On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 8:15 AM, Brandon Wirtz <[email protected]> wrote:
> GAE code especially parts built around the datastore aren't transferable to > other platforms. A big part of what makes GAE work is stuff that doesn't > work on other platforms. I work with VC's on a regular basis and I agree > with them on this point. Betting the farm on technology that is still > labeled beta and doesn't yet have pricing finalized is risky. > > It's certainly not impossible to port datastore code to some other NoSQL DB. The most important GAE-specific feature that isn't easily transferable is transaction support, but even that can be dealt with in various ways (in the worst case you build a SQL-based sharded solution). You can also simplify the porting process a lot by using Django-nonrel. You might think that this is a risk in itself, but any team worth investing in should be capable of maintaining their own Django-nonrel fork (yes, the code is very simple) in the unlikely case of us abandoning Django-nonrel. Imagine you had done the math and decided that you could rule the world > building a Financial transaction Datamining service on GAE, had priced it to > be competitive based on Maser/Slave, and then you discovered M/S doesn't > have 100% up time, so you had to move to High Replication, but because you > are a data mining service most of what you do are writes, and you are paying > 3x for those, your competitive pricing just got less so. What would have > seemed like a great bet 6 months ago wasn't. As a VC you may have just lost > your investment because what looked to be the way to better mining at lower > cost is now better at higher cost. > > If a product relies heavily on datastore writes then App Engine might not be the best choice to start with (writes are not only expensive, but also very slow). In this case I can understand if VCs have doubts about the technology. However, a lot of other web businesses fit App Engine's model very well. Such businesses also don't react too sensitively to GAE's pricing changes and even if GAE becomes a major cost factor you can still move away. As to Google End of Lining the product, well if you had built on Amazon you > could run that on your own hardware or something like Liquid Web, pack up > your code and just run. But GAE isn't so portable, anyone who has played > with the datastore can tell you that a 50 gig datastore on the local install > doesn't perform anything like the deployed version. Part of that is just > that you can make calls to API's that will burn cpu at 150x Realtime for 3 > seconds. To do that on your "local" you would need 150 CPUs for 3 seconds > which a user can wait for, but they can't wait 75 seconds for that same > thing to happen on 6 CPUs. > I'm not sure why you'd want to run a 50GB datastore on your laptop. :) If you're forced to move away from GAE you can port your code to e.g. MongoDB or Cassandra (again, Django-nonrel makes this relatively easy) and then you can put those 50GB on your (e.g. EC2-based) MongoDB/Cassandra cluster. Where's the problem, really? I am a HUGE proponent of GAE, and I'm betting the farm on it, but as an > analyst for Standard & Poor's I would NOT bet against any VC who declines to > invest in a GAE powered start up prior to the removal of the beta Moniker > and a finalization of the service's pricing this summer. > Since when do VCs (esp. "any VC") always make the right decisions? Most importantly, since when do VCs make good technological decisions? FYI, I don't have anything against VCs in general. I just think that a VC who declines an investment solely because it's a GAE-powered startup probably would've ended up being your worst nightmare, anyway. Actually, if I told such a VC "now we'll build it on EC2, are you in?" I'd find it hard to believe that he would say "yes, now everything is perfect!". That's ridiculous. Probably this "no GAE" stuff is just an easy excuse, so they don't have to tell you straight in your face: "we don't believe in your product/market/team/whatever". Bye, Waldemar Kornewald -- Django on App Engine, MongoDB, ...? Browser-side Python? It's open-source: http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
