Want to talk to the App Engine team in person?

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Everyone, I know that the pricing changes are challenging and in some ways hard to understand.  So, we thought it might help to talk to the App Engine team about it in person, ask us questions you might have, and maybe have a beer with us.  If you are interested let us know on the form so we can put you on the list:

SIGNUP: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEpzUWdiMU9ZLVlSd0NwSjlHaTFtQVE6MQ 

WHEN: September 8, 2011 6-9PM PDT WHERE: Thirsty Bear (http://g.co/maps/rmvt) 661 Howard Street San Francisco, CA 94103

Hope to see you there!

Greg D'Alesandre Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

[Arnaldo M Pereira]

This is very good, I wish there were something alike in Sao Paulo.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group.
To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

[Rohan Chandiramani]

App Engine team should do a world tour visiting at least one bar in every country :)

[GAEfan]

Hi Greg,

That's a great idea, but I will not be able to attend that night.
Will there be others like this in the future?

Thanks!

[supercobra]

Thank you for the invite but I am in Austin. :)

So here is my input:

Last year I co-wrote a book on GWT+GAE with Amy Unruh:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849690448

I wrote that book because I saw something unique and every exciting to
App Engine: Google App Engine is a **disruptive technology** as it is
the only techno that scales automatically. A disruptive product is a
dream for marketers because no competitors come close to this
easy-scaling solution. None. Zero. There are left in the dust.

So if priced correctly, there should be mass adoption to GAE.
Developers will be coming in droves signing up for this awesome
product, they won't look at any other solution because App Engine is
simple and very affordable. They'll make demos and talks of their new
little app running awesomely on App Engine and their friends
developers will try App Engine out.

However, if priced too high, App Engine will not be adopted.
Developers won't run their little app on App Engine but on a
competitors platforms and that is what they will demo to their friends
and their friends will adopt that competitors technology.

So if I was Greg D'Alesandre, I'd look at the long term goal because
the race for cloud hosting has started, competition is fierce and with
the new pricing **Google priced itself out of the market**.

I see two reasons why the new pricing is so high.

** Why is App Engine new pricing so high?
1. because App Engine running costs is high
or
2. because App Engine sees a huge opportunity in cloud hosting and
wants to make lots of $ now

** Solutions
2. If App Engine wants to make lots of revenue then Greg D'Alesandre
should look at the long term as discussed above. Doing some basic
'visioning' I see that most developers will move to cloud hosting and
that an affordable entry level pricing is key to adoption. On the long
run, Google will make more money with a smaller pricing because there
will be mass-adoption.

Maybe Google reasoning is: "well if you scale your app, you need one
or two full time sysadmins to do the load balancing and db replication
and this is very expensive, so App Engine is still cheaper than doing
it the other way". Correct but this reasoning does not lead to the
mass adoption.

**Mass adoption in cloud hosting can only happen if the entry level
price is painless because competitors have a painless entry level
price point**

1. if running costs are high, then the solution is to have more
customers so again a smaller price point is the way to be profitable
by having more customers.

I maybe missing something here because I am not an insider, however...
I guess most App Engine developers are missing something here and left
disappointed.

Greg D'Alesandre: for people who are not in SA, would you discuss your
points online?

Daniel

-- super...@gmail.com
http://supercobrablogger.blogspot.com/

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the reply (and sorry to hear you won't be able to make it on Thursday).  We are definitely thinking long term and are excited for App Engine to be around long term.  In fact, that is the reason we are going through this change now, so that people can start using App Engine without wondering when the plug will be pilled.  I'm curious to know which prices you are comparing App Engine's new prices to when you say it is priced out of the market.  All of the comparisons we've done (and indeed the ones people have shown that they've done in this Group) have shown that we are actually bringing ourselves in line with the market rather than being drastically cheaper than the market.  I completely understand that the new prices are higher than the old prices which is unpleasant (to put it mildly) when you've gotten used to those prices.  But I'd be interested in the comparisons you've done on this.

Thanks again for your thoughts!

Greg

[phraktle]

Hi,

I'll see you on Thursday!

