Pros & Cons of Google App Engine [closed]

Answer 1

Pros:

• built-in ui for unified logs

• built-in web interface for task queues

• built-in indexes on list of primary objects.

Cons:

• loose logs very fast

• VERY expensive

• VERY expensive

• VERY expensive

• Un-hackable. Scales because you're obligated to code in a way that scales.

• Longer development cycles. Sometimes you just want to hack something together and throw it away after 5 hors. With appengine you have to proper code it and write a lot of stuff to make it sure it scales. You can't just do a "find . | grep .avi | xargs ffmpeg -compress ...." :)

• You will loose hours trying to do the simplest tasks like sending push notifications to APNS (iPhone). Although it's fine if you only want to support android in the future.

• Terrible to make cleanups on the database. It's a HUGE pain in the ass to fix rows in the database, mainly because terribly slow, but it also requires a lot of code to loop properly within it's time constraints.

• It was a pain to port Lucene to work on it's "filesystem".

• Slow for what you pay.

• Even MORE expensive if your app has spikes of traffic. My app has those spikes if a user that has many followers makes an action and we have to push notifications to his followers. Because of that I have to keep 10 inactive servers always on ($$$$$) to handle spikes.

Appengine isn't too bad due to the fact that I have the option to burn $$$$ instead of being concerned about scalability and fixing bottlenecks to reduce server usage. Sometimes it worth it.

My advice to people starting new products is to go with hetzner.de which is where I host my other products servers. It's cheap and extremely hackable. I have one server at hetzner that is handling 3x more traffic than the product that I have on appengine. The difference in price is $100 a month versions $2700 a month!

I have system admin experience, so the bottom line is that I would never choose appengine over having my own ROOT server. Don't be that bored software engineer wanting to experiment new things instead of building great products!

Answer 2

Con: No Other RDBMS or NoSQL databases are not possible ....

Answer 3

Con: Limited to Java and Python

Answer 4

(A huge new) PRO: GAE now supports MySQL : https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/

Answer 5

I believe , GAE is yet to mature in terms of providing the basic features for serious business such as Datastore with complex primary key, java.awt.* support, these are just a few I'm naming.

Other than the free space and to build some "Hobby" websites, I strongly feel GAE is NOT the place java guys should looking into.

I'm having applications built on the JSP/Servlets and MySQL, thinking about migrating to GAE, but I find I will be spending more "value time" on the migration than just buying a space from some java hosting provider such as EATJ, etc (Sorry not marketing, just an experience).

Another big issue I've got is migration of my existing mySQL data into GAE, bulkupload is really pathetic and has no client support.

No support for Local Db to Server DB upload.

Once the GAE is ready with "all the Cons" mentioned by above, then I'll think we can look in to this migration.