Re:AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway
by wmf on Friday June 05, 2009 @03:20PM
(#643774)
Big design up front is bad, but big scaling up front is good?
Re:AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway
by grandalf on Friday June 05, 2009 @05:02PM
(#643976)
Not at all.
Consider Rails: Convention over configuration. The same applies to app engine, only with a slightly more restrictive set of conventions.
Re:AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway
by kragen on Friday June 05, 2009 @04:45PM
(#643941)
he hasn't built a complex system and had to refactor it in order to scale
You've heard of the C3 project?
Re:AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway
by grandalf on Friday June 05, 2009 @05:04PM
(#643981)
I've heard of it. I'm curious about your thoughts in relation to this topic.
Re:AppEngine doesn’t fit the needs of startups on the runway
by kragen on Saturday June 06, 2009 @07:05AM
(#644691)
I think it was a complex system, they spent a lot of time refactoring it to add features, and some anecdotes suggest that performance (so it could scale to all of Chrysler) was one of the major feature categories that they were working on — and kind of failed on, I think. And it's the project Beck's best known for.
This is my favorite aspect of app engine -- you can be confident that if you follow the best practices your app will scale. Try that with a rails or django app.
Sure you can scale Rails horizontally, but what about Sphinx? What about Mysql? If you're lucky your app will scale in a way that the "simple" methods of scaling these tools happens to work. But what if it's not?
Before long you'll wish you'd just been forced to make all requests complete in under 4 seconds initially :)
These are problems that you as a coder can address directly with app engine. Without it, you have to wear all sorts of sysadmin hats and hope you're not doing something foolish.