Keep it short: Who is forced to leave GAE?

[Raymond C.]

I am not asking who is not happy with the new pricing (virtually most of GAE users).

I am just asking who is FORCED to leave GAE because you cannot afford to keep running on GAE under the new pricing model.  Please (if possible) state the monthly price change as well.

And what options you are considering?

[Raymond C.]

I am one of them.  Monthly charge: $900  -> $2850 (310%)

I have been looking at EC2, every cost is clear and I can control over everything.

[joakime]

We are moving 22 servers away.

Already started the process to move to AWS.

Our costs went up 2800% under the new pricing.

[Daniel]

I will be forced to leave app engine. I already spend thousands per
month, but that will increase to thousands per week. I'm seeing an
increase of 300%. Unless there is a change of policy I will be leaving
asap.

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Hey guys, just some data collection: are you guys running Python?

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai

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[Jason Collins]

We are going from $5,400/month to $26,500/month (Python) - and this is
only one of our apps.

We are going to work hard to optimize our application because we
really like App Engine, but failing that, we may have to move
elsewhere.

j

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Jason,

I'm thinking a lot of the biggest apparent price increases come from the fact that Python 2.5 instances are single threaded, whereas Python 2.7 with multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to work with you to make this happen. 

The billing email queues should be working now, so I want to encourage you especially to open a ticket via that email alias. 

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai

[milosh zorica]

am already mostly on AWS... using GAE just on side

AWS offers the best bangs for bucks ratio so far

--
Milosh Zorica

http://www.linkedin.com/in/miloshzorica

phone: +44 20 8144 5294
e-mail: milosh...@gmail.com
skype: milosh.zorica

[Raymond C.]

I am.  Maybe check again when the new concurrency function come out.  But the new pricing is coming this month...

[Jason Collins]

Ikai,

I submitted to appengine_up...@google.com - I hope that is
the one you meant.

Yes, instance-hours is a huge increase. However, we are also seeing
large cost increases on datastore writes. Are taskqueue.add() counted
under datastore writes? We're trying to figure out why the number is
so massively high for our app (300M+ ops/day?!).

j

On Aug 31, 7:44 pm, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> wrote:
> Jason,
>
> I'm thinking a lot of the biggest apparent price increases come from the
> fact that Python 2.5 instances are single threaded, whereas Python 2.7 with
> multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to work
> with you to make this happen.
>
> The billing email queues should be working now, so I want to encourage you
> especially to open a ticket via that email alias.
>
> --
> Ikai Lan
> Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine
> plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai
>

[Peter Petrov]

I've already left GAE a couple of months ago. I.e. immediately after Greg replied to me that new pricing will come into effect before Python 2.7 and multithreading. My app has short bursts of thousands QPS, and without multithreading it was clear to me that for an unknown period I'd have to pay a very high price. Today's posts here prove that I was right.

Another reason was the insanely high price for instance hours - more than 10x the industry average. Sorry Google, but your servers are not made of gold. Paying that price is simply stupid, and I'm not stupid.

I've moved to a small VPS cluster at RackSpace Cloud. I rewrote my entire app as a Node.js application (previously was GAE/Python using Kay). Very happy so far, I don't think I'll ever return to GAE.

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[Richard Arrano]

I'll be leaving if some of the prices aren't tweaked, particularly the
channels. I was banking on being able to use a large amount of
channels, likely in the thousands per day. I did a double take when I
realized the new price was per hundred rather than per thousand,
particularly when channels expire after two hours and need to be re-
created. Does anyone have a good alternative to the Channel API using
Amazon's solutions?

-Richard

[Santiago Lema]

Same here. Unless Python concurrency is so magical it cancels the
instance billing effect I'll have to move everything I can move away.
Or just turn it off because the indirect platform locking is rather
efficient.

I am not in the same league as those who pay thousands of dollars per
month but rather the average small developer who sees what was a 31 $
monthly bill jump to over 500 $.

I still don't understand why Google can't come up with a pricing that
is competitive with plain old linux hosting. I appreciate the
abstraction of the DataStore to save data but if getting rid of the
hassle of Linux admin means having the constant hassle of having to
optimize for the new GAE rules then maybe I should go back in time to
2000 and get a pair of good old servers.

