IBM, Google, and Oracle are all equally at pains to deliver a message that makes them uniquely attractive. In this regard, Google's inability to recover from the botched roll-out of Google App Engine (GAE) will surely go down as one of the oddest business cases. It launched the product with great fanfare. But developers who flocked to it initially found a difficult platform that supported only a subset of Java and a very old version of Python. Moreover, the interfaces to the proprietary database were poorly thought out, so that almost everything in GAE required platform-specific code-arounds. While GAE has improved in a limited sense since then, Google has not done what Microsoft did — revamp the product from top to bottom to make it easy to use. Nor has it leveraged its natural connection to developers. One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google.
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Google has been incredibly supportive of us as Appengine clients, and we've worked closely with their teams on feedback for the platform and the new console.
Also, to those criticisms of the new log viewer, what's the basis for your complaints? I love the new viewer and after adjusting to it (admittedly the transition took a few days) - it's MUCH faster and easier to use.
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Fixing bugs in legacy code is not exciting work and a new generation of engineers at Google may be tempted to "improve" things that aren't broken instead of doing the hard work of maintaining the existing code.
pdknsk has a nice point, you must be on a high support level :)
Hey fellow App Engine users,
There is some great conversation in this thread. I’ll try to address some of the key points being discussed.
Regarding the discussion group; our apologies for the delayed response. Most of our customer questions now come on Stack Overflow, so we’ve been monitoring it more actively than this forum. We’ll be watching this forum more closely too from now on.
Regarding the larger topic of Google’s investment in App Engine: App Engine is a critical part of our cloud story, and will continue to be. We’re investing heavily in it. In the most recent months this investment has had two major prongs - stability improvements and new efforts to create a more flexible model within App Engine.
First, stability improvements. App Engine has grown and so has the size and sophistication of the workloads that relied on it (thanks to developers like you). We realized it was time to take a step back and invest in driving down technical debt and improving overall stability as a foundation for the future. The team has been heads down improving stability and reliability. Some of the improvements include more comprehensive monitoring across all services, better application scheduling and load balancing, deployment of SSD to reduce latency variability for Datastore access, and many others large and small.
Second, a more flexible PaaS. App Engine’s prescriptive environment for building web and mobile applications allows teams to iterate quickly on new ideas and scale up the ones that stick. The drawback, though, comes in terms of its constraints (e.g. limited JRE access, limited C/C++ Python modules, no inbound socket support). When we were building out our IaaS offering, Compute Engine, we realized that by unifying the compute stack (layering App Engine on Compute Engine), we could continue to give our customers the developer experience and efficiencies that App Engine brings with the flexibility and power that’s normally only associated with IaaS. Further, since it is a single stack, users can drop down into the IaaS layers when needed to make lower-level customizations (although we hope that most will never have to). We’ve surfaced all of this work as App Engine Managed VMs, which are now in Beta and open to everyone that wants a test drive. You’ll see that Managed VMs do not require you to manage the OS or web server configuration, and frontend serving has all the same great features as our existing runtimes. In other words, they marry the best of App Engine with a more flexible application environment.
Finally, unified administration tools are an important part of a cohesive platform. This is the goal of the Developers Console. In some cases the cutover has been a straight “drop in” of existing functionality, in others we took the opportunity to make improvements. Not all is perfect, so thank you for the feedback! I’ve created bugs / feature requests for the items you’ve mentioned (infinite scroll issues, “save as” issues, better Task Queue admin functionality) and suggest that any other feedback be sent to google-developers...@google.com (this is a more narrowly focused list).
Looking ahead, the reliability work is wrapping up (although, much like you, we’re always investing in this area) and you can expect new feature work to start ramping up (for example, we’ll have 64 bit JVM support landing soon). The beta launch of Managed VMs will progress towards General Availability and, in parallel, we’re actively looking at which additional generalized services need to be surfaced into the PaaS layer and how we can make the App Engine experience you all know and love even better. 2015 is going to be a very exciting year!
-Dan Sturman
VP, EngineeringHey fellow App Engine users,
There is some great conversation in this thread. I’ll try to address some of the key points being discussed.
Regarding the discussion group; our apologies for the delayed response. Most of our customer questions now come on Stack Overflow, so we’ve been monitoring it more actively than this forum. We’ll be watching this forum more closely too from now on.
Regarding the larger topic of Google’s investment in App Engine: App Engine is a critical part of our cloud story, and will continue to be. We’re investing heavily in it. In the most recent months this investment has had two major prongs - stability improvements and new efforts to create a more flexible model within App Engine.
First, stability improvements. App Engine has grown and so has the size and sophistication of the workloads that relied on it (thanks to developers like you). We realized it was time to take a step back and invest in driving down technical debt and improving overall stability as a foundation for the future. The team has been heads down improving stability and reliability. Some of the improvements include more comprehensive monitoring across all services, better application scheduling and load balancing, deployment of SSD to reduce latency variability for Datastore access, and many others large and small.
