Porting App Engine app to other provider - ideas and discussion

[Bay]

Looking for suggestions and new ideas on how to port my App Engine app to another provider. I could deal with the datastore errors, 500 and timeouts. There were ways around this issue by caching better etc. However, the billing issue has forced me to realize that Google has decided to profit from their lock-in. My small non-profit site with a few thousand pageviews per day cannot stay alive with a 500-1000 USD billing per year.

Long story short: I need to move my app away from App Engine, as fast as possible and with as little coding as possible. I am sure many other people are in the same situation. Please provide helpful hints in this thread. Personally my app is Python - so it would be preferable if I could find a host that can understand the same kind of webapplication framework and also the memcaching - that should make it a lot easier. Does this exist?

[Raymond C.]

Regarding hosting options, I am looking at rackspace since there are many successful businesses outside are using it.  Now looking at if I should switch to node.js or keep running python on the new server.

[Andrew Cassidy]

I'm running python/nginx/uswgi/mysql on my own servers, using django. It's not identical but it's close enough.

I have an app on app engine with hundreds of users that I was running for free, and not charging my users. It's cheaper for me to use my own equipment than stay on app engine now.

I've heard mixed stories about both Rackspace and Amazon EC2, however, I'd make sure to read the documentation for each before you make a choice.

[Waleed Abdulla]

Although a lot of us are upset about how this was handled, I'd suggest testing how much you can optimize first. If that doesn't help, I have a couple of suggestions below. Here is my own plan:

1. Start with optimizing settings. Things like reducing max idle instances and lowering the rate on low priority task queues to reduce spikes.

2. Set a minimum instance commitment to take advantage of the lower cost for committed hours. 

3. Optimize the datastore. My biggest cost is in datastore ops (mostly writes), so I'm looking at adding (indexed=False) to model properties that I don't query on, and using memcache more often.

4. If the above gets me back to a reasonable cost, then I'm staying. If not, then I'm looking at AppScale and TyphoonAE. Both are open source solutions that allow me to run GAE apps on other platforms. They're not battle tested, so I expect to have to pitch in with a few bug fixes, but I know that they've ran some apps successfully (TyphoonAE says they've ran the PubSubHubbub server successfully, which happens to be one of the apps I run as well). In terms of server hosting, I've used RackSpace and Softlayer, and they're both really good. 

I hope this helps. I have a huge amount of code which makes re-writing my apps almost impossible. If your code base is still small, you might have other options as well.

Waleed

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 6:06 AM, Raymond C. <wind...@gmail.com> wrote:

Regarding hosting options, I am looking at rackspace since there are many successful businesses outside are using it.  Now looking at if I should switch to node.js or keep running python on the new server.

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