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Can you talk more about what the app is and what it does? Curious.

I wouldn't be on a throwaway account if I felt comfortable mentioning its name. But, basically, it's an analytics API.

I love App Engine, but why use it in this case? You've got a lot of background processes, but few concurrent users. Couldn't you use a regular server, since you don't have to worry about a spike in traffic?

The API serves nearly 1 billion calls per month, with lots of variations and spikes. That, combined with my lackluster ops skills, makes AppEngine's autoscaling a perfect fit for my use case and skill-level.

Yes, it's probably more expensive than if I used EC2, but I've never been awoken in the middle of the night to need to reboot a server, troubleshoot a memory issue, or scale up my instances.

Sounds good! Congratulations! Can you share a link?

Not comfortable sharing a link in the context of talking about the revenue (hence the throwaway), but it's an analytics API.

Nice. Link, details?