Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928685

by japhyr • 14 years ago

19 19 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I see startups talking about Heroku and AWS all the time on HN, but I feel like I never see references to GAE. Is anyone actually building their companies on top of GAE?

GameGamer43• 14 years ago

Udacity uses GAE.

johnbroccoli• 14 years ago

Here's a list: https://cloud.google.com/customers/ (It doesn't have only startups, but it does have a few in there)

salimmadjd2• 14 years ago

We built an entire semantic content discovery engine on top of it. However, had to shut it down when their price went up by 10X.

nixarn• 14 years ago

With their new Python 2.7 multithreading support the price of GAE seem to have gone down, I read about some gaming company that got their cost down to ~40% of what it was before. So with that and coding around GAE's limitations I think it's possible to use.

We're certainly looking into using it instead of AWS for our next projects (games). Rovio also uses it for their Facebook games.

japhyr3• 14 years ago

What do you like about GAE, that would make you choose it over aws or heroku?

salimmadjd2• 14 years ago

Dedicated server from various vendors are probably so much cheaper than the GAE or AWS. We should have just started with AWS and then stayed on AWS or transfer to one of these dedicated server since our traffic was pretty steady. Just a suggestions for others who are looking into this. Don't build your business around google!

TylerJewell• 14 years ago

Hello. We are the publishers of Exo IDE, at http://cloud-ide.com/ We are a cloud IDE, with a focus on enabling creation of apps that will ultimately be deployed to the cloud.

On any given week, we have up to 2000 projects that can be created. Those projects can either be bound to a production PAAS or, in some cases, "no PAAS" can be selected. For the large majority of projects, a production PAAS is selected at the time of creation.

Of the projects that select a PAAS, we see about 60% of those projects select GAE. This is a number that surprises us, as while we know that GAE is a leader in the PAAS space, not sure that it's a 60% share holder as a relative fraction on the number of PAAS projects created each week. While we haven't published any case studies, we do have a number of projects that have been published to GAE in a production sense. We've collected this data through interviews and surveys.

Some things that may explain the results: 1) We do not have complete PAAS coverage. We do not have Rackspace or dotCloud, for example, and we just added AWS Beanstalk in the past two months. So maybe there is a normalization of the data that needs to occur.

2) We provide GOOG oAuth as a logon mechanism. That binding, could imply an overall tighter integration with GAE, and for developers who are PAAS agnostic, may encourage them to select GAE over other selections.

3) We provide a Chrome Store plug-in, to make configuration even easier. We do get some people who indicate they wish to do everything within the Google realm.

4) We have spent time doing co-marketing with Google, so we may have gotten an unusual influx of people who were already looking at GAE. But our referrer metrics indicate that the large number of referrers we get are people from Facebook, Twitter, GigaOM, TechCrunch, and direct.

We will watch this thread for the full conversation as we are interested in hearing about other projects.

linssen• 14 years ago

I think Potato make a lot of use of it. They've got some tools in their GitHub https://github.com/potatolondon and some really interesting projects in their portfolio http://p.ota.to/work/ (no surprise with Google among their clients.) They do a lot of Django work.

likeapub2• 14 years ago

Me. Www.likeapub.com the world's largest online pub is run with GAE. Only paying two dollars per month for hosting.

likeapub2• 14 years ago

I compare amazon and gae and think that gae is cheaper if u r not sure if your idea will work out or not.

Nat0• 14 years ago

Getaround's system is built on App Engine.

alooPotato• 14 years ago

We, streak.com, use GAE. We think its one of the best platform decisions we've made. Zero admin time, scales without us worrying about it, etc.

We aren't really worried about the platform lockin (we think it will be hard to migrate from any provider to any other provider anyways). Cost can be an issue if you don't optimize or do things the appengine way. But at least you have the decision - you can tradeoff $ for engineering time.

rezendi• 14 years ago

Pulse uses it extensively, iirc.

markahern• 14 years ago

Tethras (http://tethras.com) is built entirely on top of App Engine for Python. We're a fully managed app translation service. We've found a lot of the baked in features like map reduce and the search api really help us with out with our translation memory and translation search implementations.

japhyr3• 14 years ago

Thank you for the replies everyone, this is really helpful.

I asked because I have a student (11th grade) who wants to be a professional programmer. He is taking the intermediate web development course, and I saw that the main project is building a blog on top of GAE. I was not sure if GAE is maintaining relevance, or if it is losing out to other platforms.

I know that at this point in his education most of what he learns by focusing on GAE will be relevant. All of the platforms deal with the same server-side and client-side issues, they just do it in their own way. I know that if he understands how apps are built on top of GAE, he will be able to make sense of whatever framework he chooses to learn next, deployed to whatever platform he chooses to build on.

This helps share some perspective with him about GAE's role in the platform space. I am happy to hear it is still quite relevant.

japhyr3• 14 years ago

I meant to clarify, he's taking the intermediate web development course through udacity.

jamesjguthrie• 14 years ago

We use GAE for jsonengine at Hey Jimmy.

ordinaryman• 14 years ago

http://creator.ifreetools.com, an online database app builder, is built from the ground up for hosting on Google App Engine.

srkiranraj• 14 years ago

if I am not wrong, Khan Academy is built upon Google App Engine.

Ask HN: Who is using Google App Engine?

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