[Martin Ceperley]

Richard, a good alternative to the Channel API is Beacon Push (http://beaconpush.com/) we have been using it and it's dead simple and works flawlessly. It supports broadcast messaging (with channel API does not out of the box) as well as per-user messaging. Also extremely affordable, 3 million messages for $3.29.

-Martin

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[Srirangan]

Hi Martin, 

Thanks for sharing Beacon push. There are a couple of other such services as well. I evaluated them before opting for Channel API for Review19.

Reason being, the list of people to broadcast to is dynamic. For my app, there aren't fixed "rooms" or "groups" but the broadcast recipients changes frequently. 

Channel API doesn't impose any rules, and forces you to persist client state on the server. This initially "feels" wrong but can be a blessing in disguise as you optimize the logic to decide the broadcast recipients.

I'm not saying Beacon Push and similar services are "bad". They just didn't work as well as Channel API for my use case.

- Sri

--
Srirangan  |  About  Blog  GitHub  LinkedIn  Twitter

[Richard Arrano]

Thanks Martin, that looks like a great alternative. Do you know
anything about Amazon's SNS? Is it applicable as a Channel replacement
or am I misunderstanding it? Either way, looks like a good way to
replace the now extremely expensive Channel API. Google appears to be
pricing themselves out of the cloud computing business. And I agree
with the views of a poster in another thread who mentioned that
working with App Engine and their changing models is like trying to
hit a moving target. Developers can't and won't spend all their time
reworking their applications to avoid incurring huge charges when
Google changes pricing around.

Thanks,
Richard

[Srirangan]

>>  I did a double take when I realized the new price was per hundred

>> rather than per thousand,particularly when 

>> channels expire after two hours and need to be re-created.

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't this charge apply only after you exceed your free quota or 8000 odd created channels per day?

[Raymond C.]

Hi Peter,

Could you share about the Database/Datastore experiences as well? What are the options on RackSpace Cloud and are they good/stable (went through the site but didnt see much info)?  I am highly interested in node.js, its just the database options concern me.

Thanks in advance.

[Raymond C.]

I have been using PubNub.  I skipped GAE Channels after knowing all the limitation, esp. its just for the browser.  PubNub has everything I need, fast and being able to message to multiple users at once.

[Raymond C.]

I dont know about Beacon Push, but with PubNub, everything could be dynamic, all "channels" are just a string which you can pre-calculate or dynamically allocate as you wish. 

[Martin Ceperley]

Richard, I haven't used Amazon SNS but from what I understand it not quite the same. Beacon Push is specifically for browser based real-time apps, using HTML5 WebSockets (and falling back on flash I believe) to push real-time JSON messages to connected users browsers. Amazon SNS seems to be more of a general backend service for powering cross platform notifications, not specifically for a browser as the client.

Like PubNub, channels in beacon push are just specified by a string and can be generated on the fly.

[joakime]

Using the Java SDK.

Our "Frontend Instance Hours" is where the lions share of change is coming from.

Of the rest of the resources, only "Datastore Storage" will see a change (increase of 64% in cost)

[Prashant]

I am a student. I love GAE because it provides enough free quota to try out new ideas and run your app for free until you start making significant amount of profit.

I have an XMPP based chat app. I need atleast 100,000 XMPP stanzas/day (just to run my app without making any significant profit) which according to new pricing scheme will cost me $3 per month but the minimum monthly is $9. Now I am left with no other option but to shut my app down.

[Richard Arrano]

As far as I can tell on the new billing page, it says 100 under "Free
Quota" for "Channels Created" and then a rate of $0.01 for every 100
more channels created. I could be misinterpreting it, but it seems
clear cut.

PubNub also looks like a great alternative to Channels, I'll have to
look at the two and weigh them. On a related note, if my application
is written for webapp and Django, does anyone know if it would be a
relatively simple task to set up Django/webapp on EC2 and transition
my code? Obviously I'd have to change the database to use SimpleDB,
but again, how arduous would this task be?

