Task Queue API: Pricing Risk?

[Michael Hermus]

I know there cannot be a definitive answer to this question, but I am looking for opinions (and perhaps some insight from a Googler).

I currently make heavy use of the task queue, and every time I am faced with a design choice, the task queue presents a very attractive pattern for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that it is effectively free, currently. This is by no means the primary factor, but it certainly has an impact on my decision process. The obvious question: what is the risk that Google changes its pricing model at some point and starts charging for Task Queue API calls?

Were that to happen, I think it would be VERY painful for my app. I don't think it makes sense to design around a possible future pricing change, but it concerns me quite a bit. I would love to hear what the rest of the community thinks.

Regards,
Mike

[Jeff Schnitzer]

This is an interesting question, but I wouldn't exactly call tasks
free: When a task executes, your instance is invoked. Tasks are
really just a way of offsetting cost until later.

Jeff

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[Michael Hermus]

Of course, but there is a definitive resource cost to enqueue and dequeue the task (that is in addition to the instance time), and there is currently no charge for that.

On the other hand, if I defer work by writing an entity to the datastore and processing it later, I have to pay both read and write costs.

[vlad]

I have been using TaskQueue for a long time and this view makes no sense to me. You are paying the same price for your Instances and DS read/write when executing a task. To be fair there is a small leeway which GAE gives you on not charging for storing Task parameters. So you have to weight this advantage against unpredictable Task scheduling timing.

[Michael Hermus]

I think you are missing my point. Using the Task Queue incurs a very real resource cost to Google, which we don't currently pay for. Granted, that is true of many other services as well, and only Google knows how all the pricing incentives and resource utilization pieces fit together to ensure profitability.

However, I would guess that the Task Queue is backed by Big Table and thus has similar characteristics to datastore access (although it may be highly optimized). This makes me wonder if they are creating an unbalanced situation that they will ultimately have to correct, just like they did with the major pricing shift last year. I am surprised no one else is concerned about it given that history, but I suppose there is nothing we can do about it anway.

[vlad]

Why did you single out TaskQueue? There are other secondary services which are kind of free on GAE currently once you take the primary costs out. For example memcache comes to mind. Can they jack up the price? Of course they can. Probably with little notice and/or justification. Truth is marketing/business side was never a strong suite of GAE team. They are excellent engineers. If you are concerned about pricing risk you may want to look at AWS. Biz model there seems more straightforward/sustainable. Thus pricing risk seems lower but I would not bet my house on that.

[Jason Collins]

I think everyone on this thread should just shush. ;)

[Waleed Abdulla]

I wonder if the task queue is using the datastore behind the scenes and the cost of those calls are included in the datastore quota?  Have you checked to see if using the task queue increases your datastore calls? If so, then it's not exactly free.

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[Alfred Fuller]

It doesn't use the datastore or charge datastore ops/storage.