App Engine: Multi-tenancy, High Performance Image Serving, Increased Quotas

[mshafrir]

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/08/multi-tenancy-support-high-performance_17.html

[davidu]

The appengine photo URL service is just the first step in what will eventually be a full-blown CDN service for Appengine, and I'm sure ultimately, any Google AdWords customer.

I'm sure all the CDNs are really excited about this prospect... :-(

[pibefision → davidu]

Can you use only this part of the appengine's offer? or it's again the ToS?

I see tons of scriptkidies inspecting this to cheaply scale their sites.

[deno → pibefision]

You need to enable billing for this particular one (though you still have it for free). But other than that you can use it to augment your current services without using AppEngine completely. The only requirement is that you don't use several free applications per website to get more free quota.

[cdr → pibefision]

I've already seen quite a few instances of people using GAE as a free CDN; what Google thinks about that I don't know.

[mkr-hn → cdr]

They don't put ads up on the text pages, so I doubt it matters to them. It's not like a free webhost where they're depending on you showing their ads to cover costs.

[kljensen]

Appengine keeps getting better and better.

[jasonkester → kljensen]

Indeed. Unfortunately, it started off at "Terrible".

I think it's finally moved past "Embarrassing", but it's still a long way from "Ready to use."

Give them another couple years, and maybe they'll make it all the way to "Good". Unfortunately, lots of us got burned by it in the early days and we probably won't be coming back.

[kljensen → jasonkester]

Really? I started using it almost on day one and feel like I had an unqualified positive experience. In particular, this was the first platform I used that freed me from the burdens is sys admin. (Obviously that is not unique to gae. Also, there are numerous other qualities I enjoy.)

What do you find lacking?

[nir → jasonkester]

It depends what you use it for. For relatively small apps that don't need much system level tuning I find it pretty awesome. Scaling wise it's fantastic - I have an app serving >100k hits/day (admittedly doing very little for each hit) with no problem.

[vyrotek]

This allows you to easily serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy of the app.

I'm a bit confused by what this means exactly. Is it still 1 code base that you upload and manage or are you now just given the ability to upload different versions of code for each tenant?

he API works will all of the relevant App Engine APIs (Datastore, Memcache, and Task Queues).

Now thats cool. Each tenant basically gets their own set of data, cache and queues?

I can only hope that Windows Azure will step up and provide some similar functionality.

[detst → vyrotek]

One code base. You set a namespace and all datastore, memcache, and task queues operations are performed in that space.

So:

  from google.appengine.api.namespace_manager import set_namespace
  set_namespace('user1')

Now everything is done in the 'user1' namespace.

EDIT: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/multitenancy/mu... gives more details using a "namespace manager" but I think my example above answers your question so I'll leave it as-is.

[gmosx → vyrotek]

Multitenancy is a killer feature, very useful for Google Apps Marketplace offerings. App Engine is slowly transforming to a true 'general-purpose' platform.

[checker659 → gmosx]

You're right. If this feature had been available when I was working for a client few months back, it would have saved me a lot of time.

[toddh → gmosx]

I didn't read if this is reflecting in billing, that is, can I have a particular customer pay for the resources they use?

[rdzah]

I would love to have Appengine as an alternative to AWS, but what's a poor boy to do without his nodejs & cassandra?

[deno → rdzah]

You could use Rhino w/ AppEngine JVM if you like Javascript so much. Rhino actually supports newer version of Javascript (1.7 vs 1.5 for V8). Check out for example: http://www.appenginejs.org/

[nl → rdzah]

The AppEngine datastore is somewhat similar to Cassandra (ok, so really HBase, but you get the idea)

You can't run Node.js on AppEngine, but there is http://www.appenginejs.org/ (Javascript on AppEngine).

I'm not familiar enough with Node.js to say for sure, but it's possible you could write a compatible javascript API for AppEngine under Java.

[c1sc0 → rdzah]

I'd love to see how people are running map/reduce jobs on AppEngine.

[toddh → c1sc0]

There's a mapper API http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/07/introducing-mapp.... It's a layer on top of task queues. No reduce yet.

[sstrudeau]

Re: their on-the-fly thumbnail system -- I just started building something eerily similar this week. Wondering if I should hit the breaks and build on top of Google's work...