Google App Engine Blog

Sadly this is a common situation. They appear to hold off making any public notice (including often on their own "service dashboards") until support forums are screaming with upset users. Google App Engine has had numerous outages like this, the only one I can find any public documentation for being a 6 hour outage in 2012: http://googleappengine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/about-todays-app-engine-… (and let's not forget the old-style Datastore corruption incident, where every App Engine user got to manually merge split-brain database tables after a messed up failover)

Hi Ryan, have you seen the recently announced support packages for the Google Cloud offerings? It's a multi-tiered approach, from Bronze (free, online) to Silver (premium, with email support) to Gold (premium, with 24x7 phone support), all the way to Platinum (premium, with a dedicated technical account team). Announcement here: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/02/google-cloud-platform-intr… Sign up here: https://cloud.google.com/support/packages Basically, it's a way of agreeing with what I think is your point. Support does matter, and Google is taking it very seriously. Would love to hear your thoughts once you've tried one of those support packages!

What's the benefit here? App Engine already has a downloadable dev environment that gives you everything you need and is instantly updating as well. You can use the App Engine Launcher [0] to test multiple sites locally and then deploy to GAE. Best of all, you can operate at local speeds using an editor you're already comfortable with and it works even if you're sitting in a lead bunker with no connectivity. What am I missing? [0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/app-engine-launcher-for-ma…

This just came out today: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/09/agile-paddling-with-app-en… "All in all, we saw over 1,000,000 page views from 93 countries around the world, and experienced incredible stability and scalability from Google App Engine even when we were spiking 350 requests per second during the finals." Dave Westwood of BuddyPoke shared a few slides on his performance: http://files.meetup.com/1135107/BuddyPoke_AppEngine_Stats.pdf It's a little hard to parse w/o more description, but basically he's done well serving what seems to be a large % of Brazil with a low error rate. IMHO, the best ways to use app engine rely on (1) memcache to iron out any timeouts or datastore issues, and (2) a relatively rich client front-end so any problems on back-end can also be handled in a user-friendly way (like Gmail).

Stay tuned to the App Engine blog for more info, we're working hard on launch: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/ -- @mdrcode, App Engine PM

I was hoping that eventually App Engine would be implemented on top of GCE, with all the services App Engine now provides available for GCE, and move to container‐based sandbox, like OpenShift/Heroku/Elastic Beanstalk, instead of application‐based sandbox. Especially now that App Engine has switched to instance‐based pricing. For example there’s this old thing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDRKNzdlazFTWldOU… (Google App Engine VM Runtime TT Sign‐up)[1] Unfortunately, since all of this effort went into securing yet another runtime (PHP), I don’t think it will happen. It would be great if at least it was possible to use Appscale over GCE or just the Datastore – which is by far the most attractive feature of App Engine, other than Task Queue – with custom deployment solution. Google Cloud Datastore could deliver just that if you don’t mind paying twice: You should be aware that Cloud Datastore has a serving component that runs on Google App Engine, so there will be instance hour costs. [1] “If you are interested in using VMs with your App Engine applications in the future, let us know by signing up here.” http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-engine-laun…

I'd rather have Google say "in order for GAE to stay alive, we've had to raise pricing on our current metrics to X", I can understand that, I can justify that, I can compare it and decide how to deal with it/optimize for it, but instead we got, "based on user popular feedback we're radically changing the way we measure usage, then charging some significant multiplier to whatever everybody is already paying so that it no longer makes sense to operate on our platform and you can't even really compare it in such a way as to make sense of the change, then we'll systematically not address anybody who asks us about this in forums or via other communications but we're going to do all this in the most frustratingly passive aggressive way possible" [1][2] Can anybody really believe that popular feedback to Google was "we're not being gouged nearly enough, Google, charge us 2000% more!" [1]http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-app-engine-new-version-a… "Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help our customers is to graduate App Engine from preview status. " "Adding business features will help App Engine meet a broader set of needs and the new, more transparent pricing model will help customers better align their App Engine investment with their business goals." [2]http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-… "App Engine graduating from…

Google's blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/

It isn't really ready for prime-time. AppEngine still has some limits that make it hard to develop. Examples: The 1MB file upload limit. It's not that I want to have users uploading 500MB tars or something, but I don't want to put a message in my app saying, "please resize you photo to be less than 1MB before uploading where we'll probably alter the photo again." They've indicated that you'll be able to purchase more storage and bandwidth which is great, but noticeably absent was the ability to send more than the 2,000 email limit (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/12/system-status-dashboard-qu… The problem might not be that I want to send more than 2,000 emails in a single day. The problem is that these quotas are rolling windows. Plus, the whole point is that AppEngine scales without me having to do anything. If it doesn't accommodate a decent sized social app, I might as well just put something on Slicehost or EC2 since at that low a usage rate, scaling isn't that hard. There's no map/reduce or cron-like jobs. The datastore in AppEngine acts as a bit of a straight-jacket to ensure you don't do operations that don't scale. However, without map/reduce and cron jobs, it can mean that you just can't do certain things. And yes, I know that you could fake it by running another server, making an HTTP request to AppEngine and cutting up a process that might take a minute into chunks that AppEngine would execute, but that's just silly. The…

