Pros & Cons of Google App Engine [closed]

Answer 1

Pro: Unlimited scalabity to your application and scales with demand.

Answer 2

When assessing pros and cons, I think it is important to clarify the market for which one is representing. Developers looking for a cost-effective solution to help them with the steep part of their planned hockey-stick growth curve will weigh heavily the cons already listed. For a small business owner, however, GAE is a God-send. These folks most often are looking to "the cloud" as a means to more effectively run their business (i.e. sell physical product and services). For the SMB, GAE the pros already listed can be much more valuable compared to the hockey-stick seeking dev, whilst the cons weight in at a fraction of the devs' measure. I don't see the GAE team doing anything related to SMB positioning, so I guess answers like this are me just pulling on Superman's cape, and spitting into the wind. Really GAE should be absolutely ruling the SMB space now. If not (I have no insights re: user base), then its is a greatly lamentable failure.

Answer 3

Pros:

• Scalable
• Easy and cheaper (in short term).
• Nice option for start-ups/individuals.
• Suitable for apps that just store and retrieve data.

Cons:

• Not suitable for CPU intensive calculations. They are slower and expensive.
• Scalability doesn't matter much cuz if an app works at Google scale then probably it makes enough money to run on its own servers.
• They have lots of limitations thrown here and there, as a result deep data analysis is difficult. Like you cannot produce a social graph using GAE.

I would say its not meant for serious businesses and expensive in long run.

Answer 4

You are force to own a cell phone line, and your country+carrier must be able to receive international SMSs.

(I hate cell phones, and my mom's or co-workers won't get the SMSs)

Answer 5

Con: Not available in some countries (Argentina).

Edit

Available worldwide, but only through Google Groups for App Engine.

Answer 6

Con: All your base are belong to us

... On a serious note:

Con: You don't control the environment your application runs in. The same cons as with outsourcing any component. Fun for toys, not for business (yet) IMHO.

Various things like API for Google proprietary backends such as their database system and other 'lockdowns' and frameworks that mean your code is tied, in some loose sense to their system can create cost issues later if you want to migrate from GAE. Of course, you could abstract these.

I like GAE, AppJet and others. They are cool. But everything has its place. If you want freedom and the ability to control your language's modules, API, syntax/stdlib versions and whatnot ... don't relinquish control to a service provider.

The lack of standards for environments and specifications for what your app can expect worries me in the cloud arena.

common sense stuff really.