$500 support - your experiences

[Richard Watson]

Just wondering: what are the experience of App Engine customers that pay for $500/month support?

For a significant app I would think it's a no-brainer if it has enough benefit.

[Brandon Wirtz]

Not sure if the guys at Google will love or hate me for saying.

If you are buying to increase your “uptime” don’t.  if you are down everyone or some portion of everyone is. No one can go “kick” your server.

If you are buying because you want to be able to ask a question like “In a race condition how is conflict between two eventual put’s resolved. How does that change if the race condition is for closer to 100 puts in under a second”  then your $500 might be a good investment.

In most cases you would be better to take your $500 and set a more aggressive max idle instances, or up the size of your instances by a level.  Because $500 actually buys most apps quite a bit of head room which comes in handy when GAE has a “slow” day.

Other uses for the $500…

 

Optimize your initialization/warm up/spin up.

Add detection to your app for common issues with Datastore read and write latency.
Optimize your app to use lots of very small deferred tasks so that you are less likely to hit the 60 second limit.

If you have done all of those things… Spend the $500.

If you have a boss who wants you to call Google when you have downtime, spend the $500

But I think that when you sign up for the $500 support they should send you a check list of things, and tell you “Do these things your app will crash less”

People often accuse me of “running on a different GAE than the rest of the world”. No My code is just better, and my scheduler is better tuned, and I am infinitely aware of the limits of my instances.  As a result GAE has to have a REALLY bad day before my apps start to actually be down as opposed to cost me more than they should.

And there in lies the truth of my experience with GAE.  “Bad Days” can either result in downtime that the SLA pays you back for, or you stay up, and your hosting costs more.  No support contract will fix that.

There is a last use case for the $500.  GAE is guaranteed to stick around for you longer.  Though if 90% of GAE went away, you wouldn’t want to stick around long because all the elasticity would have gone out of it.

 

 

Brandon Wirtz BlackWaterOps: President / Lead Mercenary
Work: 510-992-6548 Toll Free: 866-400-4536 IM: dra...@gmail.com (Google Talk) Skype: drakegreene YouTube: BlackWaterOpsDotCom BlackWater Ops Cloud On A String Mastermind Group

 

[Mike Wesner]

Well, coming from people running a business on app engine I can say that it has been valuable to us.  We run into situations where something strange occurs and we are able to create a ticket and get a very fast response from the support team.  They have a direct line of communication with the SRE team and all the engineers for the various features of app engine.  We have some the best app engine talent working with us and write great stuff, but it is still important to have operational support to ensure our customers have no interruption in service and at the best possible quality.

Unless you want to depend on this list and stack overflow and the random yahoos that are happy to offer various opinions to you. I suggest you work with Google directly.

Mike