-Richard

[Robert Kluin]

I've not had time to play with Python 2.7 to see how much threads help yet, but the scheduler needs work too.  I frequently see under 1 QPS / instance on low (sub 150ms) latency apps.  I may be way of the mark, but it seems like just getting that fixed would be a significant reduction in cost for us, and a better utilization of resources for Google. 

[johnP]

But Robert - you did not address the Root Question: why *should*
Google dial back the revenue knob?

On Aug 31, 10:07 pm, Robert Kluin <robert.kl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've not had time to play with Python 2.7 to see how much threads help yet, but the scheduler needs work too.  I frequently see under 1 QPS / instance on low (sub 150ms) latency apps.  I may be way of the mark, but it seems like just getting that fixed would be a significant reduction in cost for us, and a better utilization of resources for Google.
>
> On Aug 31, 2011, at 20:44, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Jason,
>
> > I'm thinking a lot of the biggest apparent price increases come from the fact that Python 2.5 instances are single threaded, whereas Python 2.7 with multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to work with you to make this happen.
>
> > The billing email queues should be working now, so I want to encourage you especially to open a ticket via that email alias.
>
> > --
> > Ikai Lan
> > Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine
> > plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai
>

> > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

[Srirangan]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:49 AM, johnP <jo...@thinkwave.com> wrote:

But Robert - you did not address the Root Question: why *should*
Google dial back the revenue knob?

The mode of operation seems to be:

1. Attract users with free / very low cost, cloud infrastructure

2. Force them to use Google specific APIs aka lock them in

3. Drastically increase prices giving users only a couple of weeks notice

4. Since they're locked in, and can't migrate their app in a couple of weeks, fleece them!

I do hope somebody from Google tells me that I am wrong! :-)

[Kaan Soral]

+1 robertk

I still have faith in Appengine, I think they should roll out
concurrency before, and make changes after that.

My daily cost increased from ~$22 to ~$55
And it is mostly cpu-hours/instance hours, I think ~0.1$ per hour is a
lot too at this stage, since python is not concurrent currently, and
rolling out the new price changes just makes things much much worse

I believe after python becomes concurrent, the costs will reduce
instead of increasing

What do Java people think about this?

On Sep 1, 8:07 am, Robert Kluin <robert.kl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've not had time to play with Python 2.7 to see how much threads help yet, but the scheduler needs work too.  I frequently see under 1 QPS / instance on low (sub 150ms) latency apps.  I may be way of the mark, but it seems like just getting that fixed would be a significant reduction in cost for us, and a better utilization of resources for Google.
>
> On Aug 31, 2011, at 20:44, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Jason,
>
> > I'm thinking a lot of the biggest apparent price increases come from the fact that Python 2.5 instances are single threaded, whereas Python 2.7 with multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to work with you to make this happen.
>
> > The billing email queues should be working now, so I want to encourage you especially to open a ticket via that email alias.
>
> > --
> > Ikai Lan
> > Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine
> > plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai
>

> > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

[de Witte]

Hi Ikai

I seriously hope that you did some kind of research before throwing out the new pricing model. You should be able to get these charts from the datastore by analyzing your -current- customers.

Regardless, the pricing is still extreme for thread enabled Java apps, especially if you do a lot of writes. I have an increase of 0.01 to 1.70$, this is a simple form app to register customers for downloading a package. The same can be done on any php server for 5$ a month. These kind of prices are not a big concern but if our big app (under development) will cost us 3000$ a month instead of 300$ then it is logical to move.

BTW Your email API is costing us 2000$ a month to send newsletters,... I seriously hope it is a mistake to set it to $0.01 / 100. Use a technical solution to restrict spammers, not pricing!

-Wendel

[Stefan Podkowinski]

Check out http://socket.io . A single ec2 instance should be able to serve thousands of concurrent channels easily. Especially with a asynchronous web server such as node.js (I'm using Tornado as it allowed me to port my python code easily). If you need message propagation among instances, you could use a message broker such as rabbitmq. Its probably a bit more work to setup your own solution based on that instead of using an external API but can hardly be beat when it comes to pricing. 

