GAE instance prices?

[Susan Lin]

I tested out Google App Engine 4 years ago and am coming back now to see if it is a possibility for another project I will be working on. I see the pricing for instances are still the same as they were 4 years ago:

This table summarizes the CPU, memory, and hourly billing rate of the various instance classes.

Instance Class	Memory Limit	CPU Limit	Cost per Hour per Instance
F1	128 MB	600 Mhz	$0.05
F2	256 MB	1.2 Ghz	$0.10
F4	512 MB	2.4 Ghz	$0.20
F4_1G	1024 MB	2.4 Ghz	$0.30

When compared to Amazon's PaaS ElasticBeanstalk a 1 cpu 1GB instance costs $0.013 an hour which is almost 30 times cheaper than Google App Engine front end instances. I understand they offer different services, but as far as front end instances it is hard to see why in 2016 (Moore's Law) a 1gb GAE instance is still so expensive. Does Google have any plans to lower the costs of these instances in the very near future?

[Jeff Schnitzer]

If you want a nearly close comparison to ElasticBeanstalk, use a Managed VM (or “Flexible Runtime” I think they’re being called now). They are currently billed at the same rate as the underlying Compute Engine instance.

Jeff

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[Jeff Schnitzer]

“nearly exact” I meant to say. EB and Flexible runtimes are both mapped to a whole hypervisor VM.

Jeff

[Susan Lin]

Hi Jeff, yes you are correct they currently use these resources, but according to Google from https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing these prices will increase (which I assume is to the standard GAE prices) once flex environment becomes GA.

"Instances within the flexible environment are charged the cost of the underlying Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines. This is Beta-only pricing and will increase once the flexible environment is GA."

So these lower prices seem to be only temporary.

[George-Cristian Bîrzan]

I doubt however that they will go up 8 fold, which seems to be the gap currently

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[Susan Lin]

Hard to just see why then the regular GAE instances are still so expensive.

[Anastasios Hatzis]

Susan, I can't remember the prices for instance hours a few years ago. But since we use GAE, the pricing has changed a few times. I remember that once a free app became billable, there was a minimum monthly fee billed (not anymore). Separate billing of many other resources were dropped since we started, e.g. monthly fee for SSL SNIs, billing of Search API calls, etc., generalized into the instance hours. And generally costs for Storage and Datastore were simplified and reduced over time along with them becoming products you can use separately.

It also became easier to optimize certain costs, for example you can use different instance classes for modules in the same app.

After all, I understand standard GAE environment as a well integrated (almost) all-in-one platform, so in our use-cases we save lots of time and costs for administration of resources / services we would need otherwise. I would imagine that for other usage patterns alternatives could be cheaper or better, e.g. the flexible GAE environments, VMs, or even other cloud providers.

Ani