I've successfully used (and am using) App Engine for a few projects. For prototypers and small-scale users like me, it's been a God-send. I'm not a developer with 15+ years experience, I'm an aerospace/nuclear engineer who taught myself how to code webapps. Developing the application code and the front-end code was difficult enough... learning everything I needed to know to keep an app from accidentally falling down of my own stupidity on the sysadmin side would have been a bridge too far.
I'm NOT saying App Engine is right for every project, every application, etc. It is NOT right for every project/application. And some of the interesting/unique features of App Engine (like the datastore) have now been extracted so you can use them as standalone products. A couple of high-profile startups have been built on App Engine (Snapchat, for one). But to take the challenges that exist around large-scale applications on App Engine and condemning App Engine for every possible use is a little unfair.
In my experience, it's brilliant for prototyping and small applications. And if you're sensible in how you engineer it, saying under quotas isn't that difficult for a lot of small apps, too.
> In my experience, it's brilliant for prototyping and small applications.
It's one of the worst PAAS ever,there is nothing brilliant in app engine.Everything is limited, clunky,with a horrible SDK one has to download in order to use the stuff...
> learning everything I needed to know to keep an app from accidentally falling down of my own stupidity on the sysadmin side would have been a bridge too far.
I fail to see how AppEngine does replace a sysadmin more than any PAAS out there.In fact,it's the one of the most complicated plateform to deploy on.
Frankly I cant even begin to think why anyone would recommand Appengine to anybody. This is just a bad product.Just looking at its admin dashboard makes me cringe. It's expensive,limited,complicated and boy it loves vendor lockin.
>Frankly I cant even begin to think why anyone would recommand Appengine to anybody.
It's awesome for tiny things where the free quota is enough.
I have about 15 small app engine web apps, most written in python/flask, that are mostly used either only by me or maybe by some of my friends. All small websites, web apps or tools with a few hundred loc each.
The datastore APIs are nice and simple if you don't need much, it's easy to deploy, no management, easy APIs for stuff like cron jobs etc. and completely free with no way to accidentally incur costs. I haven't found anything better for that.
AWS has most free tiers only for 1 year and if you accidentally go over the monthly free tier it costs you something.
With heroku (or openshift) you need to set up and manage stuff like databases, memcache and many of the useful APIs appengine provides yourself.
While I can totally see many use cases where GAE is bad, for small free web apps its really nice and by far the best thing I'm aware of.
> In fact,it's the one of the most complicated plateform to deploy on.
Can you elaborate on that? I've been using the Python runtime for some light traffic websites for many years now (since it was beta) and deploying is as easy as anything else. It's true you can't just git push your app to production, nor can you pip install the SDK, but I automated those pieces in one afternoon.
I recently started prototyping an application on App Engine and quickly realized I'd rather be on Amazon infrastructure instead. The vendor lock in is extremely bad, but more concerning to me is how complicated their pricing is. It seems like it's nearly impossible to estimate your costs until you have real traffic, and by then you are locked in.
Take their datastore pricing for example:
Read / Write 0.06 per 100,000 operations
but what actual constitutes a read/write depends entirely on the operation
Entity Get (per entity) 1 read
New Entity Put (per entity, regardless of entity size) 2 writes + 2 writes per indexed property value + 1 write per composite index value
Existing Entity Put (per entity) 1 write + 4 writes per modified indexed property value + 2 writes per modified composite index value
Entity Delete (per entity) 2 writes + 2 writes per indexed property value + 1 write per composite index value
Query* 1 read + 1 read per entity retrieved
It seems like it can get expensive very quickly, and that's just the datastore operations, it doesn't include the datastore storage or anything else you are billed for like instance hours or traffic.
You can download the data from the data store and import it into another database. Sure you would need to write some code to interact with the new data services, but had you not deployed to app engine in the first place you would have had to write that code anyway. All the other APIs are optional and if you are worried about vendor lock in then implement them yourself (again something which you would have to do if not on app engine).
If you are on App Engine though chances are you will use the other APIs like the Taasks API. If you run your own software stack instead you can move it wherever without rewriting any code. With App Engine you either rewrite your code or use app scale.
I've successfully used (and am using) App Engine for a few projects. For prototypers and small-scale users like me, it's been a God-send. I'm not a developer with 15+ years experience, I'm an aerospace/nuclear engineer who taught myself how to code webapps. Developing the application code and the front-end code was difficult enough... learning everything I needed to know to keep an app from accidentally falling down of my own stupidity on the sysadmin side would have been a bridge too far.
I'm NOT saying App Engine is right for every project, every application, etc. It is NOT right for every project/application. And some of the interesting/unique features of App Engine (like the datastore) have now been extracted so you can use them as standalone products. A couple of high-profile startups have been built on App Engine (Snapchat, for one). But to take the challenges that exist around large-scale applications on App Engine and condemning App Engine for every possible use is a little unfair.
In my experience, it's brilliant for prototyping and small applications. And if you're sensible in how you engineer it, saying under quotas isn't that difficult for a lot of small apps, too.