Want my money back, What should I do?

[Kaan Soral]

As soon as the new billing rolled out, I made the necessary changes to switch to 2.7 with concurrency and launched my new version.

But because of the bugs I had to roll back to a version with 2.5 on it. (Here is a fatal bug: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=6282 )
(As a side problem: I already modified my code, and I don't want to roll back my code [too many modifications], for this reason I froze my app to the version with python 2.5, so this situation froze my development and the ability to make changes to the live version too )

Before new billing I was paying ~40$s a day, now I am paying ~90$s. so until 1.6.1 gets launched I will pay ~50$s extra (maybe less, maybe more)

So I feel like an idiot now

Should I submit a billing ticket for this, any advices?

[Brandon Wirtz]

Did you use the services you were billed for?

 

Were you given warnings that the billing changes were coming?

 

Did you accept the $50 that GAE gave early adopters?  (I don’t think I did)

 

If you answered yes to the first one, You don’t really deserve your money back.

If you answered yes to the second one, it is your own fault if you didn’t migrate, re-code, or prepare for the price change.

If you answered yes to the third one, likely you got as much money as you will.

 

I would modify your code to take advantage of the Edge Cache, learn to speed up your code using mem-cache, and tune your instance latency to make the app affordable.

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[Kaan Soral]

Hi Brandon,

I don't think you read my post

[Brandon Wirtz]

Yes I did.

 

McDonald’s Releases the McRib. You eat it, you love it, you visit every day to get it.

McDonald’s announces that the McRib is going nationwide in 90 days and that if you want to eat it, it will be Twice the price, but if you make order it with a shake, fries, and

Coke it will only be10% more.

 

You continue to eat the McRib every day. And then after a 2 weeks you complain that McDonald’s billed you twice the original price.  But it’s not your fault because you are lactose intolerant and can’t eat the shake.

 

Will McDonald’s give your money back?

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[Andrius A]

Hi Kaan,

I totally agree with you, I have the same problem. Google released optimization guide which states how to save, they suggest using backends and talk about multithreading, non of these features are fully working. 2.7 is broken and backends development under local environment is broken as well. I have sent couple of emails directly to google billing asking for the refund but haven't received any answer!

 

The prices we are paying now are too expensive, it would be silly for me sit and just wait if things will come better. They need to admit that they need to slash the prices until the issues are fixed!

[reco]

hi brandon,

we are on app engine since day one. its a really nice platform even
though we had a lot of issues through out the past with outages and
and the apps not behaving as they should.

I understand that you guys need to make money with this platform. I
think this is great. Actually i love you guys to make money so there
will be future enhancements, fixes, ....

the issue we see though atm its that you are forcing us to fast to
move on. running an app on 2.5 even on HR is from business standpoints
not worth what you are charting for. i am sure things will change with
python 2.7 and multithreading. the SDK to work on this is out there
since around 2 weeks. we are in the process of moving to a
multithreaded version of our app which will hopefully result in less
instances used.

i suggest that you guys should expand the 50% discount for another 2-3
months. dec 1st is just to early.

you get this from a very happy GAE developer.

best,
christof

[Kaan Soral]

Thanks for your support Andrius, christof

- And Brandon

You really make no sense to me,
Let me try to explain you the situation with a similar analogy:

Burger King decides to roll out a Frequent Eaters Card (will be referred to as FEC from now on).
I get a FEC to pay at least %50 less when I eat at Burger King
But Burger King's FEC system doesn't function, they tell me that a problem occurred and they can't issue my FEC, but I am a Burger King addict, and despite the FEC problem, I still keep on eating at Burger King for days.

So FEC is Python 2.7 here. I got it, but it doesn't work.

Should Burger King cover my losses?
----

To give a real life example, above scenario happens a lot on supermarkets here in Turkey, they keep rolling out promotions, but at the check out, they almost never get recognized, I am sure this is a marketing strategy, since a lot of people are careless, they probably earn a lot malfunctioning so, but they ALWAYS cover your losses when you ask them

I am not saying Appengine is malfunctioning on purpose, I know that there are problems, and they are trying very hard to fix them, but I am just hoping they would cover our losses

[Brandon Wirtz]

I run 2.7 Have for weeks. But from where I am sitting you had the option to eat somewhere else.  If you had reached out to Google and said “Hey, I want to stick with GAE but you have to fix these things if you want more money”, and they had agreed that would be one thing.  But you instead are in the dine an dash scenario. I at this food, and now I want a refund because it cost more than I wanted it to.

 

They gave you a tool to tell you how much the new costs would be long in advance.  They gave you slider nobs so that if you wanted to lower your performance you could keep the pricing you used to have.

 

If your cost went up it is because you didn’t gimp your performance.  Is it shitty that things cost more?  Yes. Is it Google’s fault you didn’t turn the sliders, bail, or implement fixes to reduce costs? No.