[Guillaume Laforge]

I've just wrote a blog post on the topic of pricing, and how it
affects one of my apps:
http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/google-app-engine-s-new-pricing-model

I had known about the new pricing model, but I was thinking my apps (a
blog and an online scripting console) with their low trafics wouldn't
really be hitting the new limits. I don't feel like paying 30-60 bucks
per month for each, that means that'd force me to move to the paid
model with $9/month (x2). That still sounds a bit expensive.

Really disappointed.

Guillaume

[Raymond C.]

Check the other posts in the thread.  Peoples using Java are seeing the similar dramatic increases as well.

And for those using Python, the preview price is having the instance charge reduced by 50% already.  

[Greg]

I'm waiting to see how multi-threading affects things. Appengine has
been a great platform so far, and I'd be very surprised if Google lets
it end up become more expensive than AWS or Azure.

Remember that with AWS (or any other VPS) you really need several
instances (in different regions) to replicate Appengine and Azure's
redundancy, and you need to manage both the servers and the systems
linking them. If you don't care about enterprise-scale scalability or
redundancy, you will certainly find cheaper options - Appengine is not
the appropriate platform for your site.

I also think it's a bit rich to talk about "bait and switch" and
"constantly changing billing". Appengine has been billed as a
technology preview all along, and now it's come into full production
they're setting realistic charges. You would have to be very naive to
assume you would get a free ride forever.

[Millisecond]

We're using Java and expect a 7x increase. With threading, and some
optimizations we should bring that down to 3 or 4x - I guess we're a
bit lucky, way less than a lot of people.

But, when you're over $1k/mo already and a small business, it's really
hard to take.

And more than the cost, the way this whole thing has been handled is
very odd. Will explore the options to go to another cloud provider,
but what a pain in the arse to move a TB of data and a handful of apps
with a collective ~50k LoC and 30 million reqs/day. Hopefully we can
find a reasonable path forward.

[Pieter Coucke]

I know that 20 cents a day is peanuts, but an increase from $ 0.2 to $ 8 a day for my app is just too high.

My app consists of bursts of messages in the queue that I want to be processed as fast as possible.  I could just set the rate to 100/s and never look back at it.  Now I need to disable my queue concurrency to avoid many instances running.

Like others in this thread, I thought the new billing wouldn't be as bad as expected.  I'm now trying java multi-threading again (hoping this issue is magically fixed: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=4834) and see if that helps (I still see 5 instances running now).

I use Java and moved from EC2 to App Engine so I wouldn't have to worry about peaks and adding more servers (that was before Elastic Load Balancing and Autoscaling was introduced).  Also, I didn't want to bother with OS updates but want to focus on what I'm good at (development).  I'm willing to pay more for that ease of mind.  For me the strong point of App Engine is the ease of deploying/upgrading my apps.  EC2 provides better flexibility for controlling scaling, cdn, messaging and even a scalable simpledb, but at a much higher operational cost for me.  It's easier as a developer when the App Engine team has already decided for me on which platform, database, memcache, queue, ... to use.  The learning curve was sometimes steep (transactions for entities with different parents) but I'll try to remember this as a good way of learning to create scalable sites.

The strong point of app engine (I didn't have to care about the number of servers which makes it a real cloud solution) has gone with the new pricing.  EC2 micro instances are just $ 0.02 and give me 613 MB.  I already refactored my site for App Engine so each server can die at any moment, so why wouldn't I go to EC2 (simpledb, elasticache) now?

One of my clients asked me to create a (big) site on App Engine based on my advocacy, I will probably need to rethink that decision.

Sorry for the hard work of the App Engine team, but I'm really disappointed here.

(and apologies for the not so short answer)

[nischalshetty]

$0.01/ 100 is the same as amazons simple email.. 

[PanosJee]

We at BugSense see a x4 increase. There is space for optimization though and we hope that after the introduction of 2.7 and some refinements to keep it at x4. But we want to release a new API and we are already planning it to implement outside GAE and just use Datastore for period flashing.

We love the 0 admin cost but the future is unsure and we have seconds thoughts about porting everything off.

[Tom Newton]

I think this might be caused by your db indexes. Do you index a lot of attributes for various entities in your application?

[Bay]

I think you might have misunderstood the 9$/month. As I understand it, it basically means that if you want more than the free quotas you have to pay _at least_ 9$/month. But it sounds as if your usage charges exceeds this... therefore you _will_ be paying the 30-60 bucks per month...

