[user5994461]

> App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow.

App Engine was a precursor that came 5 years too early.

The hype about serverless is only starting now.

[foxylad]

We jumped on Appengine very early, and have never regretted it. It's remarkably stable, and not having to worry about the security issue du jour, scaling, or any other sysadmin stuff means we can concentrate on what we do best - building apps.

I've been surprised how few people understand the value proposition, and how little competition there is. When I first heard about Azure I expected it to be PaaS, but it turned out to be Windows-first AWS.

[addicted]

I'm pretty sure Azure began as Paas as well, and added Iaas later.

[detaro]

Isn't Azure Cloud Services pretty close to Appengine?

[foxylad]

Not as I understand it. Both AWS and Azure force you to use machines - you may put them behind load balancers, and they may start up automatically when required, but you still need to design the system and do provisioning and plumbing to make your application working.

With Appengine, you don't know anything about the hardware of software your application is running on - you simply upload your app.

I haven't used Azure, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I believe AWS Lambda is the beginnings of a "serverless" environment - maybe Azure has an equivalent.

[lambardy]

Azure has a ton of serverless components. Functions is their lambda equivelant. Azure has many services you can create apps and capabilities without standing up a sever. Like anything else it has some pros and cons.

[iainmerrick]

Was it really just "too early"? I always thought App Engine was a fantastic idea, and I wondered why it never seemed to catch on.

Choice of languages -- initially just Python and Java? Fiddly APIs, different from competing platforms but not actually super-simple for simple tasks? Lack of a straightforward way of running background tasks (still a bit of a mess)? Lack of management support? Maybe just underpowered at first for large sites, and insufficiently compelling for small sites to build a loyal fanbase?

I just built a new, very small project in App Engine (Python, standard environment). It works fine but the tools are quite fiddly. There are plenty of docs but they're a bit of a trainwreck, in the classic Google "the old way is deprecated, but the new way is still in beta" way (e.g. standard versus flexible environments).

[acdha]

App Engine seems to me like the classic Google product: some cool ideas but the initial experience was clunky and the pricing model scared people, especially since you were locking yourself into a proprietary architecture. Google engineers could point to various things it did to help with future scaling needs and took the advantages of things like the NoSQL data model for granted but everyone I knew who didn't work for Google was generally asking questions like “How long would it take to migrate if they cancel the service?” or “What's my coping strategy if they have another major outage?”.

I think a little time invested on customer service and user experience would have gone a long way.

[iainmerrick]

I just realised there was another problem: no internal customers. If there had been an important team inside Google keen on using App Engine, that might have helped them figure out the right feature set. But instead they were just guessing at what users outside Google might want. (Compare to Gmail, which was and is very heavily used inside Google.)

[crb]

Thousands of internal Google apps (most of the important ones we use day-to-day) run on App Engine. Many external apps do too - https://plus.google.com/107043289104010976501/posts/VYybt1BC... talks about developers.google.com, for example.

That doesn't help though, as Googlers learn to write apps the Google way (massively horizontally scalable, managed NoSQL data service), which looks very much like App Engine. Outside, people still wanted to run their relational databases and large VMs, and App Engine didn't let them do that. That's why we came out with Compute Engine.

[tyingq]

I'm sure there are other reasons why App Engine didn't catch on, but the deal breaker for me was support.

They had an issue where outgoing emails just disappeared, without errors, and no way to debug what was happening. Support denied the issue for quite some time. Wasn't fixed for 2 or 3 weeks.