Small enty level VPS and cloud based services v appengine

[Tim Hoffman]

Hi

More than a few people have said in the groups lately that appengine is unsuitable for entry level apps due to the new pricing schedule.

I am not so sure, but there hasn't been any real information about the alternatives, so I thought I would start to collate some numbers

So to that end I have included a spreadsheet here with a summary of a number of VPS or cloud providers solutions that I would consider

might be suitable to run a small entry level appengine app.

For the sake of the discussion you would want to run a stack that looks like the following

linux

nginx/apache

a light weight stack say webapp2, pyramid, tipfy (a lightweight framework)

an ORM (sqlobject/Storm)

and mysql

This doesn't really equate to a heroku offering, but lets say in each case

we need a single instance of something running, 512MB at a minimum to run the small stack and an RDBMS , with at least 1GB of 

storage available if no OS is factored in and 5GB if the OS counts in the storage allocation.

So here is a spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At1LTa6ONStgdExuRUl2QUdOVE0yWDFDbUJyX09QNlE&hl=en_US

I know none of these compare service wise directly with appengine.  But these are the sort of services people name

frequently as viable alternatives that are cheaper than appengine. So lets look at the reallity

The equivalent appengine basic service would be a single permanently idle instance running 24 hours a day, plus low volume of traffic and < 1GB of data in the datastore. So more instances might spin up.  Under 2.7 with threading requests we might not see more instance start.  A $ figure to apply to such an appengine app

would probably be between $30 and $40 per month.

Please suggest refinements to these models, and additonal detail to go into the spread sheet.

On the face of it I am not convinced many of these services are significantly cheaper than appengine especially when you take into account most of them

require you to manage the complete stack.

Hope this helps focus the discussion and provide some reality checks.

I personally have no plans to move off appengine.  But due plan to do some tuning.

Regards

Tim

[Philip]

There is a European provider called OVH. They currently host about
100k dedicated servers and also offer virtual instances. The cheapest
starts at 0.0119 € / Hour and includes 256MB Ram, 8Ghz, 5GB storage
and unmetered 100 Mbps connection: 8,8536€/month.

I think they should be in your table.

On Sep 4, 3:26 pm, Tim Hoffman <zutes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> More than a few people have said in the groups lately that appengine is
> unsuitable for entry level apps due to the new pricing schedule.
> I am not so sure, but there hasn't been any real information about the
> alternatives, so I thought I would start to collate some numbers
>
> So to that end I have included a spreadsheet here with a summary of a number
> of VPS or cloud providers solutions that I would consider
> might be suitable to run a small entry level appengine app.
>
> For the sake of the discussion you would want to run a stack that looks like
> the following
>
> linux
> nginx/apache
> a light weight stack say webapp2, pyramid, tipfy (a lightweight framework)
> an ORM (sqlobject/Storm)
> and mysql
>
> This doesn't really equate to a heroku offering, but lets say in each case
> we need a single instance of something running, 512MB at a minimum to run
> the small stack and an RDBMS , with at least 1GB of
> storage available if no OS is factored in and 5GB if the OS counts in the
> storage allocation.
>
> So here is a

> spreadsheet.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At1LTa6ONStgdExuRUl2QUdO...

[Joshua Smith]

I don't buy the $30 - $40 / month figure for GAE.  With just a tiny bit of tuning, my single-threaded M/S app is now running on just one instance, handling both periodic robots (that keep the instance from dying; this is unavoidable in my application), and a regular user workload:

You can clearly see the point at which I deployed my tuning. :)

I'd want to have the capacity for the occasional (rare) spin-up from concurrent user access, so I'd go for the $9/month plan.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that people take the time to optimize like I did, and also that they take advantage of edge caching.  And also, the site is small, so GoogleBot isn't going to go for the periodic kill (I've never seen GoogleBot assault my site).

So I think the right number for GAE for the scenario you laid out is $9.  Not $30-$40.