I have no idea why Google decided to make the pricing so extremely high... I personally will have to reevaluate the whole thing...

[Bay]

I spend _a lot_ of time optimizing my app for very, very low cpu usage. 

Now this effort matters very little, as the vast amount of usage cost now come from the fact that the instances are running - and not how heavy their use of the CPU is...

I have a very hard time understanding the logic behind all the articles about optimisation that you've posted over the past 3 years...

[Raymond C.]

Yes we are waiting to see how multi-threading affect things, but we will be paying for the new charge THIS MONTH.

There are many free tool to monitor and scale your AWS automatically, which you can has complete control if you wish to tune them.  Linking them is a trivial setup, at least much easier than learning to work with the bigtable datastore on GAE.  If you have problem setting up AWS to scale, I dont think you are smart enough to use GAE well.

Not to mention that there are PAAS like Heroku which works like GAE without the ridiculous pricing and concurrency limitation.

Why lock yourself into GAE if you are targeting enterprise-scaling?  You still have faith in Google after this?  Every enterprise start as a small startup, and I think thats why Google started GAE.  But now they are now killing startup, losing the initial vision.

Ya your right, we are all naive and didn't get the meaning of "preview" as "we are going to charge you high once you have locked yourself in by becoming our tester".  Who would have used GAE if they knew this?

[GAEfan]

@bay... I don't think your efforts to optimize for CPU time are
wasted. As I understand it, the faster you can turn around a request,
the sooner a new request (within the same instance) can be served.
So, that should keep the number of open instances, and thus your
costs, down. Optimizing is very important here.

[GAEfan]

I am stunned by some of the service numbers reported here. 30 million
requests per day? Hundreds of CPU-hours per day? Terabytes of data
served per day? What kind of apps are these, and what is a reasonable
price to pay for that volume of service?

If you are serving millions of requests per day, you need to be
serving most of those through memcache.

Please help me understand... what type of app gets millions of
requests, hundreds of CPU-hours, terabytes of data per day? Is it
some free game or similar?

[Santiago Lema]

If anything this clearly shows one thing: most of us came here to
avoid doing system admin but now we're just at the mercy of random
policy changes and have to keep optimizing in a different way each way
pricing rules changes (or pay heavily).

I disabled all costly services (which thankfully weren't central to my
business) and I will definitely think twice about trusting Google
blindly. I can now hear my past self telling my previous employer's
customers that Google is trustable and that they should be worried
about using AppEngine, that they were in good hands.

I am glad I am not responsible for those customers anymore (and glad
their project failed for other reasons before having to face this
which would have killed it due to costs). I just don't want to be the
guy who told them to use this service but I am, and I deeply regret it.

[Rachel Gollub]

Same for me -- my main app (which is still in the testing and demoing phase) is going from $.31/day (which was already too high for the very occasional usage) to ~$2.50/day, and that's before it even has any users -- the unpredictability of the costs on launch is a big problem.  It's in Java, and all the costs are frontend instance costs.  I'm in the process of setting up my first AWS account.  I've been recommending GAE to everyone and using it for my apps for the last couple of years, but I'm going to have to do some serious cost comparison before investing any more time or money in it.

I like GAE a lot, otherwise -- please, Google guys, reconsider and make this more affordable?

-- Rachel

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[David]

I was forced to already start migrating to AWS/EC2 because there are
frequent errors almost daily because the datastore times out. Having
no control over it and Google not doing anything to help made me
decide to start the switch. But my pricing looks like it will
increase about 200-250%. Now I'm really glad I started the switch
now. BTW, I'm using java appengine and yes I have multithreading
enabled.

EC2 is really nice, but you need to be a bit more technical to get it
going. AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it pretty easy though to just
deploy your war file and will be the easier transition for most GAE
java users.

[Ryan W]

Already left for new apps being developed. Moving to Sinatra/Rails on
Linode instances that a friend has. The existing apps I have on GAE
will migrate along that path over time or be shut down.

My total cost is going from $2/month to over $150/month and this is
all stuff I do on my own time out of my own pocket. Most of the
increase is the platform fee. Explain that one to my wife ;-)

[Ugorji]

I have read this thread, and just wanted to add something.