 

I on the other hand:

Saved 20% by implementing 2.7 for concurrency.

(I do not use thread safe)

 

Saved 25% by Fixing my cache headers (with minimal documentation on how to do so)

 

And as a result the costs are not significantly higher on Release than they were on pre-release.

My bill is higher because I merged most of my apps in to one mult-tenant app so a bunch of 28 hours of instances stopped being free….

 

But yeah, you are wining (one N not two).  If you get the 90 day notice that your rent is going to increase, vacate or don’t complain when your bill is higher. 

 

 

From: google-a...@googlegroups.com [mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kaan Soral
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2011 11:21 AM
To: google-a...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [google-appengine] Want my money back, What should I do?

 

Thanks for your support Andrius, christof

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[Kaan Soral]

I got the thread safe too, also my app was highly optimized since the beginning, all those performance improvements tips were just confirmations for me

I don't get your attitude

[Andrius A]

Brandon, your cheap food example here does not make any sense here. Problems we are having here that we are paying for the services which do not fully work. I am using GAE since early days and was happy with the issues before because they didn't cost me a lot. Now GAE came out of the preview release with drastically increased prices and the features they advertise do not fully work, for example: backends SDK broken, backends do not suppor channels API, all my backends stop working 2-3 times per day, time to time frontends fail to load throwing deadline exceeded errors, time to time requests to frontends take 10 times longer even (processing time is as usual), enabling multi threading with python 2.7 makes things even worse. I am disappointed because I spent nights trying to adapt changes for new billing method later to find out that those new features do not actually work!

[Brandon Wirtz]

Fine. Post your problems and get them fixed, don’t complain that you used services you don’t want to pay for.

 

Yes 2.7 frontends take longer to load. Reduce the number of imports, and create a warm up script that only does the bare minimum, (doesn’t handle a request just says “hello I’m up with all the imports”)

 

Backends don’t support Channels because they aren’t Front ends. Backends are designed for talking to front ends only, channels are designed to talk to users. Ergo no channels on the back ends.

 

BackEnd SDK broken is too nebulous can’t help you.

 

2.7 Thread Safe works it is just a PITA to implement, so stick to 2.7 with thread safe off you get concurrency, and doesn’t require any code changes.

 

Without code can’t help you on the 10x as long as usual.  Likely based on the things you have said, those are also user error. 

 

GAE is not like hosting on a physical machine, or like using Amazon.  There are lots of very strict rules for development. If you break those rules your code won’t scale, you will spend a fortune, and badness will ensue.

 

You keep saying my cheap food example doesn’t apply, but you keep making it complicated.  You either used the service and owe money. Or you didn’t and don’t.

[Brian Quinlan]

Hi Brandon,

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:
> Fine. Post your problems and get them fixed, don’t complain that you used
> services you don’t want to pay for.
>
>
>
> Yes 2.7 frontends take longer to load. Reduce the number of imports, and
> create a warm up script that only does the bare minimum, (doesn’t handle a
> request just says “hello I’m up with all the imports”)
>
>
>
> Backends don’t support Channels because they aren’t Front ends. Backends are
> designed for talking to front ends only, channels are designed to talk to
> users. Ergo no channels on the back ends.
>
>
>
> BackEnd SDK broken is too nebulous can’t help you.
>
>
>
> 2.7 Thread Safe works it is just a PITA to implement, so stick to 2.7 with
> thread safe off you get concurrency, and doesn’t require any code changes.

I'm not sure what you mean here. If threadsafe is set to "no" or "off"
then your instances will not be sent requests concurrently.

Cheers,
Brian

[Brandon Wirtz]

>I'm not sure what you mean here. If threadsafe is set to "no" or "off"
>then your instances will not be sent requests concurrently.

That would explain why I didn't get the gains I expected. Things were still
faster.
I guess I'll work on that too then.

I get some error in the CGI handler... Would have to look it up to be
certain what the error was.

[Brian Quinlan]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure what you mean here. If threadsafe is set to "no" or "off"
>>then your instances will not be sent requests concurrently.
>
> That would explain why I didn't get the gains I expected.  Things were still
> faster.
> I guess I'll work on that too then.

There is an outstanding bug where enabling threadsafe can cause large
latency increases , especially if your requests use a lot of CPU:
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=6323

So I'd test carefully before enabling it for anything important.

> I get some error in the CGI handler... Would have to look it up to be
> certain what the error was.

You can't enable threadsafe if you have an CGI handlers (Python gets
upset if there are several __main__ modules ;-)).

