As a recovering hardcore Joke Engine user, I suggest not getting too tied up on TOS minutia as arguments against App Engine when there are plenty technical reasons to avoid it like the plague, e.g.:
- Behavioural changes as a result of unannounced internal release process. Go to bed, wake in morning to app serving 500s (happened twice)
- Design flaw that ran so deep they had to redesign the datastore, insisting on people start migrating before they even had migration tools ready. Prior to that, at least one outage event required running the Google equivalent of fsck and leaving "/lost+found" folders in everyone's datastore (WTF?!?!? Not even once, dude!)
- Latency that varies according to the phase of the moon, and you're billed for it anyway.
- Continually changing architectural story around apps. Last year: Memcache is cheap, free, and shared! This year: Dedicated memcache, only $66/gb/month! 2 years ago: elasticly spun up processes! Last year: dedicated hardware thread, only $100/thread/month!
- Let's not forget the wild pricing changes depending on how much the App Engine team had packed in their crackpipes the night before
- Service characteristics you won't see on any other platform (e.g. DB query latency). So regardless of abstraction layers, your app inevitably ends up designed for a single platform
It's a platform that succeeds only at exposing users with RAM-sized datasets to planetary scale problems, all the while charged handsomely for the privilege of the self-delusion that some edge was gained through all the suffering. Seriously fuck all that. I could turn this into an essay but why bother.
No kidding, the service should be renamed GA2EE. It's slow as hell, never works, and requires you to custom code for their 'enteprise' platform to solve problems no one even has.
God forbid the bill you'd get for actually scaling to a size that started to require whatever GA2EE really is.
My company hosts our app on GAE and I could not agree more with this. GAE is horrible. We are paying close to $1000/month and we could get better performance on a $5 Digital Ocean instance. $700 of that is "premier" support which is a joke. We're lucky just to get a response back. Not to mention they broke Python's debugger(PDB) a while back and it took them three month's to fix it.
- Behavioural changes as a result of unannounced internal release process. Go to bed, wake in morning to app serving 500s (happened twice)
- Design flaw that ran so deep they had to redesign the datastore, insisting on people start migrating before they even had migration tools ready. Prior to that, at least one outage event required running the Google equivalent of fsck and leaving "/lost+found" folders in everyone's datastore (WTF?!?!? Not even once, dude!)
- Latency that varies according to the phase of the moon, and you're billed for it anyway.
- Continually changing architectural story around apps. Last year: Memcache is cheap, free, and shared! This year: Dedicated memcache, only $66/gb/month! 2 years ago: elasticly spun up processes! Last year: dedicated hardware thread, only $100/thread/month!
- Let's not forget the wild pricing changes depending on how much the App Engine team had packed in their crackpipes the night before
- Service characteristics you won't see on any other platform (e.g. DB query latency). So regardless of abstraction layers, your app inevitably ends up designed for a single platform
It's a platform that succeeds only at exposing users with RAM-sized datasets to planetary scale problems, all the while charged handsomely for the privilege of the self-delusion that some edge was gained through all the suffering. Seriously fuck all that. I could turn this into an essay but why bother.