App Engine 1.6 out with Python 2.7, Map/Reduce in the SDK

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/app-engine-160-out-of-preview-release.html

by jconley • 15 years ago

79 19 15 years ago

googleappengine.blogspot.com

alpb• 15 years ago

I guess nobody is interested in (or hates) App Engine anymore after pricing plan changes. That's what I think due to no comments in such a post.

LeafStorm2• 15 years ago

Now that we have ep.io, Gondor, and all the other PaaS things that support Python, the ability to upload an application and scale it as much as we want isn't limited to App Engine anymore. Whereas back when it came out, it was the only service of its kind for Python. (Heroku might not have even been out for Ruby, though my memory's a bit fuzzy at that point.)

And pretty much all the other vendors use plain old SQL databases and don't have everything as a platform-specific API like App Engine does. So when the prices went up, my guess is that people realized, "Hey, why should I lock myself in to this one vendor that could raise the prices again, when I can go with other vendors that would be easier to migrate between [or switch to hosting myself later]?"

angkec• 15 years ago

Are there good python PaaS that doesn't lock you in? I'm looking for one for our next project (or migrate the current project away from App Engine). I guess I just don't trust Google any more.

fooandbarify• 15 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the reminder. I've been waiting for ep.io to get back to me as I asked for an invite a while ago, but apparently Gondor is out of beta now and anyone can sign up!

I don't mind App Engine that much though, to be honest. The price changes don't really affect me and I've always been happy with their infrastructure. The only thing that bugs me about using it is vendor lock-in.

bdr• 15 years ago

I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. App Engine has been a disappointment for its entire existence, but now it seems to be one of Page's chosen hyperxylopygian arrows. I tried launching one project on the platform a couple years ago, and it didn't work out, but I'm willing to try again for my next one.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

Almost every developer I speak with has developed a passionate hatred of Google for a variety of reasons. And I don't know a single person who would trust Google enough to run their whole app infrastructure.

Google has gone to extreme lengths to make every company on the internet their enemy, and they've succeeded.

tdavis2• 15 years ago

After a year of working on a midsize AppEngine project targeted at large enterprises, I can honestly say that AppEngine's only truly redeeming quality is its Google integration. Our product is an add-on for Google Apps; AppEngine runs on the same infrastructure; big companies like that.

If this doesn't apply to you, choose an up-to-date, cheaper, more versatile, far less tedious deployment platform. I've spent the past 10 years developing, deploying, and maintaining web applications of most sizes and I've never had a harder time "scaling" usage of mere GB of stored data. Maybe if I had 100TB then AppEngine would make the "impossible possible"; for the rest of the 99.999999% of the Internet, it makes the formerly trivial insanely tedious.

va_coder• 15 years ago

I don't understand your tedious deployment comment. I just type the following and bam, my app is updated:

appcfg.py update .

I don't understand the scaling comment either. How is it not scaling for you?

adpowers• 15 years ago

I was skeptical of the new pricing plan at first, but then I realized it was introducing more accurate price signals to users. This helped a lot of people realize that their apps were doing really stupid things. I argue this here:

https://plus.google.com/116396240707733722472/posts/EHpaKDWM...

dmnd• 15 years ago

Python 2.7 may be present in the SDK (which is great!), but it's still in experimental mode:

"Unfortunately, being on the bleeding edge means that we may make backwards-incompatible changes. We will inform the community once the Python 2.7 runtime is no longer experimental."

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/python27/newin2....

tosh• 15 years ago

From my POV google app engine is still the only PaaS offering that can scale the data-tier. Scaling the application instances is a lot easier and most other PaaS providers struggle with that too.

I think if you look at the big picture GAE is as good as it gets at the moment and there is quite a gap to the second place when it comes to automatic scaling.

Am I missing something? Disclaimer: we are very happy and excited GAE customers with https://blossom.io

bad_user2• 15 years ago

I'm a GAE user for a personal app -- basically I use it for serving comments on my personal blog, similar to whatever Disqus is doing but I prefer the control. I also built on it 2 other personal apps that I later shut down.

IMHO, GAE is great for quick prototypes. Even for apps built for personal usage is great as the free quota is still reasonable, and compared to shitty PHP hosting services it's heaven-like. As far as the free quota goes it's also a lot better than Heroku.

However, I feel very restricted on GAE. My current project at work that pays my bills would never fit into it. Even if it did, because of the stuff we do asynchronously and because of how Google charges for API calls, the bills would go through the roof.

    the only PaaS offering that can scale the data-tier

Yes it is. However, you can also scale the data-tier by yourself. Yes, it takes engineering, but it really isn't that difficult if you're planning ahead a little, which you have to do with GAE anyway. I think this old article from 2009 about how Friendfeed used MySQL to do sharding is a classic by now, but in case you haven't read it: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

My biggest problem with GAE is that it is hard to migrate from when it no longer suits your needs. Not impossible, not extremely difficult, but difficult nonetheless taking away precious resources you'd rather invest in something else.

But as far as PaaS goes if you're in to that, it works great.

PanosJee• 15 years ago

Map/Reduce is still horrible. Python 2.7 is a much awaited addition

tszming• 15 years ago

They have released a full MapReduce framework for Python, but still no SSL support?

Are they serious?

App Engine 1.6 out with Python 2.7, Map/Reduce in the SDK

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