Appengine Flexible Pricing is total Ripoff

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Rahul Tongia

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Jan 19, 2019, 3:47:02 AM1/19/19
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Hi Google Team,

I have recently migrated an application from old Managed VMs to "flex". My application does server side processing using flex and we use servers in 24x7 mode. After few days of using flex, I find it way more expensive than alternatives.

Here are few observations.
- For Same VM configuration: Flex pricing is nearly 3 times for my use case after including just Compute Engine sustained pricing. Even the "vm/core/hour" or "RAM/hour" costs are way more.
- Datastore costs have gone up much more because of missing "Memcache" in Flex. Even with Cloud Redis, we are paying additional cost.
- We had to rewrite entire codebase which was using messaging to PubSub

In effect, we don't see the additional value in Flex that we are being charged for. In fact, much of the value has been removed. I understand reduced DevOps, Health Check with flex is valuable, however, the pricing of it should be reconsidered. At this point of time, I am considering either to move off entirely from AppEngine or atleast moving to our flex instance to Google Kubernetes Engine.

Few questions that would help us decide:
Regards,
Rahul Tongia

Cristian (Google Cloud Platform Support)

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Jan 25, 2019, 5:41:58 PM1/25/19
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Hello Rahul,


I am addressing your questions below:


* Are there any considerations to make Flex pricing fair in the coming weeks?

[Ans] For notifications of prices changes will follow the procedure as described in section 1.7.b of the Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service. As prices are part of the Service Legal Agreement, changes will be made 30 days after they are posted. Google will provide at least 90 days notices by contacting the customer through their point of contact.


I would like to clarify the price difference you described with a simple comparison reflecting the difference in cost. From Google App Engine Flex the price is  $0.05 per core hour while a Google Compute Engine VM is $0.03 per core hour. The main difference in price is that App Engine Flex manages most of the infrastructure for you, as you have described in your opening statement. If one needs these features in a GCE VM, they will need to be implemented and managed by the user.


* How reliable is this page giving an example of migration of Flex -> GKE [qqq]. Are there any examples in Github?

[Ans]  I engage the Infrastructure team and they said that it should work without any complications. They also added that GKE means more infrastructure management on your side. For an example, I recommend you to review Google Kubernetes Engine's quickstart. I would like to add this post as they discuss contrast between the products that you have interest on: Google App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Compute Engine VM. I would also provide the price calculator so you can compare estimated cost values between the different products.



* What is your Roadmap regarding CloudTasks, Memcache for Flex?

[Ans] Cloud Tasks is still in beta stage. You could use Pub/Sub as an alternative.  

I understand that Memcache is not Available for Google App Engine Flex as discussed here. The current solution is to use Redis Labs Memcache as they offer a compatible API to Memcache in Google App Engine Standard which will allow you to switch at a later time.




Rahul Tongia

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Jan 25, 2019, 7:35:08 PM1/25/19
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Hi Christian,

Thanks for the detailed reply. Appreciate it.

Just a few comments though:
  • On pricing: Happy to pay 66% higher on VM/hour charge for no maintenance. However, there is no sustained usage discount which compute engine provides, hence pricing is really more than double for a sustained usage flex case, like mine. Other people have written about it too: https://medium.com/@jaitaiwan/a-brief-note-on-app-engines-pricing-73490fe0446b
  • On memcache: I tried Redis cloudmemorystore, but somehow that was not connecting to the default network, so I had to ditch that in favour a self-managed memcached instance, which worked out of the box with bitnami image.
  • GKE: Yes, with only a few tweeks, I was able to make GKE work. However, still have issues with setting up service accounts, but that is just a configmap setting in GKE. Since, GKE is also managed by Google SREs, don't really see a huge difference with flex in terms of reliability apart from health checks, but k8s can do it natively with just a config.
At this point, I find technically flex's limitations have forced me to put more infrastructure out anyways like pubsub, memorystore/memcahe that overall reliability is not as elegant as it was with appengine only case. Additionally, pricing is driving me to move over from app engine, specially flex to GKE.

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amit...@google.com

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Feb 18, 2019, 10:11:17 PM2/18/19
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Hello Rahul,


I would like to thank you for your details feedback. We use every feedback into consideration to improve our services. I would say as Cristian mentioned, price calculator is a great tool to calculate estimated costs before you moved into the product.


On Friday, January 25, 2019 at 7:35:08 PM UTC-5, Rahul Tongia wrote:
Hi Christian,

Thanks for the detailed reply. Appreciate it.

Just a few comments though:
  • On pricing: Happy to pay 66% higher on VM/hour charge for no maintenance. However, there is no sustained usage discount which compute engine provides, hence pricing is really more than double for a sustained usage flex case, like mine. Other people have written about it too: https://medium.com/@jaitaiwan/a-brief-note-on-app-engines-pricing-73490fe0446b
  • On memcache: I tried Redis cloudmemorystore, but somehow that was not connecting to the default network, so I had to ditch that in favour a self-managed memcached instance, which worked out of the box with bitnami image.
  • GKE: Yes, with only a few tweeks, I was able to make GKE work. However, still have issues with setting up service accounts, but that is just a configmap setting in GKE. Since, GKE is also managed by Google SREs, don't really see a huge difference with flex in terms of reliability apart from health checks, but k8s can do it natively with just a config.
At this point, I find technically flex's limitations have forced me to put more infrastructure out anyways like pubsub, memorystore/memcahe that overall reliability is not as elegant as it was with appengine only case. Additionally, pricing is driving me to move over from app engine, specially flex to GKE.

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