Comments on: Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it.

By: links for 2009-01-08 « Amy G. Dala

links for 2009-01-08 « Amy G. Dala — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:01:56 +0000

[...] Aral Balkan - Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it. (tags: md google) [...]

By: Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network | Castup

Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network | Castup — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:30:50 +0000

[...] In the right circumstances, App Engine can be a real boon. I run my own site using the method I’ve discussed above, and I’m very happy with it. But App Engine does have its disadvantages, most notably those discussed by Aral Balkan in his post ‘Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it‘. [...]

By: stelg

stelg — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:02:55 +0000

Aral,
Compliments with your article.
Meanwhile using https is a piece of cake. Just adapt the yaml file.

The storage limit of 1 MB is ridiculous!. Youtube (=Google) and plenty other systems allow much more!

The CPU limits are painful. It is easy to get over the short-term high CPU quotas.

Sending more than 10 emails at one submit request is impossible. You have to wait every time 1 minute before a next group of 10 emails can be submitted.
Using Blind Carbon Copies (BCC) does not work at all.

So a lot to improve for Google. The term SCALABLE is not yet fulfilled by Google!

To end with good news: The reponse times on normal (smaller requests) are great!!

By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:47:41 +0000

@nate: As far as I’m concerned, C can keep its curly brackets. With the amount I type, I’d rather type less

By: Aral

Aral — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:46:32 +0000

@Jeremy:

SSL as in accessing your site via https://www.mylovelyapp.com. You can’t do that. With the newly-introduced SSL support, you can access your app at https://mylovelyapp.appspot.com but you cannot carry across a session between the two. So, if you’re using a custom domain for your app, Google App Engine still doesn’t support SSL. It only supports SSL if you’re serving your app from appspot.com.

By: Jeremy kajikawa

Jeremy kajikawa — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:45:42 +0000

SSL for serving ?
or SSL for accessing external sites?

Ive had no issues with SSL serving and Im only using the AppEngine
as a customized coded front-end for the googleplex database

SSL access to offsite resources will be part of what I’ll find out about
when I finish seperation of the admin site from the service site.
personally I am trying to setup the admin site as an own site seperate
from the site administrated.

so far together or apart seems equally as disconnected for all the parts.

By: nate

nate — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:30:54 +0000

Enterprise IT has to be “Reliable” above all, it won’t be long before clouds like GAE will be more reliable than the servers in the local data center.

Does someone really have to write a pretty printer that adds in curly braces into Python code for it to be read by all the “C” family programmers?

And, I agree no-price, no-knowing.

By: Kris

Kris — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:18:56 +0000

1. It’s currently free.. Who in their right mind would use a free hosting service to deploy a serious project? Nobody!

2. It’s a beta service /preview release.. and will become something more like the AWS platform over time (limits and restrictions won’t be in place but it will cost you)

If they made it available for free with no restrictions then everybody would use it a host huge static files globally for free..

By: Andy B

Andy B — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 02:33:58 +0000

As far as enterprise uses go, I think David is correct that Python is viewed with suspicion by businesses. This is in part due to the language itself: businesses prefer to be somewhat more conservative. (e.g. static typing, C-like syntax, etc.) Dynamic languages seem scarier and less reliable.

This is not, however, a fatal flaw of GAE. Mostly I think Java and .NET are popular in the enterprise space because of the supporting corporations. Each is quite good on its own, but where would Java really be without Sun, or .NET without Microsoft? The association between Google and Python will give it plenty of credibility as a language. There is still the problem of programmers not knowing it, but I agree that Google should work on the core functionality before adding support for other languages.

It sounds like these problems, although severe enough to be show-stoppers now, might not be as intractable as the scalability problems that GAE is meant to solve. Hopefully Google will fix them soon for its own sake.

By: Prathapan Sethu

Prathapan Sethu — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:48:22 +0000

We are building our intranet HR app on Google App Engine. While I like its speed, on the flip side there are too many limits as pointed out in this article, and Google needs to remove them asap. Also, BigTable is not relational and I see that MySQL developers have a problem switching to the non-relational way of doing things. Google needs to support developers with plenty of documentation and example code, so they can understand the concepts learn this platform faster. They also need to communicate their roadmap.

I think GAE is a wonderful platform, but unless Google moves fast and fixes the problems, they are going to lose developers.