Second, a more flexible PaaS. App Engine’s prescriptive environment for building web and mobile applications allows teams to iterate quickly on new ideas and scale up the ones that stick. The drawback, though, comes in terms of its constraints (e.g. limited JRE access, limited C/C++ Python modules, no inbound socket support). When we were building out our IaaS offering, Compute Engine, we realized that by unifying the compute stack (layering App Engine on Compute Engine), we could continue to give our customers the developer experience and efficiencies that App Engine brings with the flexibility and power that’s normally only associated with IaaS. Further, since it is a single stack, users can drop down into the IaaS layers when needed to make lower-level customizations (although we hope that most will never have to). We’ve surfaced all of this work as App Engine Managed VMs, which are now in Beta and open to everyone that wants a test drive. You’ll see that Managed VMs do not require you to manage the OS or web server configuration, and frontend serving has all the same great features as our existing runtimes. In other words, they marry the best of App Engine with a more flexible application environment.
Finally, unified administration tools are an important part of a cohesive platform. This is the goal of the Developers Console. In some cases the cutover has been a straight “drop in” of existing functionality, in others we took the opportunity to make improvements. Not all is perfect, so thank you for the feedback! I’ve created bugs / feature requests for the items you’ve mentioned (infinite scroll issues, “save as” issues, better Task Queue admin functionality) and suggest that any other feedback be sent to google-developers-console-feed...@google.com (this is a more narrowly focused list).
Looking ahead, the reliability work is wrapping up (although, much like you, we’re always investing in this area) and you can expect new feature work to start ramping up (for example, we’ll have 64 bit JVM support landing soon). The beta launch of Managed VMs will progress towards General Availability and, in parallel, we’re actively looking at which additional generalized services need to be surfaced into the PaaS layer and how we can make the App Engine experience you all know and love even better. 2015 is going to be a very exciting year!
-Dan Sturman
VP, Engineering
Hi Dan,thanks for taking the time. We have not heard from anybody from Google in this forum for many months so your reassuring communication is very welcome.I list below some of the reasons that might explain why some of us who have been following GAE for a long time have been skeptical about Google’s commitment and jump to conclusion when articles like this appears in the press.1. There are still 3,000 issues open in the tracker. Although many of them are irrelevant enhancements others are critical. For instance,---we never expected that 5 years later would be still unable to send 8-bit e-mail through the platform (issue 2383) or—in the critical area of security we would have to deal with a Users API stuck in the 2009 reality and crashes in certain important use cases (issues 9045 and 8916) or--- that it would still be so difficult to create an SSL app (issue 8528).2. Now what makes this more frustrating is that bugs have been aging for way too long. For instance, issue 2383 was filed in 2009, it was accepted in 2012 and at the end of 2014 it is still open.3. Google used to communicate a roadmap here. This was great for our planning. At some point the roadmap disappeared, again without communication. Furthermore, until a few months ago new releases (and pre-releases) were announced in this forum. Then suddenly the announcements and every Googler disappeared without warning. StackOverflow is a great Q&A forum but is not a discussion or announcement forum.4. Finally, last but not least the enthusiasm on Google’s part does not come across. I have been following GAE and developing since almost day one. The early days the developers were out here and in the irc chatrooms all the time. Input from customers was actively sought. Now we do not see anybody from your engineering/PM team here in the trenches.Knowing the alternatives, I remain very enthusiastic about PaaS in general and GAE in particular. I acknowledge that the GAE stability is very good, Google’s innovations in the hybrid IaaS/PaaS cloud is significant and that recently I have seen more activity in the issues tracker. For instance, I was impressed how proactive you were when I filed 11396 or regression 10503.I remain optimistic that the GAE stability will stay where it is but also that the Google investment reflected in faster feature velocity will increase, and the open communication will return.Best,On November 10, 2014 at 8:09:09 PM, Daniel Sturman (stu...@google.com) wrote:
Hey fellow App Engine users,
There is some great conversation in this thread. I’ll try to address some of the key points being discussed.
Regarding the discussion group; our apologies for the delayed response. Most of our customer questions now come on Stack Overflow, so we’ve been monitoring it more actively than this forum. We’ll be watching this forum more closely too from now on.
Regarding the larger topic of Google’s investment in App Engine: App Engine is a critical part of our cloud story, and will continue to be. We’re investing heavily in it. In the most recent months this investment has had two major prongs - stability improvements and new efforts to create a more flexible model within App Engine.
First, stability improvements. App Engine has grown and so has the size and sophistication of the workloads that relied on it (thanks to developers like you). We realized it was time to take a step back and invest in driving down technical debt and improving overall stability as a foundation for the future. The team has been heads down improving stability and reliability. Some of the improvements include more comprehensive monitoring across all services, better application scheduling and load balancing, deployment of SSD to reduce latency variability for Datastore access, and many others large and small.
