if you read the blog, the main point of OP’s project was to get at the diagrams, so hardly “splitting hairs”.
41 karma · joined April 26, 2011
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I think the history per se is interesting. And I’m hoping to get comments with additional trivia that I’ve missed.
(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.
I tried to address it back at the time, I invite you to read my thoughts again: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/... and happy to debate again. But please read it first.
GAE at the time was running as an experimental/beta product. There was no support, there was no SLA, and there was no deprecation policy. When a product is experimental or beta, eventually the time comes around when we need to look at next steps.
We concluded that the pricing was insanely low at the time and did not make for a viable long-term product. And when we talked to customers, they absolutely didn't want us to discontinue the product, but instead they wanted us to invest in it and provide support.
So that's what we decided to do. In working with customers, we determined that (after reasonable optimizations), the vast majority of apps would experience 2-5x increase in bills. Obviously we lost some customers because of this, but much fewer than you think, and mostly (but not always) because they were simply architected in ways that badly matched GAE, or had business models that assumed a cost-of-operations that was unrealistic (either on GAE or anywhere else), and that we had in effect been subsidizing.
GAE targets being the "best" option, including cost - but you need to include the entire cost, and factor in ease of use, SRE operations, durability, scalability, etc. We're happy to duke it out with any apples-to-apples comparison for total cost of ownership.
Slamming PHP is akin to slamming the x86 instruction set. It's besides the point. There are so many large "apps" that effectively use PHP as asm; we need to have a solution for customers that want to run open source CMS:es and CRM:s, for example, and this is all Wordpress, Drupal, SugarCRM, MediaWiki, Joomla etc.
And there are a LOT of startup companies building in PHP, believe it or not. PHP on the server is akin to Javascript on the client. You can argue that Erlang or Go is better, fine, but the reality is that most web sites are PHP. And similar to what happened with V8, there is a significant industry effort in just accepting this and making PHP run faster and better. We don't want you to compare GAE/PHP with GAE/language_X. You should compare GAE/PHP with [other platform]/PHP, and see if you like what we've done. And we're doing some cool stuff with it. We are working to support PHP code better than any alternative. We expect PHP developers to love it. But we're not doing it in order to advocate (or not advocate) PHP per se. You don't like PHP? Then move along, there's nothing to see here.
And as for the "small $5-6 dollar sites" (or free), that doesn't matter. Many of the apps running on GAE are within the free tier, which is one of the great things about the platform. So that's not news. Part of the GAE vision has always been to offer a place on the web to run small web apps for free.
Response from us was initially muted because it looked like it only affected M/S apps, but it turns out (a) it can impact HRD as well, and (b) we're pretty unhappy about the level of impact for many M/S apps so we're looking at ways to resolve. It's a high priority and we're looking at a number of ways to address it. It's also a pretty interesting issue, because indirectly it's caused by (a) the large scale that App Engine is running, and (b) the large extent with which GAE is running free applications.
Regardless, apologies to those who felt support was unresponsive. We are working very hard to improve support. For the sophisticated audience that comes to these pages, please link to me on Google+ to get my attention if we are failing you (https://plus.sandbox.google.com/110401818717224273095).