Multiple Instances of the Same App

[Eric Kolotyluk]

I remember reading some policy that Google prohibits people people
from basically running the same app under different registration. I
gather one reason for this is so that people don't exploit the free
nature of apps, or so that Google is not replicating essentially the
same app everywhere. What ever the reason I don't want to violate
Google's policies.

We have an app we want to develop for our customers, but we
essentially want each customer to have their own instance of the app
for quotas and billing purposes. Basically, if our customers want the
service, they would pay Google directly, rather than us figuring out
who uses what and billing our customers. It would also make it easy
for our software to automatically create the customer's app on app
engine and keep it up-to-date.

An alternative design would be to have some way to invoke a central
app, but for service operations and quota have some way to bill things
to a specific account.

Does Google have any way to do this that does not violate the
policies?

The alternative for us is setting up a separate account for each
customer on either Amazon, Microsoft, or some other cloud, and
essentially giving each customer their own VM instance. There are pros
and cons to this, as there are with using the Google PAAS, and I am
trying to figure out what our best options are.

Cheers, Eric

[Brandon Wirtz]

I'm in the same boat. Google has let me get away with running the same app
customized for the user. All of my apps are paid apps running on different
domains.

I'm all for lobbying to get app reseller accounts where we can markup our
services on the billing page. If you come up with a good way to get the
billing information by API let me know because I'd like to have a better way
to bill clients and generate usage reports.

Cheers, Eric

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[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hey Erik, I think you are referring to this section:

"4.4. You may not develop multiple Applications to simulate or act as a single Application or otherwise access the Service in a manner intended to avoid incurring fees."

What you are doing is not being done to avoid incurring fees so it does not violate our terms.  We also need to build better support for this sort of thing in the future as a number of people have asked for it.

Hope that helps!

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

[Mark]

I just wanted to add a +1 here.

The issue for me is that 1 app = 1 domain. I would love to be able to
map a domain (www.theclient.com) to a specific part of my app
www.myapp.com/theclient. But it looks like I will have to duplicate my
app and perhaps use multiple google accounts to do so. It seems dodgy
to me as I doubt any instance of the app would exceed the free
threshold but the sum of all apps would. Can I get some extra details
on how people are handling this and/or how google will handle this.

[Gary Frederick]

yep (how we say +1 in Texas)

Is there an issue we can star to show we are interested?

Gary

[Nick Johnson (Google)]

Hi Mark,

That's not the case - you can map multiple domains to the same app, either by setting them up as separate Google Apps domains, or by adding them as aliases for an existing domain. Your app can then use the Host header to distingush between domains and serve different content to them.

-Nick Johnson

Nick Johnson, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine

[Sergey Schetinin]

Mapping domains to different subpaths / handlers is easy. For ex see: http://self.maluke.com/hostmap 

Full disclosure: that's a link to my own blog )

-Sergey

[Rajkumar Radhakrishnan]

Hi,

Quote (Eric Kolotyluk <eric.ko...@gmail.com> wrote) :

We have an app we want to develop for our customers, but we essentially want
each customer to have their own instance of the app for quotas and billing
purposes. Basically, if our customers want the service, they would pay
Google directly, rather than us figuring out who uses what and billing our
customers. It would also make it easy for our software to automatically
create the customer's app on app engine and keep it up-to-date.

Quote (Gregory D'alesandre <gre..@google.com> wrote) :

What you are doing is not being done to avoid incurring fees so it does not violate our terms.  We also need to build better support for this sort of thing in the future as a number of people have asked for it.

Quote (Gary Frederick <gg..@jsoft.com> wrote) :

yep (how we say +1 in Texas) 

 

Is there an issue we can star to show we are interested?

Yes, there is now a feature request which you can star to show you are interested. Check out : Marketplace for Google App Engine apps.

Thanks & Regards,

Raj

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