a 60% share holder as a relative fraction on the number of PAAS projects created each week. While we haven't published any case studies, we do have a number of projects that have been published to GAE in a production sense. We've collected this data through interviews and surveys.
Some things that may explain the results: 1) We do not have complete PAAS coverage. We do not have Rackspace or dotCloud, for example, and we just added AWS Beanstalk in the past two months. So maybe there is a normalization of the data that needs to occur.
2) We provide GOOG oAuth as a logon mechanism. That binding, could imply an overall tighter integration with GAE, and for developers who are PAAS agnostic, may encourage them to select GAE over other selections.
3) We provide a Chrome Store plug-in, to make configuration even easier. We do get some people who indicate they wish to do everything within the Google realm.
4) We have spent time doing co-marketing with Google, so we may have gotten an unusual influx of people who were already looking at GAE. But our referrer metrics indicate that the large number of referrers we get are people from Facebook, Twitter, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and direct.
We will watch this thread for the full conversation as we are interested in hearing about other projects.
I asked because I have a student (11th grade) who wants to be a professional programmer. He is taking the intermediate web development course, and I saw that the main project is building a blog on top of GAE. I was not sure if GAE is maintaining relevance, or if it is losing out to other platforms.
I know that at this point in his education most of what he learns by focusing on GAE will be relevant. All of the platforms deal with the same server-side and client-side issues, they just do it in their own way. I know that if he understands how apps are built on top of GAE, he will be able to make sense of whatever framework he chooses to learn next, deployed to whatever platform he chooses to build on.
This helps share some perspective with him about GAE's role in the platform space. I am happy to hear it is still quite relevant.
We aren't really worried about the platform lockin (we think it will be hard to migrate from any provider to any other provider anyways). Cost can be an issue if you don't optimize or do things the appengine way. But at least you have the decision - you can tradeoff $ for engineering time.
We're certainly looking into using it instead of AWS for our next projects (games). Rovio also uses it for their Facebook games.