[fhoffa]

AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

Since you're checking notes, please check out all the AE service deprecation notes.

Disclosure: I worked for Google for ~10 years, and I fought internally many of those deprecation decisions. I did not succeed.

[dekhn]

Google making AppEngine in the first place always felt weird to me. It was great for some web developers, but outside that use case, really not so much. But it came with a great collection of side technologies, which got unbundled (Datastore, etc) because there were folks (like me) who wanted to use the side tech but not AE itself (for many, many years you couldn't "import numpy" but people would still say "see? We have a cloud, it's called AppEngine").

Once enough things were unbundled from AE, and containers became popular, it wasn't really clear what AE provided that wasn't better solved by more standard tech.

Often times, Google leadership simply didn't understand what its own engineers and product managers knew. People told me for years "we can't do cloud because the profit margins are too small", and now look: Google is a perenially third-place in Cloud but has committed itself so much they can't even shut it down if they want to.

[latchkey]

No, we all just migrated the decision of using GAE to using Cloud Functions / Run / Tasks, which is fine. Those are easier for Google to scale over time, than AppEngine.

The problem with AppEngine was that they had to heavily modify the runtimes for isolation... the JVM needed to be secured and that meant maintaining a separate fork, which also meant being perpetually always behind in versions. It also meant any upgrade had to go through a huge security evaluation.

So, moving to another process model, containers, worked much better.

[latchkey]

> AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

I see that as a good thing, it means they are still working on it.

[fhoffa]

Have you actually been using it for 15 years?

My guess is not, or you would have a different opinion. But that's just a guess

[latchkey]

Poor comment and poor guess.

My best friend Jeff started working on Objectify in 2009 after I convinced him to use GAE. I have built two businesses on it. One did $80m in revenue in the first year and I guarantee we couldn’t have done it without GAE.

Now give me back my downvote please.

[fhoffa]

Wait, you just said in a separate comment that you migrated away from App Engine.

You also just said that you used it very effectively back when it was a different thing.

I think we agree in many more ways than we disagree.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020604

[latchkey]

Ugh, now you're making me explain myself due to your poor understanding of what I was saying and taking different comments in different threads out of context.

"We migrated"... meaning that over time, everyone is migrating from the concept of using GAE as a first choice, to using things like Run/Functions. Not that I actually physically took code for GAE and moved it to R/F. For example, my last project, I choose to use GCF, instead of GAE. The reason I went straight to GCF is because it is effectively what GAE has morphed into today. This isn't a slight on GAE at all. I've updated previous comment to hopefully clarify this for you.

Again, I have used GCP extensively since about 2009. By the way, much of what you use today was a result of things I did back when I co-founded the Jakarta Apache project, open sourced Tomcat from Sun, brought Lucene under the umbrella, blah blah blah... I've been around the internet since 1991.

[fhoffa]

This is awesome, thanks for all the background info. Now let me give you an example of App Engine deprecating stuff:

- In 2012 App Engine deprecated the "Conversion API".

- They notified this deprecation in August 2012, and they told users it would stop working only 3 months afterwards.

- You were affected by this deprecation.

- You created an alternative to it, that worked on Heroku.

Source: https://groups.google.com/g/google-appengine/c/-JJccGx5RRk/m...

Did I get this right?

You are awesome. We are just choosing to remember the past with different colored glasses.

[nathants]

backwards compatibility is a big deal in infrastructure. when a serious provider has bold new ideas, you release appengine2.