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[Sergey Schetinin]

Also: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq7

That's 9.20 USD for those of us who don't need to pay VAT.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq12 - this one is 15 USD w/o VAT.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq19 - 23 USD

-Sergey

[Tim Hoffman]

Hi Joshua

Thanks for your input  I feel I can get my small instances down to the $9-$15 per month territory too.

But I wanted to not have to argue that point too much here ;-)

Anyone running a small instance that is well optimised should have a good handle on what it will cost them. 

So lets restate - For purposes of comparison the approximate cost for an appengine small app is  going to be 

anywhere from $0 (below free threshold) up to say $30 and the sweet spot which should be attainable by 

most apps in the category is going to be in the $9-$15 per month territory

Hows that sound ?

Regrds

Tim

[Philip]

Joshua is correct with some tuning you can improve your instance count
quite well. I have set Max Idle Instances to 2 and kept Min Pending
latency at auto and I am seeing some good results.

However, I still think there is needed some competition here in the US
market. Traffic is way cheaper in Europe than here. If you take a look
at the offer from Hetzner for 15$/month you'll get 2TB of traffic
included. With the new GAE pricing this could cost you about 300$
here. The OVH offer for 8€ even includes a 100MBits flatrate.

[Sergey Schetinin]

Amazingly enough AWS still prices their bandwidth from EU datacenter
at $0.120 per GB

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[Tim Hoffman]

Let me know if you would like to help collate this information, and I can give you write permissions on this

spreadsheet.

Hopefully this is a useful excercise.

Also I need to look at what the minimum spec for a typhoonae or appscale deployment would be, if someone wanted to move

off appengine but try and not chnage their code in any significant way.  Anyone got any details there?  

Regards 

Tim

[Barry Hunter]

OT, but probably because if they made it much cheaper, it would be
huge lure for US customers (not worried about latency) to use the EU
data center.

But even for EU bound traffic, they probably route it to US
datacenters first then route it via internal networks to the EU.
Mainly for quality of service reasons, they have more control over
their internal network (even it it works via public internet) than
pure public internet.

So they would be paying US 'entry/exit' rates, but only charging EU rates.

[Sergey Schetinin]

AWS doesn't route EU traffic via US, that would be nuts. And the EU
customers would be outraged too.

[Philip]

@Zutesmog
Why did you left IRC? I think its better if I send you my remarks to
the list there instead in the groups ;-)

Microsoft: The price is only correct for September. In October there
will be a 20% price cut for the smallest instance. Input bandwidth is
free and outgoing bandwidth depends on the region where your instance
is deployed: North America and Europe regions: $0.15 per GB out / Asia
Pacific Region: $0.20 per GB out

On Sep 4, 5:01 pm, Sergey Schetinin <mal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> AWS doesn't route EU traffic via US, that would be nuts. And the EU
> customers would be outraged too.
>

> On 4 September 2011 17:53, Barry Hunter <barrybhun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > OT, but probably because if they made it much cheaper, it would be
> > huge lure for US customers (not worried about latency) to use the EU
> > data center.
>
> > But even for EU bound traffic, they probably route it to US
> > datacenters first then route it via internal networks to the EU.
> > Mainly for quality of service reasons, they have more control over
> > their internal network (even it it works via public internet) than
> > pure public internet.
>
> > So they would be paying US 'entry/exit' rates, but only charging EU rates.
>
> > On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Sergey Schetinin <mal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Amazingly enough AWS still prices their bandwidth from EU datacenter
> >> at $0.120 per GB
>

> >>> For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

>
> >> --
> >>http://self.maluke.com/
>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group.
> >> To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com.
> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.

> >> For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

[Strom]

Regarding available memory, memcache is free in GAE.

