Why is GAE not popular?

[Torsten Därr]

Hi, I'm not a web developer but I've been running websites for many years having them created by web development companies. I've been trying to find a good company that is familiar with Google App Engine because I do believe that the Google ecosystem is the right choice for my next sites and projects. Can you give me any idea as to how I can find a web developing company that has been using Google App Engine for a while successfully? Many thanks, Torsten

[Evan Jones]

This is a complicated question with many answers, most of which will be based on opinions. :)

There are a number of companies that do build products on App Engine, although not many of them make much noise about it. Snapchat and Kahn Academy have historically written about their experiences. I work for Bluecore, and our product is based largely on App Engine.

My very personal opinion about why App Engine is not more popular:

* App Engine Standard (the original product) is just slightly too "weird". There are enough third-party libraries that don't work correctly due to the way the sandbox is implemented that it makes things inconvenient. There was originally no SQL database, so you had to use the Datastore, which is a good product but is also quite "weird."

* It was too early. At the time it was launched, a high level platform that auto-scales your code was unusual and scary. Running stuff in VMs in the cloud was still new. Today the cloud is more familiar, so now some people are willing to try again, calling it "serverless" this time. However, it is too late for App Engine: people have already tried it and decided they don't like it, so they won't try it again.

In short: I have a love/hate relationship with the platform. It is technically very impressive, but it is too bad that it isn't more widely adopted.

I think this article summarizing one developer's experience is a good and balanced description of the pros and cons:

https://blog.stephanbehnke.com/3-years-on-google-app-engine-an-epic-review/

I wrote my own brief comparison of "serverless" versus "platform as a service" that also has some opinions:

http://www.evanjones.ca/serverless-paas.html

[Richard Cheesmar]

Hi, Torsten,

Google App Engine was, I suspect, originally adopted by Python and Java developers in the early days,  it was seen as a very cheap alternative as a Paas. Based around the no-sql datastore, it offered quite a few advantages to say the heavy-ish load of say a straight Django based server option. The whole Paas idea being to relinquish the substantial dev-ops requirements that often burdened smaller developers. Today it is a different beast, it's no longer a matter of the Standard environment and Java or Python. You have the Flex environment, extra lnagues, Go and PHP in the mix as well as numerous APIs and cloud facilities that can really help speed up development of any size projects. Developing restful APIs as micro-services for example, cloud storage, and many cloud based facilities are now part of the overall development ecosystem.

Today I don't think you should look at google-app-engine development just in terms of the core code base. It's part of an family of tools that I personally use most everyday. It still has it's issues, documentation for a a long while was in need of improvement but it's getting much better all the time. On the downside, the requirement to get to grips with the various components Google now offers can be quite time consuming and the original concept of getting rid of the burden of heavy dev-ops has since been somewhat retograde by the need to understand, use and monitor all the activities of a web site via the cloud console and other tools. To be fair though, this is more to do with the reality of designing web apps which are no longer small and simple. The web today is a complex beast, which many people underestimate when it comes to tooling up and development, but Google is getting much better as it matures and takes away many of the more painful and cumbersome burdens that modern web app development brings.

I wholeheartedly recommend it.

If you need some advice of any form give me a shout.

[Vitaly Bogomolov]

Hi, Torsten,

My 5 cents.

GAE allows measure "quality of code" in money. If the code is "bad", you need a lot of GAE resources -> lot of money for serving your app.

This thing for some reason not liked by most developers.

:)

WBR, Vitaly.

[Rajesh Gupta]

I really like it a lot.  Especially for small teams, you don't have to worry about dev-ops.  Our company is running the SaaS service for 5+ years with out dev-ops.

With all the improvement over the years, and the java8 available, it is really a platform to go with.  

I highly recommend.  Just use the good features like 

taskqueues, autoscaling -  it is worth a lot.

All projects will have bad code and memory leaks - appengine can start new instances and continue to serve other requests, while one of the instances dies because of memory issues.

Some negatives

- Datastore is different, needs lot of learning and different thinking.

- No good migration tools for datastore - to alter  or delete columns data in bulk  (I don't like mapreduce).  Hope Google team will give better api and come up with a UI to alter bulk data

- don't like the endpoints framework

- Needs lot of documentation

Its my choice for SaaS.!!

 

Regards,

Rajesh

www.GainERP.com

Accounting/Inventory/Orders/Sales/Purchase on Google Cloud Platform and Mobile

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[Dave Kuhn]

Hey Torsten, it's a great question. We're mystified too!

As others have said, initially it was an odd platform. Major web frameworks (e.g. Django, Spring etc) didn't originally work out of the box for a variety of reasons including the lack of a SQL database, file size limits, slow startup times and the Java class whitelist. That was a pretty big hurdle to overcome for most developers. Thankfully Google's put a ton of investment into the platform recently which has alleviated most, if not all of the pain there.

I work at an agency called 3wks which has built over 200 projects on it over the last five years. In fact we work almost exclusively with GAE these days. I suppose we've learned a little bit about the platform by now – and we love it. It scales like a dream, not to mention it's super reliable. We've built everything from major media sites to payments platforms on it. Better still we haven't had to hire a single devops person in that whole time.

PM if you'd like to chat further.

[timh]

I would agree with Dave

Its is a very good platform.  I have been using it since 2008.

I think to get the most out of it, you have to invest some effort understanding how to use well.

The early adopters had to as there where really few scalable PAAS options then.

Now there are a lot more choices, however it still has some unmatched features like to autoscaling which is hard with a lot other solutions, but for many that isn't a major criteria.

The other big benefit is being a true PAAS and not having to manage OS/lower layers.  Again a lot of people don't see the value vs investment in knowledge.

T

[Dave Kuhn]

Hey everyone, I thought this was such a great question I wrote an article about it. 

https://in.3wks.com.au/whats-not-to-love-about-google-app-engine-31de6454e746

I'd appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

Dave