We spent the better part of 2 months complaining in-house (ie within these google groups) about the pricing changes. What was the effect of our concerns? Nothing. There was only a nominal change to the pricing (making $9 a minimum spend instead of a levy). To make matters worse, this was rolled out without any thought about how it would impact us, the initial set of customers that started with GAE. We got an idea of the impact of the pricing changes with 2 weeks notice before they take effect, giving us no time to respond. 

I think it's time we moved our concerns out of Google Groups and into more public places (blogs, twitter, facebook, google plus, etc). Maybe a more public display of the way Google treats its developers would cause them to react differently.

I started a thread here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/-9GOvh6dkvc/discussion

From my part, I have started the following:

• Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GoogleAppEngineNewPricingSucks/226690334046342
  
• Twitter Hashtag: #GoogleAppEngineNewPricingSucks http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23GoogleAppEngineNewPricingSucks

• Blog Post: http://blog.ugorji.net/2011/09/google-app-engine-new-pricing-sucks.html
• Google Plus Post: https://plus.google.com/115545205253432230935/posts/7oJGwFEgDgC

Please join and let's let our voices be heard. Let's all write our own blog posts about our concerns and impressions, and post links on twitter and facebook. Let's reshare our thoughts on Google Plus. That's the least we can do since Google has decided that they can pick and choose when to call on their "Do No Evil" slogan.

[thstart]

>Python 2.7 with multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to work with you to make this happen. 

I would like to modify my code right now. Do I need to tell you I am not happy in order to get access for more information?

--Constantine

[Will]

My bill would go from ~120$ per month to ~310$ per month. I'm using
Python, M/S datastore.

With this price, I won't get 99% guaranteed up time, because of M/S.
Oh, there are periodical M/S maintenance times, and I will be paying
for them.

As soon as I get time, I'll evaluate other options.

It's not only money, its faith, too.

Will

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Raymond C. <wind...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not asking who is not happy with the new pricing (virtually most of GAE
> users).
> I am just asking who is FORCED to leave GAE because you cannot afford to
> keep running on GAE under the new pricing model.  Please (if possible) state
> the monthly price change as well.
> And what options you are considering?
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Google App Engine" group.

> To view this discussion on the web visit

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/MDdHgnCrDecJ.

[Henrik Schack]

I'm also forced to leave with at least one of my apps :-(
So sad, I think the AppEngine setup is really cool.

/Henrik Schack

[Wesley C (Google)]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Srirangan <srir...@gmail.com> wrote:

The mode of operation seems to be:

1. Attract users with free / very low cost, cloud infrastructure

2. Force them to use Google specific APIs aka lock them in

3. Drastically increase prices giving users only a couple of weeks notice

4. Since they're locked in, and can't migrate their app in a couple of weeks, fleece them!

I do hope somebody from Google tells me that I am wrong! :-)

we understand what users are feeling, but i think you're mistaken on some of your points:

1. most Google products are free/low cost. App Engine was/is no exception. it was/is also in it's beta or preview period... a time for users to "try before you buy." however, unlike a standard API, this is a distributed application execution platform, which is not exactly a low-cost service. 

many users are comparing App Engine to EC2, but that is not an accurate comparison... yes, both are fruits, but this is really apples vs. oranges. with EC2, *you* have to not only worry about your app, but also *everything else*, like elasticity/scale, operating system, database server, web server, load balancer, licenses, patches/upgrades, etc. i would argue that scalability is the most difficult and most expensive thing to build on your own.

your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creators-talk-google-app-engine.aspx -- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding-bells-in-cloud.html ... *these* are the reasons for using App Engine. it was not meant as free/cheap generic app-hosting but to provide a premium service that's difficult to get elsewhere in the market. if you're just after the former, there are plenty of options for you.

