AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway

http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=226

by vaksel • 17 years ago

17 25 17 years ago

threeriversinstitute.org

vomjom• 17 years ago

The main problem with AppEngine is vendor lock-in.

If you write your program to AppEngine, and Google decides one day to close down your site, you have no options.

wmf2• 17 years ago

No options other than the various App Engine clones that people are working on.

jonknee• 17 years ago

AppScale is probably what you're looking for.

va_coder• 17 years ago

problems are * vendor lock in, * no (easy) ad hoc queries, * no (easy) bulk load or export

If a) you know *nix and SQL and b) don't need to scale to 1000's of users a minute, I don't see the need for AppEngine.

grandalf7• 17 years ago

Not really -- someone could easily write an nginx/hypertable system to let you run your app engine app on other hardware.

That nobody has done this suggests that the community doesn't think google is going to shut down app engine. You run the same risk using any library that is currently being maintained that you would have to suffer a learning curve to improve if the maintainer quit.

fauigerzigerk3• 17 years ago

He didn't say that they might shut down AppEngine. He said they might decide to close down your site. No library stops working from one day to the next.

I wonder what the appeals process is in case of a dispute. Considering some people's experiences with Google Checkout I would at least read the terms of service very carefully.

This is not just an issue with Google. It's a general issue with that kind of all in one cloud service.

[edit] If you use google accounts for authentication the risk is even greater.

mariana2• 17 years ago

you can host webapps written in Python and use Django on there (or just almost any other Python framework). That doesn't look like vendor lock-in to me, if they decide to shutdown the service, you can move your webapp to another place, like your very own server.

paulgb• 17 years ago

FWIW, even if you use django, the database is still Google's proprietary db.

knowtheory• 17 years ago

Ha ha! Not with Ruby! :) The Ruby community is building tools that abstracts away from the idiosyncrasies of AppEngine in such a way that you hopefully will be able to run your apps wherever, with minimal effort on your part.

You won't be locked in. If you need to get out you can :)

(Specifically, people like ribrdb, who himself is a googler, has produced a Ruby api wrapper [handily called appengine-apis] for the Java API, and an adapter that interfaces with one of Ruby's ORM/DataStore libraries called DataMapper. Data access as a result is uniform from an end user perspective across environments)

grandalf7• 17 years ago

If he's frustrated with app engine, he hasn't built a complex system and had to refactor it in order to scale -- app engine puts these decisions in your lap up front, not after you get on techcrunch.

This is my favorite aspect of app engine -- you can be confident that if you follow the best practices your app will scale. Try that with a rails or django app.

Sure you can scale Rails horizontally, but what about Sphinx? What about Mysql? If you're lucky your app will scale in a way that the "simple" methods of scaling these tools happens to work. But what if it's not?

Before long you'll wish you'd just been forced to make all requests complete in under 4 seconds initially :)

These are problems that you as a coder can address directly with app engine. Without it, you have to wear all sorts of sysadmin hats and hope you're not doing something foolish.

wmf2• 17 years ago

Big design up front is bad, but big scaling up front is good?

grandalf7• 17 years ago

Not at all.

Consider Rails: Convention over configuration. The same applies to app engine, only with a slightly more restrictive set of conventions.

kragen2• 17 years ago

he hasn't built a complex system and had to refactor it in order to scale

You've heard of the C3 project?

grandalf7• 17 years ago

I've heard of it. I'm curious about your thoughts in relation to this topic.

jcapote• 17 years ago

I think if you follow best practices with any platform you'll achieve great results.

jshen2• 17 years ago

Not really. If you normalize all of your data according to typical relational best practices you will often later find that you need to denormalize it to scale.

jshen2• 17 years ago

The title is terribly misleading and the article is silly. The bulk of the article lays out a scenario in which you would and should use a relational database. i.e. he's got some data and wants to run arbitrary queries on it. Claiming that app engines isn't a good fit for startups because it's not good at this is absurd.

KentBeck• 17 years ago

Interesting comments below. Apparently my point wasn't as clear as I hoped. I'll try once more--in the runway portion of a startup, especially when bootstrapping, I am willing to completely ignore scale if I can gain an order of magnitude in cycle time for experiments.

AppEngine offes a different tradeoff--easy scaling but relatively slow experimentation. My comments about the fit of AppEngine only apply on the runway. Once you get to climb out (validated product/validated business model/rapid growth), AppEngine is a great fit.

AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway

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