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A comment on The hidden cost of Google App Engine. Parent comment

Re:The hidden cost of Google App Engine by erikpukinskis on Sunday August 19, 2012 @08:43PM (#4405798)
Do you feel like GAE and Heroku make different trade-offs in this regard? I ask because the benefits of GAE you describe sound like reasons I like Heroku, but you see to be suggesting that Heroku is higher maintenance in some way.

Just curious as a Heroku user who wants to keep tabs on GAE.

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Re:The hidden cost of Google App Engine by latchkey on Sunday August 19, 2012 @09:04PM (#4405853)
Beyond the free tier of Heroku, I feel like it is significantly more expensive than GAE.

Recently I've been doing a fair bit of traffic and I'm still below the $2.10/week minimum. If I get even more traffic I don't have to touch anything to deal with it. Heroku doesn't auto-scale quite the way that GAE does, it isn't transparent. Yes, I know there are tools to help with this, but GAE does it automatically.

A key point for me is that Heroku doesn't have the GAE Datastore. This might be fine for you, but the hope for my company is to get as large as possible and the last thing I want to think about is replication, backups and scaling of databases. I've done that before and it sucks.

People seem to quickly forget about the recent outages on Heroku. That said the past year on GAE has been pretty darn stable. I think they've really fixed a lot of the issues they were having early on.

I do use Heroku for two apps running in the free tier and I can't complain because they are free and they wouldn't be possible in GAE. I have a NodeJS webpage scraper (which is controlled from RESTful hits from GAE) and a reverse nginx proxy so that I can serve up mapquest OSM tiles over https. =)

So, maybe it boils down to the needs of your application and your tech stack comfort level (there is no Ruby or PHP on GAE).

On a side note, I love your business! =)

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