2. this is directly related to #1. the company has spent many years and $$$ to build infrastructure that is "Google-scale," whatever you think that means, and you should have an idea. we've built a system that lets you leverage all the research and horsepower, but because it's all hand-built, you need to use our APIs to take advantage of it! after all, you can't get something for nothing, or can you? perhaps you *can*, if you're developing a Django app using Python.

the Django web framework traditionally relies on a SQL/relational DB, but the django-nonrel project -- http://allbuttonspressed.com -- enables Django apps to run on NoSQL/non-relational databases, including MongoDB and App Engine. (ports to Cassandra, Redis, SimpleDB, etc., are also underway.) what this means is that you can write a traditional Django app but can choose *where* you want to run it, whether it be on App Engine, or via traditional hosting (SQL or non). "lock-in" doesn't exist if you can move your app (and data) to/from App Engine any time you wish with just a change of your settings.py file! i've even written an article to help you port your app from webapp to Django if you wish -- http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django-nonrel.html

that's on the client side as both the App Engine SDK as well as Django are both open sourced. if you wish to run you own App Engine-like *backend* compatible with the App Engine SDK & API, you can take a look at the TyphoonAE -- http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae -- and AppScale -- http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu -- projects. Google welcomes/supports such server-side projects -- http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/sponsors.html -- even if we can't release our proprietary backend. in fact, one of the AppScale team members has written about the project -- http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/10/research-project-appscale-at-university.html -- and has interned here at Google!

3. the price changes are a reflection of certain key facts:

a. Google as a company backing the entire platform as a product... instead of being cancelled, we're coming out of preview mode and become an official product! Google is not a non-profit company and cannot continue to operate services at a loss. our products, and my paycheck's gotta come from *some*where! coming out of preview means Google is committed to App Engine, and in turn, we're committed to our users.

b. this service costs the company significant resources... premium services like App Engine and YouTube require a lot of hardware and networking bandwidth. We serve more than 1.5 *billion* pages views a day across all applications!

c. we're adding an SLA and paid support -- http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html plus a business-oriented ToS -- http://code.google.com/appengine/updated_terms.html -- with updates like alternative billing options. These help prove to enterprise that we mean business and provide a strongly-desired comfort level from larger customers.

d. most importantly, these changes were announced publicly during the second week of May during Google I/O -- see http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-engine.html ... slightly more than a few weeks notice.

4. this is certainly not the intention, as stated above. We written up a FAQ -- http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/postpreviewpricing.html -- as well as provided guidance on adjustments that you can make to ease the transition to the new pricing model -- http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/managing-resources.html

we will continue to work with users over the coming months to help them with any questions or concerns they may have. please reach out to appengine_up...@google.com to send in your feedback and concerns.

hope this helps clear up some details,

-- wesley
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Core Python Programming", Prentice Hall, (c)2007,2001
"Python Fundamentals", Prentice Hall, (c)2009
   http://corepython.com

wesley.chun : wesc+api at google.com : @wescpy
developer relations :: google cloud products

[Angke Chen]

If all you said is true, then why the billing in the preview was so
cheap for 3 years?

BAIT AND SWITCH I call.

Angke

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Google App Engine" group.

[Cameron Corda]

Wesley,

The contact email shows up as "appengine_up...[at]google.com" in the web interface of groups.  Can you please spell out what it is?  This might make sense to put into the FAQ that you linked as well.

[Wesley C (Google)]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Wesley C (Google) <wesc...@google.com> wrote:

1. most Google products are free/low cost. App Engine was/is no exception. it was/is also in it's beta or preview period... a time for users to "try before you buy." however, unlike a standard API, this is a distributed application execution platform, which is not exactly a low-cost service. 

many users are comparing App Engine to EC2, but that is not an accurate comparison... yes, both are fruits, but this is really apples vs. oranges. with EC2, *you* have to not only worry about your app, but also *everything else*, like elasticity/scale, operating system, database server, web server, load balancer, licenses, patches/upgrades, etc. i would argue that scalability is the most difficult and most expensive thing to build on your own.

here's a perhaps less-based comparison arguing a similar point:

http://groups.google.com/group/objectify-appengine/msg/807b35bfe098ce2c

[Wesley C (Google)]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Angke Chen <ang...@gmail.com> wrote:

If all you said is true, then why the billing in the preview was so
cheap for 3 years?

BAIT AND SWITCH I call.

