Comments on: Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate

By: Thomas McKay

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:56:38 +0000

Still interested! Is a ticket still available? I’ve started using Gears now in addition to Android and Appengine.

By: Thomas McKay

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:59:14 +0000

Definitely still interested in the free passes. Without them this is not a trip that I could justify making. With them this would be a fantastic opportunity to get access to both GAE as well as Android insights.

Groveling is not out of the question. Heck, it was Tech Crunch 50 that really made me think, “I can do this!” I owe you guys!

By: Thomas McKay

Thomas McKay — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:33:49 +0000

Seems like I’ve had my attention too long on getting my Android app updated. GAE now as a ‘remote_api’ that allows manipulation of the datastore from scripts running on your local machine. This will allow a huge amount of freedom in manipulating the database (making backups, upgrades to datastructures, etc.). Good stuff!

By: Allan

Allan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:17:16 +0000

This is great. I can use this for my facebook app, as the traffic/demand gets greater, i can easily tweak it on demand.

By: Thomas McKay

Thomas McKay — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:10:59 +0000

GAE let me go from zero to live in literally a couple weeks. The learning curve is stunningly low and the cost is free. (Let’s face it, if your site is going to get more than 5 million hits per month, the free threshold, you probably could figure a way to monetize it for the couple dollars you’d need to finance it, right?)

Pros:
+ Simple to get started, with great examples, active forums, and responsive Google R&D support.

Cons:
+ Difficult to manage database itself (difficult to make backups, upload revisions enmass, etc.). This is a very serious flaw.
+ Very limited text search. This has been harped upon constantly with sayings like, “Google is a search company, why can’t I search my data?” There are some workarounds but they are just that.

I can’t say that GAE is better than other platforms, since I’ve not used them. Given GAE’s accessibility and ease-of-use getting started, though, I would recommend it highly. Some consideration to the myriad other Google resources that come along with it need be considered too: Email for your site, map support, blogger, picasa, on and on. It’s the entire package.

By: Amar

Amar — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:21:51 +0000

My university is experimenting heavily with digital classroom technologies. Many of these technologies are experimental, conceptual, and need to be heavily refined before they can be proven. I would use GAE to experiment with applications that allow professors to engage the class by asking them questions and accepting responses through email/web/sms. Essentially, replace the clicker with a device students have. Powerpoint integration on the professor side too, so they can just initiate questions from slides.

By: wayne

wayne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:12:50 +0000

I am impressed by how much a single application gets just for free. It seems like you need to have a pretty busy app for it to make sense to upgrade.

By: Gee

Gee — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:04:21 +0000

Our service has been hosted on AppEngine for quite a while and I had been dreading this day since we already have elevated quotas during the beta period. We are using it to store mobile iPhone photos and all that data really adds up in terms of storage costs and bandwidth!

Luckily they are letting us keep our free elevated quotas for another 90 days

I would love to go to Google I/O!!

By: Jesse Andrews

Jesse Andrews — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:20:14 +0000

I’m going to use app engine to allow firefox users to keep track of their favorite extensions.

The users install an extension which sends the profile information to appengine whenever an extension is isntalled or removed.

http://firenomi...rs/anotherjesse

Once enough data has been collected recommendations and other statistics can be shared with visitors.

By: Florian

Florian — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:45:58 +0000

I’ve been developing a wine-connoisseur site / network that connects people who love wine for the app engine. It’s not just a rating side but you actually characterize the wine and can also rate other people’s judgement and some really cool surprise features…

So far, I have been holding off with finalizing it, because the I/O limitation was always in the back of my head ~ thinking: I won’t be able to scale that up with the limitation…

By: silicon valley dropout

silicon valley dropout — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:45:49 +0000

too bad they forced you to used python then restrict a lot of what you can do. me i would be too afraid of google stealing my code to use their service

By: Daniel Buchner

Daniel Buchner — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:40:43 +0000

