Monday, July 6, 2009

On Google App Engine Downtimes

The Register’s Ted Dziuba wrote a rant about a recent Google App Engine’s downtime, and Google’s handling of it. (I can attest the App Engine is down more often than it would be healthy for a website which hopes to gain visitors... we had to experience this with our app, CaptionX, although Google’s service was free and Google additionally supported us with extra capacity.) Ted writes:

App Engine developers must go through the effort to contort their program to Google’s data storage mechanism, which in some cases can be a far cry from SQL. The benefit to this is that you don’t have to worry about scalability, ever. Allegedly. It’s sort of like how a heroin addiction means that you don’t have to worry about reality, ever.

As with anything that flies through a cloud, Google App Engine can suffer a double flame-out and crash to the ground, killing hundreds and swearing a large subset of the population off of air travel for quite some time. Google has paying customers for App Engine, and maybe Wonka doesn’t quite understand this, but when people pay you for a service, they expect a certain amount of transparency and honesty.

[Via Reddit.]

On Google App Engine Down ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

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