 

it usually takes awhile for a product to bake before realizing that it is indeed viable to the market. we couldn't make it *completely* free, so a pay-as-you-go method worked well for Google and App Engine users alike. we also wanted to continue to attract users to platform. as i already mentioned in my previous message: "it was/is also in it's beta or preview period... a time for users to "try before you buy."

3 years isn't unreasonable for a preview period, and since we launched, we've kept on making improvements and adding new features to the platform -- new releases about every 6-10 weeks! yes, there have been a few small bumps along the way, but this is the way of the cloud. we're continuing to make the platform better for users, and hopefully some of you will see that it's still a worthwhile endeavor!

best regards,

[Will]

I understand what GAE team may be feeling after reading some very
harsh comments. My comments are:

1. I don't know how many in this discussion group believe Google is a
non-profit organization. My guess is none. I want to pay for GAE, and
I've been paying for more than a year, the recent monthly bills are
about 120$. Not particularly cheap, but I am happy because I believe
it is a very reasonable price.

2. If GAE is a premium service intending for serious business uses,
then say so at the very beginning. GAE was presented as a very cheap
(yet technically advanced with many advantages) clouding platform at
the beginning. If Google realizes it is a mistake, it should do
something more reasonable than this, especially to existing paying
customers. Maybe Amazon is as expensive as the new pricing model, but
I won't complain, because they state their prices very clearly
upfront, without 3 years of 'previewing'.

Will

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Wesley C (Google) <wesc...@google.com> wrote:

[Brandon Kolybaba]

We've built a number of apps on GAE over the past 3 years, some for our own use but many more for clients. Our costs are going up across the board by between 300% to over 1000%. Our clients are going to be furious and some will likely move off GAE, sadly I think for many it's really going to erode their confidence in Google moving forward. To be fair, I have thought for some time that GAE pricing was in need of an adjustment but the main problem with this type of a drastic change is the message it sends out to the IT decision makers in enterprise and the mid market organizations. They were already nervous because their IBM and Microsoft venders would create fear and doubt by suggesting things like prices would increase. I never in a million years world have expected such a drastic increase and in the past have even told our clients when asked about this very thing not to worry, I would say: "Google would never do that" but they did and it makes me look very foolish. 

To Wesley C (Google) and all the other folks who are trying to tell us this was announced in May, it's not exactly true now is it? Yes we were told that there would be changes (and at the time I thought that was a good thing as it was needed) but not enough detail was provided to us (until very recently) that gave us any indication of the magnitude of this change thus creating a very short window to inform our clients and make any adjustments necessary.

Brandon

[Raymond C.]

I think Google's stance has been quite clear after all the posts from Google's employees: GAE is now targeting enterprise only, i.e. companies that have plenty of money to spend on hosting web apps without the need to make money through itself, because their main revenue stream is from else where.  (tell me how royal-wedding-bells-in-cloud can make a turnover from its insane cost)

If you are a startup or companies that are planning to make a business by hosting an your applications on GAE, you are doing it WRONG. 

But then I wonder, which company is so stupid that having so much money to spend on hosting web apps on GAE, but dont bother to spend a tiny portion of it to hire a system admin to host applications on AWS given that it is:

- not locked in

- you are having all the controls

- you can use whatever you want

- you can do whatever you like (socket on GAE? long polling? event based server? push notification to iOS?)

- you know the price will only go down by time

- its a much larger community

[Will]

3 years 'preview' is rare and unreasonable in my opinion. If you are
not certain about the usage patterns and price model etc, you can do a
closed beta with selected customers. 3 years of experiment with this
public massive scale on real commercial products and serious paying
customers, I've never heard of, let alone a price increase with this
magnitude in the end.

Best,

Will

[scott]

This is a real bummer. I hear what you are saying and I see where Google is trying to take this, but I wonder how much adoption is going to suffer now that they have to compete with other similar service offerings at a similar price point. Even with all the good that comes with appengine, will new developers be willing to take on all of the GAE proprietary technologies and idiosyncrasies. Does Google have enough penetration in the app hosting market that they think this isn't an issue? 

After reading all of these comments, it feels like Google lost a little bit of cool today. It probably didn't help that developers were only given a couple of weeks to fully understand the impact and to react. There's a lot of panic on this forum.