Sub Thread: Google's Conflicting Objectives.

[Brandon Wirtz]

Couldn’t agree more.

 

In the past, quota limits were based on 2 conflicting objectives:

• discouraging people from building non-scalable applications by restricting APIs & time limits.
• discouraging people from using app engine at an "unfair" cost during the request pricing regime.

Except Google has straight up told me some of the issues I’m hitting are the result of a 3^rd conflict.
Not allowing you to build a Denial of service platform. (I am not allowed to work with 3^rd party API’s at rate greater than Google will allow)

 

I agree by default you shouldn’t be able to build a DoS platform, but you should be able to get the training wheels to come off, and not have them randomly comeback, or be able to get them removed when you need in a reasonable amount of time.

 

My issues are much more simple:

That support sucks.

That changes are made without documentation.

 

Seriously. Anyone want to raise their hand and tell me how great the support is? Or how it got better when it moved to Stack Overflow?  Support is primarily outsourced. You hope the community can help with your issue.  From this thread you can tell how well that works. 

The community can’t fix a down instance, or that you are locked out of pushing versions because they had a glitch during your upload and appcfg thinks you are in more than one upload. Which usually happens when something is broken, and you might need to push a new version. The community can’t fix that Memcache is slow, or that for some reason your datastore is in read only mode. Everyone on this list had experienced the joys of this kind of thing. Most people end up on this list because they experienced this kind of thing, and it was their first introduction to the group.

 

Anyone want to raise their hand and say, “Yeah I get notifications when they change how the request scheduler works, Google is so great about telling me about tweaks, that just before they do a push I update my min-max idle thread and my pending latency settings”.  I didn’t think so.  Edgecache how many support threads are there in this group because EdgeCache changed its behavior?  AppsForDomains Policy changes… “we added a new word to our list of words you can’t have in your domain, Fart is now included, So SFARTInstitute.com is down” AwesomeSauce.

 

None of those issues are Python, Go, or Java.   None of those issues are “this one feature I was using broke”. These are inherent in the way Google has chosen to do business. That they have picked a modus operandi that is not compatible with enterprise scale applications. 

 

 

[Francois Masurel]

I couldn't agree more, sadly.

François

[Kristopher Giesing]

Two thoughts:

First, GAE's technology doesn't scale down to small projects, and its support model doesn't scale up to large ones.  That spells trouble, to me.

Second, I suspect Google is running experiments on GAE.  By this I don't just mean playing around with technology; I mean the specific experimentation framework and process that they employ for internal software components.  Yahoo did the same thing when I was there.  Basically it means that rolling out a new implementation of something involves rolling it out to 100 people, then 1000, then 10,000, then everyone.  If it looks like things are going south you pull the plug.  That works for products you own and manage because there are internal feedback mechanisms.  When the products are owned and managed by 3rd parties, though, it sucks.  Don't experiment with my platform, please.

[johnP]

One consequence of dumping support onto Stack Overflow is that there no longer seems to be a group of familiar names and faces who, well, are a Community.  Now if feels like I'm in a forgotten outpost of a once-great empire, and I have no idea if I'm the one who is forgotten, or if the empire is dying and I just have not received word yet.

johnP

[Brandon Thomson]

GAE's technology doesn't scale down to small projects

I don't agree with this. I run several small projects on GAE, some for free. There are limitations, but if you work within them it is an excellent platform for small projects.

[Brandon Wirtz]

Re-Filling out paper work so we’ll see how it goes.  I will give it every effort. I am still sad that premiere doesn’t come with 24/7 or phone support.

 

 

From: google-a...@googlegroups.com [mailto:google-a...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mani Doraisamy
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2012 6:43 AM
To: google-a...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [google-appengine] Re: Sub Thread: Google's Conflicting Objectives.

 

Didnt realize that you started a separate thread out here :)

 

You mentioned in the other thread that you were planning to move to premier account. Did you move to premier account and still didnt get support?

 

[Kristopher Giesing]

Issues like this seem to plague low traffic projects much more than high traffic ones:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-appengine/icdr3dcuoew

However, it's possible this is specific to the Java implementation.