On Sep 4, 4:26 pm, Tim Hoffman <zutes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> More than a few people have said in the groups lately that appengine is
> unsuitable for entry level apps due to the new pricing schedule.
> I am not so sure, but there hasn't been any real information about the
> alternatives, so I thought I would start to collate some numbers
>
> So to that end I have included a spreadsheet here with a summary of a number
> of VPS or cloud providers solutions that I would consider
> might be suitable to run a small entry level appengine app.
>
> For the sake of the discussion you would want to run a stack that looks like
> the following
>
> linux
> nginx/apache
> a light weight stack say webapp2, pyramid, tipfy (a lightweight framework)
> an ORM (sqlobject/Storm)
> and mysql
>
> This doesn't really equate to a heroku offering, but lets say in each case
> we need a single instance of something running, 512MB at a minimum to run
> the small stack and an RDBMS , with at least 1GB of
> storage available if no OS is factored in and 5GB if the OS counts in the
> storage allocation.
>
> So here is a

> spreadsheet.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At1LTa6ONStgdExuRUl2QUdO...

[Tapir]

how much memory can you use is not clear. and it is not totally free.
and installing a memache in a ec2 instance needs less than 5 minutes
and will run faster.

[Tim Hoffman]

Hi Strom

Yep, though accessing it counts in rpc quotas.

I tried to keep the stack really small ;-)

Honestly you can't compare any VPS with appengine feature wise unless you build some really big

stack yourself and you still don't get the seemless scaling. But for really small apps the scaling is 

probably irrelevant, so I erred in favour of IAAS type services ;-)  These types of apps also don't 

need to worry about load balancers, distributed datastores like cassandra or mongodb etc as well.

See ya

T

[Barry Hunter]

Not all traffic, only traffic to/from US origin.

[Raymond C.]

There are two points need to mention I think:

- GAE instance serve one (or multiple requests on concurrency) requests at a time only

- GAE operations (e.g. datastore) charge extra, which depends on what your app does.  Currently under the new pricing, more than 50% of the charge of my app is for Datastore write and read. (i.e. more than instance charge)

I know its hard to compare GAE with others just by numbers.  But since you are doing it...

[Adam Sah]

I added two linux VPS services to the spreadsheet:

 - linode.com, which has been great for me over the years-- very reliable, solid tech support, etc.

 - intovps.com, which is 1/2 the price of linode (!!).  I just signed up and it seems to work as advertised.

I'd be **very** interested to see someone setup TyphoonAE on a VPS and compare true cost-- it would be hilarious if TyphoonAE+VPS beat GAE native.

hope this helps,

adam

[Tim Hoffman]

HI Adam

Thats a comparison I would like to see.  It still ignores large scaling etc...

But it would provide a minimal application change option for running else where.

Which is a much better real comparison.

Rgds

T

[Strom]

As far as I know using memcache is free. What are these RPC quotas
that you speak of?

[Barry Hunter]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Adam Sah wrote:

> I'd be **very** interested to see someone setup TyphoonAE on a VPS and
> compare true cost-- it would be hilarious if TyphoonAE+VPS beat GAE native.

Surely that is not that far fetched? Esp. if you only count the cost
of the VPS itself, not the time to setup and maintain TyphoonAE
running on that VPS (and maintaining the VPS itself)

It's like just about anything, DIY can usually save money. But it
takes time instead.

But the real value of GAE, comes with scalablity. Take your
installation and instantly scale it to 15 VPS's. How about 200
servers? Multi-terabyte datastore?
Multi-datacenter replication and failover? Someone on call to deal
with the sudden 'darkness' of large numbers of your machines
disappearing.
(all possible - but quickly gets non-trivial. particully if want to
scale quickly)

[Tim Hoffman]

HI Barry 

Totally agree.  Those are the costs that the spreadsheet is ignoring amongst other things.

On the face of it, for small apps the actual base hosting cost of appengine vs the 

other solutions are all in the same ball park.

Statements like appengine is no good for small apps is probably not accurate in most cases, and if you where to factor in the real 

cost of managing a vps stack yourself then most of the time appengine is probably ahead in terms of TCO.  

Rgds

Tim

[G Heslop]

There used to be a quota on the maximum amount of data you could transfer from MemCache to your app. This is alluded to in the Python Memcache docs [1] and was discussed by the Khan Academy blog [2]. The quota used to be 640 GB/Day.

[1] http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/overview.html#Quotas_and_Limits
[2] http://bjk5.com/post/2320616424/layer-caching-in-app-engine-with-memcache-and-cachepy