Greetings folks! One of the App Engine PMs here. That couldn't be further from the truth - we absolutely want people to use App Engine. If you want to manage your own infrastructure, Google Compute Engine is great. If you want something that scales automatically, and requires less management - App Engine is a great option. We've actually made a ton of changes recently, specifically on our support for docker based runtimes, new docs, and new runtime support (like nodejs, ruby, python3, etc).
Appengine's whack pricing says: we'd like to kick you off appengine onto GCE but that would scare away all the enterprise users from GCE. If we announce regular Moore's Law following price cuts for GCE and nothing for appengine, well hey, we can't stop you leaving. We're totally not twisting you're arm! (aside: we are)
The new Tesla Model 3 is cheaper than the Model S. Is that Tesla encouraging people to migrate to the
Model 3?
They're not the same product, and in this case they serve different points in the space with different underlying requirements. App Engine Standard's cost structure on the backend just hasn't changed nearly as much as compute engine's lately where it's a much more direct: oh look Haswell released, more cores per host at similar dollars yields less $$/core.
Disclosure: I work on Cloud (Compute Engine mostly) and care a lot about our prices.
Jeez, if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works this isn't much of an endorsement. Just because some company moves a lot of bits doesn't mean they know what they are doing. The easiest way to move a lot of bits is to be bad at infrastructure and have investors with deep pockets. Fuck just run a rack of open relays and bad NTP/DNS servers.
>> if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works
>What does this even mean.
I find their app to be very poorly designed, I wouldn't be surprised if their back end is also poorly designed.
>You have to have some measure of competency to be able to operate at Snapchat scale. You really do.
Meh, they are big but they aren't that big. There are about 3000 bigger sites out there and not that many are built on GAE so that's a strange way to measure the competency of GAE or snap chat for that matter.
You can run at scale and do it poorly, Enterprises do it all the time. Size and scale aren't really a good indication of quality.
If you want to make a case for appengine, do that, but don't tell me that 'these guys vetted it, and they are kinda big, so it must be good' There's a lot more big sites that don't use app engine. Size doesn't equal competency.
