Final GAE vs AWS architectural decision

Question

I know this has been asked one way or another before, but most of the main issues to do with GAE stability seem to have been asked around the end of 2008, early 2009, or aren\'t

Answer 1

BuddyPoke is one example of a large-scale social app running on GAE. How large I'm not sure. This article says 30m daily page views (not users):

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/10/app-engine-case-studies.html

Their facebook page says 2.7 million monthly (not daily) users:

http://www.facebook.com/buddypoke

Although, they are also on a heap of other social networks:

http://www.buddypoke.com/

Personally I decided to go with GAE, for a couple of main reasons:

• The unit of scalability is a single request, not a whole instance like it is with AWS.
• I can work at a higher level, without having to worry about configuring instances.

If your point 4 is a big one for you, then you may be better off with AWS. With GAE there appears to be nothing you can do, and no-one you can contact.

About a week ago I had an issue with my app - it had suddenly started failing in Google's code, in a location which had been working fine for the last 5 days, ie since I had last uploaded my app. The only way to report issues to Google seems to be via their production issue template, here:

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/entry?template=Production%20issue

I reported the issue, and didn't hear anything. Since it's running on Google's servers I was unable to resort to any 'usual' emergency tactics like restarting a server. An hour later and the problem resolved itself - I'm not sure if someone at Google saw my message and fixed something, or if it just went away. I updated my bug report to say the problem was fixed, but even now a week later the issue hasn't been closed or even acknowledged. Also since the issue has to be posted publicly, my app is now getting random hits from bots.

Admittedly my app is currently only in beta and so only has a hundred or so users, and so it wasn't a major incident for me. If I was getting thousands / millions of hits, maybe either Google would have noticed the problem themselves earlier, or they would have paid more attention to my bug report.

On your point 3, even my small app with a small amount of traffic throws occasional data store errors (even during times which aren't reported on the availability charts as outages).

Having said this, I still like GAE (I am using the Python version), and plan to stick with it. The promise of GAE is its scalability - although it falls over occasionally now for my small traffic, it shouldn't fall over any more when it scales to much more traffic (ie your point 2), provided I've coded it correctly to avoid contention. I'll see how it goes.

Finally regarding your point 1, the blobstore and/or static files are more like a CDN on GAE, than the datastore. However for very large amounts of traffic, a real CDN may be cheaper. It's also not necessarily a CDN, see Google app engine & CDN.