The Google Cloud Datastore (formerly the "App Engine Datastore") has had cross-entity-group transactions since 2011: https://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engine-155-sdk-releas…

Google has been putting a lot of time and effort into cloud in the recent years and doesn't look to be slowing down anytime soon. As to ease your worry here a little, any launched cloud products have at a minimum a 1-year deprecation policy[0]. Anecdotal: AppEngine deprecated their Master/Slave datastore[1] in April 2012, and it was actually shutdown on July 6, 2015. So that's 3+ years to move to newer tech. [0] https://cloud.google.com/terms/ (section 7.2) [1] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/masterslave-datastore-than…

Nit: it looks like it's been 60 second limit on requests since release 1.5.5: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engine-155-sdk-release…

That was supposed to be a one-time repricing and Google put in place some policies for pre-announcing future price changes or deprecations. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/app-engine-and-googles-new…

Additionally, the 30 second limit was increased to 60 seconds in October 2011. [1] [1] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engince-155-sdk-releas…

Well, technically we are now allowed a limit of 1GB per instance, as of a couple of months ago: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/02/app-engine-175-released.ht…

Bemmu, Google recently removed the $2/month minimum charge when you have billing enabled. Have a look at http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/04/app-engine-177-released.ht… Thanks for telling us a bit about yourself, it felt very personal :)

As part of their pricing switch a few years ago, Google committed to a 3 year depcreation period for App Engine: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-… "For App Engine, leaving Preview will include providing all paid users a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, billing via invoice, a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses, and a new, easier to understand usage-based pricing structure for App Engine that is in line with the value App Engine provides. It will also reaffirm our deprecation policy whereby we will support deprecated versions of product APIs for 3 years, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to function." A quick comparison of the TOS shows that Compute Engine doesn't have the same policy, but IANAL, so I could be missing something.

The deprecation policy says they must give you a year's notice (or April 2015, whichever is longer) before deprecating any part of App Engine that isn't experimental: http://googleappengine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/app-engine-and-googles-n… Django is supported. If you want to use the Datastore, you need to use django-nonrel: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/django-nonrel Alternatively, you could use the 'real' Django against Google Cloud SQL.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, it was deprecated just about eleven months ago: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/masterslave-datastore-than… When your datastore gets deprecated, you act sooner rather than later.

"No support" > not exactly true: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/02/google-cloud-platform-intr…

The Master/Slave datastore has been deprecated for almost a year. [0] Beyond the latency issues, it simply wasn't reliable; both reads and writes were failing way too often. I'm glad GAE is focusing its resources on the HRD. [0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/masterslave-datastore-than…

As it turns out, they previously were using Clojure + Python. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/02/bugsense-hybrid-app-experi…

While Python is a sizeable part of App Engine (SDK, admin console, tooling .. some other things I can't remember right now), the majority of the code is Java and C++. It's one of the reasons Python isn't listed as one of the top needs (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/07/wanted-app-engineers.html) over C++ and Java. That being said, it's a very Python friendly team. Guido's on it (HI GUIDO).

Here's the official announcement: http://googleappengine.blogspot.in/2012/05/looking-for-search-find-it-…

Don't forget new Google Cloud API which allows you to manage Clouds of course. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/google-cloud-api-cloud-cov…

Why the indirection via reddit? http://googleappengine.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/bugsense-hybrid-app-exp…

Looks like it went into testing last October [1], otherwise people have been using their appspot subdomains. [1]http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engine-ssl-for-custom-…

I don't see a SLA for Stripe on the ToS page, why not? GAE has actually had 100% uptime for the last year. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-birthday-high-replic…

Banjo only has 500K users[1]. Urban Dictionary is bigger (30MM page views/month[2]), but Pulse is an order of magnitude bigger ("100Ms of requests per day" [3]). Pulse ships on a lot of Android devices by default now. [1] http://ban.jo/blog/banjo-hits-500k-users-in-under-six-months [2] http://success.heroku.com/urbandictionary [3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kindle-fire.h…

There absolutely has been App Engine downtime in the past year. They seem to be claiming that the datastore specifically (an App Engine service) hasn't had any downtime. It's not really a good measurement of App Engine's reliability as a whole. Example: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/07/java-app-engine-outage-jul…