[tdavis]

Frankly, having worked on a serious AppEngine application for over a year, it most certainly is not. Of course, that isn't an absolute statement--perhaps some serious applications do exist on AppEngine, and leverage it in a way that doesn't cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs. The one I work on doesn't fall into that camp. I miss managing my own infrastructure more than anything.

[adaml_623]

Sorry but are you saying that your serious AppEngine application _does_ cost countless thousands in hosting and development costs? Implying that it's more expensive than it might be on competing platforms?

[tdavis]

Yes, it's probably an order of magnitude more expensive when accounting for the countless hours spent pre-optimizing everything, tracking down intensely opaque performance issues, dealing with the AppEngine team's tendency to introduce changes that entirely alter performance characteristics without notice, and etc.

This, of course, is on top of the now rather ludicrous cost associated with maintaining a write-heavy application that must be both highly concurrent and consistent, with a large number of composite indexes and relational schemes that the datastore was simply not designed to cater to. That isn't AppEngine's fault, but it is by no means a generic hosting platform and I truly believe that their goal of creating an "infinitely scalable" and robust system is directly at odds with providing a product that is a good choice for the majority of applications.