Our new site CityCrawler will be leveraging AppEngine for JS file cosilidation and just-in-time delivery (basically a really fancy and dynamic JS script manager). It will also be used to do all image manipulation with the excellent Python lib provided. Storage of our unique “push” site notifications will be handled there in a special queue system we devised. I think these things are pretty cool uses of AppEngine, let me know where to pick up my tickets! ….joking…but seriously…

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:06:39 +0000

You have to look beyond the numbers. Sure, you can come up with a cheaper solutions in terms of hardware and bandwidth, but the real value comes in freeing up limited people resources to focus on what makes your business different. A managed environment frees you from activities that add little value to your customers. Do you want to spend precious time on keeping your systems running, or focus on the business side?

By: tux

tux — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:48:25 +0000

I am going to use the paid extension to create a easier to use storage engine than BigTable and Sell it back to google…
MUahhh Ha Ha Ha……

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:26:58 +0000

And how has your experience with appengine been to this point? Pros/cons?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:26:05 +0000

Awesome! Glad to see USC grads active in the tech/web space. I hope your apps take off. Fight On!

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:58:07 +0000

I am impressed by how much a single application gets just for free. It seems like you need to have a pretty busy app for it to make sense to upgrade.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:50:11 +0000

A few days back, when Yahoo BOSS started to charge, people were angry about that. Now see how people react to similar move from Google.

By: Joe Waltman

Joe Waltman — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:41:06 +0000

I am going to use App Engine as the back-end for a social ad network. Current development plans have this ad network being ready to launch right around the time of the next TechCrunch50 event….

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:36:14 +0000

I'll use the App Engine to host a Microlending Resource System we are working on.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:30:15 +0000

Our plan is to use the GAE (or honestly Amazon EC2) for offloading more expensive operations off our cloud based education applications, such as advanced scheduling algorithms and perhaps analytic calculations that allow break out of the multi-tenant limits within the Force.com platform.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:15:19 +0000

This is a bad example because it’s only 10MBPS, but locally in downtown LA, you can pick up a quarter cabinet for about $299 a month

http://www.misd...on-hosting.html

and sit 5 of those $99 rackable systems racks in there behind Varnish or the load balancer of your choice.

Of course you want 100MBPS or Gigabit duplex, and you can always negotiate with the center about that.

I’m strongly guessing that Google won’t give you Gigabit either though, so keep that in mind. They’re going to throw you on the last tier of their bandwidth while their own services take the prime stuff.

By: Josh Fraser

Josh Fraser — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:47:10 +0000

I’m using Google App Engine to create static Url’s for twitter images. I’m not sure if I’ll need the extra bandwidth or not, but having that option is a must-have to put anything production-worthy on App Engine.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:43:17 +0000

“That just sounds completely ridiculous since TB drives cost below $100 on the open market today.”

Not only a TB drive, you could get solid state for about that price, and you can bet your @ss that Google’s SAN array is not SS.

By: Charbax

Charbax — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:22:47 +0000

$0.15/GB/month sound really expensive.

What if I want to backup 1000GB on Google’s servers on the cloud? Do I really have to pay $1800 per year?

That just sounds completely ridiculous since TB drives cost below $100 on the open market today.

Can’t Google just buy about 2 of those to provide reliability even for the backed up content that needs to rarest amount of access and Google could just hook those two off the shelves TB hard drives to their computing cloud and dynamically scale only if required which could dynamically increase the price of storage depending on the scale of accesses required to that data.

If I want to store terrabytes of my HD video files on Google’s servers, with their current pricing for storage, I can just forget it and just keep hosting my own server on whichever 2mbit/s upload ADSL connection that I can find where I live. It sucks though that Google cannot provide a service that would be just as cheap or cheaper than building my own server.

Google needs to support PHP on App Engine as soon as possible. It will be great to host all Wordpress blogs, phpbb3 forums, mediawikis, Jaikus and other web community applications on the Google App Engine.