New pricing -- too soon.

[Sergey Schetinin]

Google announced that the new pricing goes into effect by the mid-September. At the same time the Python 2.7 runtime is not ready, and we still don't know what concurrency levels will be allowed (neither does the development team). There's still no word about guaranteed CPU resources per instance (overselling is a possibility). There's no way to prioritize requests from users over task queue requests either.

The old-new billing comparison in the admin panel is horrible as well -- no numbers for new billing in the overview. No way to see how close you're to the new free quota limits either.

The end result is that I'm not even worried that I will have to pay too much when the new billing kicks in, but that I'm completely in the dark about how the things will change after the change and no idea how well the new pricing will work at scale. Supposedly the old one was bad for estimating costs, but the new one is way, way worse at the moment.

This is a complete failure to make transition to the new model smooth. I'm looking forward to the someone explaining in a couple years what kind mismanagement caused all this nonsense.

-Sergey

[Santiago Lema]

What can I say? +1.

I am not sure how we're supposed to rewrite our apps for Python
concurrency (or what that implies). All I know is I probably won't
have the time to do so. Anyway I think it'll always be cat and mouse
with AppEngine. I rewrote my app to use a maximum of memcache in order
to avoid costly datastore usage and they increased CPU cost. Then I
optimize to try to reduce CPU and they start billing by instance.

You just can't win.

[stevep]

And this is from a company doing billions in profit per quarter.
Gaining a minuscule decimal (thousandth?) of a percentage of quarterly
profit for the cost of a lot of brand equity seems a very strange
trade-off (but then so does the quasi-legal Canadian Pharma ads which
suddenly got a lot more expensive both re: cash and brand equity). GAE
should allow more time for developers suffering pricing shock to port
off of GAE to some other solution, and burnish rather than tarnish the
brand. Much like MSFT, though, and ATT before they are now too big to
care. I'm simply shocked at the timeline.