On first glance, the new pricing definitely makes AppEngine significantly less competitive - and it's quite a disappointing jump from the prior pricing. For one app we run, the charges will go up from the current $0.30/day to $11/day - and that's with the 50% discount, so it'll actually be around $20/day. That's almost two orders of magnitude more expensive than previously!

Being priced by actual CPU usage (rather than instance hours which include idle time) was a great advantage of AppEngine. The policy for idle time is largely controlled by GAE (as, in my opinion, it should be), however this mechanism is not efficient right now. For ~300 instance hours, we have clocked only 6.5 hours of actual CPU usage. If this ratio would go from 2% to closer to 50%, I'd be happy with the new pricing. I think the current scaling mechanism is broken - we see instances with the same uptime (eg. 4 hours), but an order of magnitude different numbers of requests served (120 vs 1200). The fact that the scaling mechanism is not efficient was previously not a concern for us (it was a concern for Google).

Now the pricing model is directly comparable to AWS, and it's not even favorable anymore. The more flexible architecture of AWS provides more choices for achieving high efficiency with less instances - we have full control over usage and scaling. We have migrated some apps from GAE to AWS previously due to Datastore write latencies, and with the new pricing there's one less "pro" for GAE.

Regards,

  Viktor

[Robert Kluin]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 01:37, phraktle <phra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'll see you on Thursday!
> On first glance, the new pricing definitely makes AppEngine significantly
> less competitive - and it's quite a disappointing jump from the prior
> pricing. For one app we run, the charges will go up from the current
> $0.30/day to $11/day - and that's with the 50% discount, so it'll actually
> be around $20/day. That's almost two orders of magnitude more expensive than
> previously!
> Being priced by actual CPU usage (rather than instance hours which include
> idle time) was a great advantage of AppEngine. The policy for idle time is
> largely controlled by GAE (as, in my opinion, it should be), however this
> mechanism is not efficient right now. For ~300 instance hours, we have
> clocked only 6.5 hours of actual CPU usage. If this ratio would go from 2%
> to closer to 50%, I'd be happy with the new pricing. I think the current
> scaling mechanism is broken - we see instances with the same uptime (eg. 4
> hours), but an order of magnitude different numbers of requests served (120
> vs 1200). The fact that the scaling mechanism is not efficient was
> previously not a concern for us (it was a concern for Google).

I completely agree with this. Previously, it was of no concern to me
how the instances were allocated as long as my trafic was served.
Completely not the case now.

> Now the pricing model is directly comparable to AWS, and it's not even
> favorable anymore. The more flexible architecture of AWS provides more
> choices for achieving high efficiency with less instances - we have full
> control over usage and scaling. We have migrated some apps from GAE to AWS
> previously due to Datastore write latencies, and with the new pricing
> there's one less "pro" for GAE.
> Regards,
>   Viktor
>

> --
> 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/-/Swo6OTdoi8MJ.

[Gergely Orosz]

Couldn't agree more. When I chose GAE as my cloud platform I chose it because it was the only solution on the market that offered the CPU hours billing - you pay only for what you use. THIS was the killer feature that made it stand out and what made made me advocate GAE for years on different forums.

However, as of today if I started a new project to be hosted in the cloud this is not the case: Google is adopting the same virtual machine model than Amazon and Azure and the price is much easier to compare as the only additional thing you're providing is automatic spinning and killing of instances and a java / python environment. I think it's much harder to justify the 4x cost difference for an instance with the 1/4th of memory, basically bringing it to a 16 times more expensive pricing vs Amazon.

I'm not sure how this is priced by the market, perhaps running a web app with 50K visitors and 1M hits a day with occasional spikes isn't your target market - if this was the pricing two years ago when I built my app I would surely not have chosen GAE. However I probably don't know your target market as well as the GAE team and there probably is a mass who's happy to pay the 16x price difference more for these extra services.

[Jason Collins]

+1 on usage-based billing. It was a HUGE factor in our decision to use
App Engine; we have built all of our company's products on App Engine.

