Potentially blocking issues as we near production: TLS/SSL, POST/PUT chunked encoding, support options

[Jonathan Layes]

Hi folks,

Our team has been developing a product for about a year on app engine (Java) and we've been very happy with it as a development platform. However, I have now reached a point where I need to decide if we can stay on GAE as we move closer to production. At the moment, there are three issues that could block us moving to production on GAE:

1) TLS/SSL support for custom domains: This has been asked by many others and I know Google's policy is not to provide release dates. However, this really is a showstopper for us. We cannot move to production on GAE without TLS support on our domain. I applied for the TLS Trusted Tester program about two months ago but I have not heard anything in response. Is there any way to determine where a Trusted Tester application is in the queue?

2) Chunked encoding on PUT or POST body: For some reason, the development server in Java does not accept a chunked transfer encoding for PUT or POST requests (it returns 411 length required errors). Fortunately, the GAE frontend does not suffer from this limitation; the problem only occurs in development (and we have workarounds). However, given that the Python folks also report this problem in development (see http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=129), I would feel more comfortable moving to production on GAE if someone at Google could state that you intend to continue supporting chunked transfer encoding for PUT/POST requests. Our application cannot determine the length of the POST request body in advance and relies on chunked encoding. The HTTP 1.1 specification requires support of chunked encoding and so I'm not sure why the development servers fail to support a chunked transfer encoding.

3) Support options: (Not necessarily a showstopper but an important consideration) $500/month is rather pricey for a one-model-fits-all solution, especially when the response times are 24 hours and limited to weekdays. Compare that to even the Bronze $49/month for Amazon AWS (12 hour turnaround any day of the week) and, at least on paper, AWS appears to have both better and more affordable support options. Are there plans to provide other support plans in the future?

Thanks, Jonathan

[Brandon Wirtz]

If you would like you can send me $250 a month and I’ll take your call 24/7.  I’ll even pretend I care about your downtime, and that “we” are working to resolve the issue.

 

This is 5x the price of Amazon, and ½ the price of google, but I’ll be more responsive than Google, and less of a jerk than Amazon.  In either case the fixes for your issues will be resolved in the same time frame as everyone else because for the most part no one knows which physical machines your stuff is running on or how to move it, if they are in fact acting weird.

 

Issue 2. Run on production in a test instance…

Issue 3. Hybrid with Amazon to do reverse proxy, That way I can sell you another $250 a month support contract for them as well J

 

All kidding aside, I don’t think support will increase your uptime. It might help with your TLS/SSL issues. I often think the Dev Server has bugs intentionally. I think complaining about them encourages them to leave them in so they know how many people are running it.

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[Cayden Meyer]

Hi Jonathan,

Glad to hear that you have enjoyed using App Engine for development of your application.

Issues 1: 

I very much understand how important SSL is for App Engine users and we have been trying to get as many users as we can into the Trusted Tester Program. 

We have had a huge number of applicants and we have been slowly ramping up the number of users we add to the program. The Trusted Tester Program is aimed at gaining feedback from users and identifying and fixing issues before we roll the service out to a larger audience. By adding all the users that applied to the program we would have greater difficulty in achieving all of these goals.  

This being said we should be adding a small number of new testers later this week and I will try and get you added to this group.

Issue 2: 

I would also recommend running a testing version on App Engine if you need chunked transfer encoding for testing. 

On your concern for removing support for chunked encoding, we have no plans to do so and I doubt we would have any plans to remove it in the future. We also have a three year deprecation policy for General Availability features (this excludes experimental and Trusted Tester obviously) so even if we did decide to remove it or any other feature you could still use it for three years. 

We are always trying to improve the developer experience, fixing bugs in dev appserver is very much included in this. 

Issues 3: 

Our premier accounts gives you more than just access to Google Engineers for support. Premier customers also receive a monthly invoice and can create an unlimited number of applications without a minimum monthly spend. 

To clarify, high priority issues have a response time target of 4 hours. Lower priority requests have a response target of 1 business day or less. For more information you can see here. 

Hope that clears up your concerns, 

Cayden Meyer

Product Manager, Google App Engine

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[Jonathan Layes]

Hi Cayden,

Thanks for the fast and thorough reply and for trying to get us on the Trusted Tester SSL program sooner rather than later. I appreciate it.

A quick followup question concerning TLS: is Google supplying the TLS certificates or will we have the option to provide our own?

Thanks, too, for the clarification on service levels for premier apps. In re-reading the Technical Support Services Guidelines, I do note the 4-hour response on P1 requests. However, if I am reading the terms correctly, even P1 requests are not guaranteed to be handled on weekends and holidays. Again, not a showstopper for us right now but 18x7x365 coverage for P1 requests would be more in line with other cloud providers at a $500/mo price point.

Thanks, Jonathan

[Jonathan Layes]

Thanks for the bit of morning humour, Brandon. A good way to start the day.

I'm not worried about the application-layer issues (that's for us to worry about). And, honestly, I'm not worried about the catastrophic failure of a datacentre or other large-scale outages. Big failures get noticed quickly. However, on a few occasions in the past two years (very rarely), there have been reports from GAE of outages that affected only a small number of running apps or only affected the deployment of new app versions.

I'd certainly pay $500/mo to know that, in the event that something goes terribly wrong with our app, I can call on someone close to the hardware (or its cloud facsimile) to look at the problem.

Jonathan

[Brandon Wirtz]

Talk to Google about if that’s what you get. At Amazon, there is no tier where large outages get resolved faster, you just get to tell your boss “I spoke to them, they are working on it”

 

If you don’t care if they spoke back, all tiers are the same ;-)

 

That’s not to say that the support plan doesn’t make sense, there are other things like stuck indexes, and Should I do X or Y, or Hey I want to switch App ID’s so I don’t have to pay you to delete 50 billion records because I serialized the data (which may be something I’m facing soon…)

 

-Brandon

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