Second, a more flexible PaaS. App Engine’s prescriptive environment for building web and mobile applications allows teams to iterate quickly on new ideas and scale up the ones that stick. The drawback, though, comes in terms of its constraints (e.g. limited JRE access, limited C/C++ Python modules, no inbound socket support). When we were building out our IaaS offering, Compute Engine, we realized that by unifying the compute stack (layering App Engine on Compute Engine), we could continue to give our customers the developer experience and efficiencies that App Engine brings with the flexibility and power that’s normally only associated with IaaS. Further, since it is a single stack, users can drop down into the IaaS layers when needed to make lower-level customizations (although we hope that most will never have to). We’ve surfaced all of this work as App Engine Managed VMs, which are now in Beta and open to everyone that wants a test drive. You’ll see that Managed VMs do not require you to manage the OS or web server configuration, and frontend serving has all the same great features as our existing runtimes. In other words, they marry the best of App Engine with a more flexible application environment.
Finally, unified administration tools are an important part of a cohesive platform. This is the goal of the Developers Console. In some cases the cutover has been a straight “drop in” of existing functionality, in others we took the opportunity to make improvements. Not all is perfect, so thank you for the feedback! I’ve created bugs / feature requests for the items you’ve mentioned (infinite scroll issues, “save as” issues, better Task Queue admin functionality) and suggest that any other feedback be sent to google-developers-console-feed...@google.com (this is a more narrowly focused list).
Looking ahead, the reliability work is wrapping up (although, much like you, we’re always investing in this area) and you can expect new feature work to start ramping up (for example, we’ll have 64 bit JVM support landing soon). The beta launch of Managed VMs will progress towards General Availability and, in parallel, we’re actively looking at which additional generalized services need to be surfaced into the PaaS layer and how we can make the App Engine experience you all know and love even better. 2015 is going to be a very exciting year!
-Dan Sturman
VP, Engineering
On Sunday, November 9, 2014 9:30:16 PM UTC-8, Vinny P wrote:On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Brandon Thomson <b...@brandonthomson.com> wrote:
Fixing bugs in legacy code is not exciting work and a new generation of engineers at Google may be tempted to "improve" things that aren't broken instead of doing the hard work of maintaining the existing code.+1. New is not necessarily better. To go on a minor tangent, I liked the older Google Groups UI better than the current version.On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Kaan Soral <kaan...@gmail.com> wrote:
pdknsk has a nice point, you must be on a high support level :)And +1 as well. A paid support contract gives the App Engine unicorns some extra pep in their step :-)
------------------Vinny PTechnology & Media ConsultantChicago, ILApp Engine Code Samples: http://www.learntogoogleit.com
Thanks for your candid responses. I hear your concerns loud and clear. I think the issues you raised all boil down to one thing: you’d like to see greater engagement between the App Engine team and our developer community.
With regards to your specific concerns:
I agree that an issue tracker is of little use if we aren’t actively triaging and updating it. Although I could address the individual examples you pointed out one by one (e.g. we partnered with SendGrid to give you a good alternative for sending email), I think the proper action here is to triage the open issues in the tracker. We have been ramping up support for doing this and you can expect to start seeing traction in the coming weeks.
As we ramp back up on feature work, we’ll also resume using the group for outbound communications regarding releases as well as any other developer-facing changes. In parallel we’re having our support engineers monitor the group for issues and topics that need to be addressed by Google. These will either be answered directly by that team or will be routed to the proper product management and / or engineering team.
-Dan
VP, Engineering
I just hope that someone is busy reinventing the datastore viewer. That would be compelling.
On November 14, 2014 at 10:05:32 AM, pdknsk (pdk...@gmail.com) wrote:
I noticed that Google closed the Perl bug yesterday. It was obvious really, but a good move nevertheless. C# was also closed.
[I] suggest that any other feedback be sent to google-developers-console-feed...@google.com (this is a more narrowly focused list).
I will also want to make a claim for all those early users of App Engine which are joining and trying to catch up the professional world using this tool.It really seems abandoned to me. At least if you only (and I say here ONLY) want to rely on PaaS and not going further.The majority of app engine questions in stackoverflow are from 2013 or early and If you follow people who where actively contributing to app engine on those days you find out they no longer answer nor they belong to the app engine community any more. You really can't feel a big community of people asking and getting involved in.It's also hard to find documentation on how to make a complete web app in app engine.For example, if you try to do it with Webapp2 framework (which I like the most because of it's simplicity) you will find it really difficult to implement oauth, sessions, rest, rbac, etc...Webapp2 it's completely abandoned! And given that almost all app engine examples on python rely on webapp2... that's a big flaw.
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I would find hard to disagree:IBM, Google, and Oracle are all equally at pains to deliver a message that makes them uniquely attractive. In this regard, Google's inability to recover from the botched roll-out of Google App Engine (GAE) will surely go down as one of the oddest business cases. It launched the product with great fanfare. But developers who flocked to it initially found a difficult platform that supported only a subset of Java and a very old version of Python. Moreover, the interfaces to the proprietary database were poorly thought out, so that almost everything in GAE required platform-specific code-arounds. While GAE has improved in a limited sense since then, Google has not done what Microsoft did — revamp the product from top to bottom to make it easy to use. Nor has it leveraged its natural connection to developers. One senses GAE is just not a major priority for Google.