Cheers,
Brian

[Brandon Wirtz]

I made the changes to be thread safe in all but the configuration utility...
That way I can start load and error testing it. I'll let you know the
results.
(yes it took less than 10 minutes) (but that's because I'm a genius.... or
be because Nick Johnson has such a great article on how to do it.
http://blog.notdot.net/2011/10/Migrating-to-Python-2-7-part-1-Threadsafe )

[Geoffrey Spear]

On Nov 21, 2:21 pm, Kaan Soral <kaanso...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your support Andrius, christof
>
> - And Brandon
>
> You really make no sense to me,
> Let me try to explain you the situation with a similar analogy:
>
> Burger King decides to roll out a Frequent Eaters Card (will be referred to
> as FEC from now on).
> I get a FEC to pay at least %50 less when I eat at Burger King
> But Burger King's FEC system doesn't function, they tell me that a problem
> occurred and they can't issue my FEC, but I am a Burger King addict, and
> despite the FEC problem, I still keep on eating at Burger King for days.
>
> So FEC is Python 2.7 here. I got it, but it doesn't work.
>
> Should Burger King cover my losses?

Does Burger King slap a big warning on every part of the menu where
they mention the FEC saying it includes experimental new hamburgers
that might taste good or might make you sick, and please don't use
them for production eating?

[Kaan Soral]

Now that's a good point, but still its been taking too long for 1.6.1 to come out, and in this situation TIME IS REALLY MONEY

[Nick Johnson]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 4:49 AM, reco <re...@nex9.com> wrote:

hi brandon,

we are on app engine since day one. its a really nice platform even
though we had a lot of issues through out the past with outages and
and the apps not behaving as they should.

I understand that you guys need to make money with this platform. I
think this is great. Actually i love you guys to make money so there
will be future enhancements, fixes, ....

To clarify, Brandon does not work for Google, and does not speak on behalf of Google.

-Nick Johnson

 

the issue we see though atm its that you are forcing us to fast to
move on. running an app on 2.5 even on HR is from business standpoints
not worth what you are charting for. i am sure things will change with
python 2.7 and multithreading. the SDK to work on this is out there
since around 2 weeks. we are in the process of moving to a
multithreaded version of our app which will hopefully result in less
instances used.

i suggest that you guys should expand the 50% discount for another 2-3
months. dec 1st is just to early.

you get this from a very happy GAE developer.

best,
christof

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[Jeff Schnitzer]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Nick Johnson <nickj...@google.com> wrote:

To clarify, Brandon does not work for Google, and does not speak on behalf of Google.

Except when he is wearing a Google mermaid costume.

Jeff 

[Brandon Wirtz]

I hope I have never said anything to imply I work for Google.  I have tried for so long to make sure that never happens.

 

I specifically don’t use a Gmail address or anything to associate me with Google.  I may go back to putting my sig on the list so that there is less confusion.

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

From: google-a...@googlegroups.com [mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kaan Soral

Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2011 9:46 AM
To: google-a...@googlegroups.com

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[Nick Johnson]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:

I hope I have never said anything to imply I work for Google.  I have tried for so long to make sure that never happens.

Not that I've seen; I was responding to reco's post where he seemed to assume that you did, and I wanted to clarify.

-Nick Johnson

[salim]

My Price went up by 400%. I am not looking at leaving google. This
huge price change is crazy. I've emailed google pricing twice and I
have not heard back yet. I'm thinking of finding others who might
want to go on a class action law suit against google on this.

[Brandon Wirtz]

I am not a lawyer, but I don't think you would get anything. Changing the
price with lots of notice isn't illegal.

Are you setting your cache headers? Are you using concurrency? Likely those
two things will get you closer to 30% rather than 300% increase.

--

[Jeff Schnitzer]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 10:11 PM, salim <photojo...@gmail.com> wrote:

My Price went up by 400%. I am not looking at leaving google. This
huge price change is crazy. I've emailed google pricing twice and I
have not heard back yet.  I'm thinking of finding others who might
want to go on a class action law suit against google on this.

Do you realize that the top 1% of GAE applications consume more than HALF of all CPU cycles in the cluster?  Occupy Google App Engine!

Jeff
--

We are the 20%

[Brandon Wirtz]

I don’t use the CPU that’s  I just use the RAM and lots of it. The change in pricing was specifically because the GAE team doesn’t like me. :-)

 

 

 

From: google-a...@googlegroups.com [mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Schnitzer

Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 6:32 PM
To: google-a...@googlegroups.com

--

[reco]

hi nick yeah... i know. i wanted to address the google guys...
i had no intention to participate in this fast food debate

christof

[Nick]

App Engine shouldn't have come out of preview with the new pricing model while 2.7 is still in experimental mode!

The problem for us is pretty simple.  2.5 is now too expensive (like not worth it compared to other options) and 2.7 is having a lot of issues (downtime today and 2 days ago).  The reason developers are angry is because now they are stuck.  Neither 2.5 or 2.7 are viable options.

We have to switch back to 2.5 because we can't have downtime and unhappy users.

Google, please consider a price break until 2.7 is stable.  This will help a lot of the smaller companies.

[Kaan Soral]

Couldn't agree with you more