Using Google App Engine to run newsletter system?

[Torsten Daerr]

Dear GAE support community, I have a customer built email newsletter management system built in Yii Framework. I would like to have the entire system rebuilt in Google App Engine. Can you please tell me if this is possible in general? The MySQL database behind the newsletter system has close to 400k subscribers right now so I send out up to 1 million emails per month. What would the cost be if I were to run the system using Google as the mail server instead of my own server? 

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Torsten,

In terms of running a mail-server, you can read about this in the docs. Generally, running a mail-server is difficult due to specially-blocked ports, but you can still send email on 465 and 587 using services like Sendgrid.

As far as the other components of your service, I'd take a look at Cloud SQL or hosting a Compute Engine instance with mysqld running for the data storage.

Now, as to the framework itself, if you stick to vanilla App Engine (Java/Python/PHP/Go), you're limited by the App Engine sandbox in terms of what can run inside your instances. There are efforts out there in the Yii community [1] [2] did a quick google search) to h - you could even find moreave the framework run on vanilla App Engine.

There's also the possibility of running Managed VMs, which are like App Engine in how they scale and deploy, can be monitored, etc. but have a more permissive sandbox that allows you to install pretty much any web framework/stack you like (although you'd still want to externalize the SQL db, as instances spin up and down, and it's not a good way to run a persistent db process) 

As far as evaluating the pricing of any system you'd like to deploy, I recommend taking a look at your needs/current usage and comparing that to the pricing docs (there's even a very cool pricing calculator).

I wish you the best of luck in determining where to go from here, and I hope further google searches can turn up this thread as a useful resource :)

Have a nice day,

Nick

[Alex Martelli]

Nick's answer is correct, but one further bit that's key to *app engine* use (as per the group's subject and Torsten's original post), is *mail quotas* -- see https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#up_mail_quota (TL;DR: over 20k mails/day is considered exceptional enough to need you to get a support package to request the quota increase -- 400k subscribers might easily require *much* higher quotas, presumably well over the design limits of App Engine's mail system, depending on usage patterns).

Compute Engine, plus Sendgrid or the like for the actual mail-sending, would therefore appear to be a better match for such a large-customer-base mailing system.

Alex

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[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Great point , Alex, and thanks for bringing that up. If using the Mail API, the quota would certainly need to be considered. For this reason, I'd second the recommendation to evaluate sendgrid as an option, as the number of subscribers is really quite critical.

On Monday, June 15, 2015 at 4:20:43 PM UTC-4, Alex Martelli wrote:

Nick's answer is correct, but one further bit that's key to *app engine* use (as per the group's subject and Torsten's original post), is *mail quotas* -- see https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#up_mail_quota (TL;DR: over 20k mails/day is considered exceptional enough to need you to get a support package to request the quota increase -- 400k subscribers might easily require *much* higher quotas, presumably well over the design limits of App Engine's mail system, depending on usage patterns).

Compute Engine, plus Sendgrid or the like for the actual mail-sending, would therefore appear to be a better match for such a large-customer-base mailing system.

Alex

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Nick (Cloud Platform Support) <pay...@google.com> wrote:

Hey Torsten,

In terms of running a mail-server, you can read about this in the docs. Generally, running a mail-server is difficult due to specially-blocked ports, but you can still send email on 465 and 587 using services like Sendgrid.

As far as the other components of your service, I'd take a look at Cloud SQL or hosting a Compute Engine instance with mysqld running for the data storage.

Now, as to the framework itself, if you stick to vanilla App Engine (Java/Python/PHP/Go), you're limited by the App Engine sandbox in terms of what can run inside your instances. There are efforts out there in the Yii community [1] [2] did a quick google search) to h - you could even find moreave the framework run on vanilla App Engine.

There's also the possibility of running Managed VMs, which are like App Engine in how they scale and deploy, can be monitored, etc. but have a more permissive sandbox that allows you to install pretty much any web framework/stack you like (although you'd still want to externalize the SQL db, as instances spin up and down, and it's not a good way to run a persistent db process) 

As far as evaluating the pricing of any system you'd like to deploy, I recommend taking a look at your needs/current usage and comparing that to the pricing docs (there's even a very cool pricing calculator).

I wish you the best of luck in determining where to go from here, and I hope further google searches can turn up this thread as a useful resource :)

Have a nice day,

Nick

On Saturday, June 13, 2015 at 8:05:26 PM UTC-4, Torsten Daerr wrote:

Dear GAE support community, I have a customer built email newsletter management system built in Yii Framework. I would like to have the entire system rebuilt in Google App Engine. Can you please tell me if this is possible in general? The MySQL database behind the newsletter system has close to 400k subscribers right now so I send out up to 1 million emails per month. What would the cost be if I were to run the system using Google as the mail server instead of my own server? 

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[english-team]

Dear GAE Community,

Can you please tell me where I might find GAE developers who build my site and show me how to use it properly? I have hired a freelancer through elance but had to quit since he is rather incompetent. Many thanks, Torsten

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 2:05 AM, Torsten Daerr <tor...@english-team.com> wrote:

Dear GAE support community, I have a customer built email newsletter management system built in Yii Framework. I would like to have the entire system rebuilt in Google App Engine. Can you please tell me if this is possible in general? The MySQL database behind the newsletter system has close to 400k subscribers right now so I send out up to 1 million emails per month. What would the cost be if I were to run the system using Google as the mail server instead of my own server? 

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[Jeff Schnitzer]

(someone else revived this thread; I noticed an issue in this old response, figured it is worth correcting for posterity)

You can (and should) use Sendgrid, Elasticemail, Mailgun, etc from _App Engine_ to send mail. You don't need Compute Engine for that. Yes, GAE has the mail api but you can (and should) ignore that. All these services have simple HTTP APIs that work just fine from GAE.

They actually work extra well from GAE, because instead of making the HTTP request inline in your code, you can enqueue a task (usually transactionally) which makes the call. Your app will be significantly more reliable this way and your user-facing API requests will complete faster. Win-win.

Jeff

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[Luna Duclos]

What's wrong with GAE's own email API that it should be ignored ?

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[Alex Martelli]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Luna Duclos <luna....@palmstonegames.com> wrote:

What's wrong with GAE's own email API that it should be ignored ?

Very small quotas for an application that hinges about sending a lot of emails.

Alex

 

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[Jeff Schnitzer]

Also, no deliverability measurements and very little control over the From/Sender fields.

Jeff

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