I wouldn't host anything of importance on GAE, since Google has this odd fascination with shuttering services with zero recourse for its user-base.
Even if App Engine isn't tremendously valuable now, it's a growth market, and easily monetizable. Google isn't going to burn a bunch of customers who could be - if they end up being the next Netflix - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue.
I wish people would stop with the hyperbolic Google Reader stuff. Google's bread and butter are web ads, and they're a shrinking market. As Facebook can attest, mobile is hard to monetize, and it makes a lot of sense to focus on areas where people can just pay you directly. AWS has already validated this market, Google has the capacity to deliver, they've just fumbled the execution wildly.
That kind of cynical thought should be eliminated.
Not that many.
>and Google has probably invested tens of billions and thousands of engineers into GAE
If we're speculating, I'd say, far far less.
Except for the parts they use themselves too, anyway.
Stop wallowing over reader and move on.
"Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate that Service without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015"
So you have a year, at a minimum.
"Unless otherwise noted by Google, material changes to the Agreement will become effective 90 days after they are posted, except if the changes apply to new functionality in which case they will be effective immediately. If Customer does not agree to the revised Agreement, please stop using the Service."
- Behavioural changes as a result of unannounced internal release process. Go to bed, wake in morning to app serving 500s (happened twice)
- Design flaw that ran so deep they had to redesign the datastore, insisting on people start migrating before they even had migration tools ready. Prior to that, at least one outage event required running the Google equivalent of fsck and leaving "/lost+found" folders in everyone's datastore (WTF?!?!? Not even once, dude!)
- Latency that varies according to the phase of the moon, and you're billed for it anyway.
- Continually changing architectural story around apps. Last year: Memcache is cheap, free, and shared! This year: Dedicated memcache, only $66/gb/month! 2 years ago: elasticly spun up processes! Last year: dedicated hardware thread, only $100/thread/month!
- Let's not forget the wild pricing changes depending on how much the App Engine team had packed in their crackpipes the night before
- Service characteristics you won't see on any other platform (e.g. DB query latency). So regardless of abstraction layers, your app inevitably ends up designed for a single platform
It's a platform that succeeds only at exposing users with RAM-sized datasets to planetary scale problems, all the while charged handsomely for the privilege of the self-delusion that some edge was gained through all the suffering. Seriously fuck all that. I could turn this into an essay but why bother.
God forbid the bill you'd get for actually scaling to a size that started to require whatever GA2EE really is.
(a) App Engine specifically (and Google Cloud Platform in general) is being sold to enterprise as well, with SLA and deprecation policies.
(b) App Engine has been around since 2008 and is growing VERY strongly.
(c) Even if worst case happens, fine, move your app to somewhere else. Deprecation is officially a year, plenty of time to move. Any company can deprecate any products. GAE has huge usage (over 3 million applications), and we have two (and counting) compatibility partners (CapeDwarf and AppScale) that you can move.
(d) GAE does not lock you in. Won't rehash arguments here, see: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/0/110401818717224273095/po...
cheers,
P.
They thankfully decided to just go commercial-ish with Translate, but the same can't be said about Charts (which had a long deprecation window and a replacement, but the replacement is a fundamentally different kind of API that has different browser requirements and even different charting capabilities). They also happily will just shut down things like Google Checkout and offer no replacement at all for key use cases like "sell a physical product" (if you sell digital goods, you might be able to switch to Google Wallet Objects, an "exciting new API" released a couple weeks before Checkout was deprecated).
Google Checkout was certainly also targetted at enterprises, had a clear business model behind it, and had existed since 2006: everyone who built on that one (again, not me: I avoided Checkout like the plague) got only six months to migrate to a different provider (and figure out how they are going to handle any refund requests from recent customers, which will surely be horribly irritating as they won't be able to just tell Checkout to refund the transaction anymore). There is simply a patterned lack of care for people who may have built things on their stacks.
(Yes, some services have deprecation policies, but let's not forget that those guarantees were themselves attempts to regain faith due to a previous round of services that had been axed with little warning ;P. After the anger died down from that they started reversing course, shortening or removing the policy entirely after the previous guarantees expire. I can only imagine the people who keep citing these deprecation policies don't have much memory of how this has all been going down over the past few years ;P.)
http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-depr...
Yes: you might be able to find alternatives to migrate towards... but if, by just acknowledging this pattern, you could avoid that bullet--which could easily come at the "least convenient moment" (such as when you now have some competition out of nowhere while attempting to launch a new product and raise finding), requiring you to suddenly drop everything for a couple weeks coming up with a new implementation of key infrastructure before the clock runs out--why wouldn't you?
That said, I acknowledge that Google shutting down enterprise products is less likely than shutting down niche consumer products. Another point I want to make, however, is that shutting down a product is not the only thing that can go wrong with something from Google. For example, there are App Engine bugs affecting production that have been left open for years. There's also poor documentation of some of the interactions between Google products. For example, the best documentation of Google Apps secondary domains not being supported by App Engine is a bug report. (https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=6...)
I seem to run into an issue with App Engine every few months only to find that people have been encountering it for years and that despite being acknowledged by Google, it's just been sitting idle in the GAE issue tracker. My point is that a shutdown of GAE isn't the only thing that could go wrong with it, and who knows what GAE bugs might be encountered if one actually made a serious attempt to migrate an app away from GAE.
On balance, I don't regret picking GAE because I think the effort saved outweighs the problems.
This leads me to believe that it won't be killed