On a related note, the 15-minute cost to spin up new instances defeats
one of the greatest features of App Engine: the ability to fan-out and
process large jobs very quickly. We have architected many processes
that take advantage of this feature: various stats compilations, Map-
Reduce data migrations, large scale batch import and report
generation. It was always an amazing power of App Engine to scale-out
and chew through these jobs in very little time. Now, to scale out, we
will incur a bunch of extra billing in order to warm up the instances.
Our solution, I guess, will be to tune back our queue rates and force
the jobs to run longer. Seems like a waste of a great infrastructure.

j

[Barry Hunter]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Jason Collins wrote:
>
> On a related note, the 15-minute cost to spin up new instances defeats

> one of the greatest features of App Engine: ...

Do have a read of the "the min instace time is 24 hours?" thread. It's
a treasure trove of information. Not least you are only paying the
'15-minute cost" for the number of instances under the
'max-idle-instances' setting.

So a huge burst of instances to furfil a map-reduce style task, - you
still only paying for active instances.

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Thanks for noting that Barry, I was just going to mention the same thing!  We'll try to do a better job of codifying it in our FAQ.

Greg

[Robert Kluin]

Me too.

>
> j

[supercobra]

Hi Greg,

...

> I'm curious to know which prices
> you are comparing App Engine's new prices to when you say it is priced out
> of the market.  All of the comparisons we've done (and indeed the ones

> people have shown that they've done in this Group) have shown that we ...

We use Rackspace for other apps. We pay $600 / month for a Quad Xeon,
16GB or RAM, and Raid 5 drive array. Rackspace tech support is 24x7,
1h hardware replacement guaranty. Rackspace manages hardware, OS,
backups and we deal only with the app and the database.

A server like this can take a huge amount of load...

Add $300 / mth for a managed load balancer, add more servers has
needed and you get a farm entirely managed by Rackspace tech support.
Still not as cool as GAE auto-scalling and HR but close.

IMHO, I think that it is key that App Engine pricing accommodate for
small apps as well because this is the way to win consumers, consumers
being developers in this case. The cloud company that wins them will
win the majority of market share (e.g. mysql), but this is more about
strategy than pricing.

Daniel

-- super...@gmail.com
http://supercobrablogger.blogspot.com/

[Vivek Puri]

Can we have a similar meetup in NYC?

On Sep 2, 8:42 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone, I know that the pricing changes are challenging and in some
> ways hard to understand.  So, we thought it might help to talk to the App
> Engine team about it in person, ask us questions you might have, and maybe
> have a beer with us.  If you are interested let us know on the form so we
> can put you on the list:
>

> SIGNUP:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEpzUWdiMU9ZLVlS...

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Vivek, I'll see what I can do about having one in New York (and other cities), I'll post to the list if we can work it out.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Greg

[Tomas]

What about Auckland, New Zealand? :p

Actually, do you guys have some dev in NZ or is it just Assie?

[Gregory D'alesandre]

I would love to spend all my time flying around to hang out with App Engine developers, but alas there is work to be done here :)  We don't currently have any App Engine developers in Auckland, but we do in Sydney...

Greg

[Jonas Wills]

Any chance there is someone in Boulder in the GAE team? I've gotten a
tour of the offices there before, pretty neat place. We are about the
launch a pretty big product using GAE and it would be awesome if we
could meet with someone.

On Sep 2, 6:42 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone, I know that the pricing changes are challenging and in some
> ways hard to understand.  So, we thought it might help to talk to the App
> Engine team about it in person, ask us questions you might have, and maybe
> have a beer with us.  If you are interested let us know on the form so we
> can put you on the list:
>

> SIGNUP:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEpzUWdiMU9ZLVlS...

[phraktle]

Hi,

Thanks for the meetup yesterday! It was very nice chatting with all the smart engineers from Google - I have a lot of respect for what you guys are doing (with a some constructive criticism :).

I summarized my thoughts from the meetup here: http://phraktle.com/en/on-the-new-pricing-scheme-of-google-app-engine

Regards,

  Viktor