|
The new pricing made it App Engine a sustainable business, because the old pricing model didn't actually account for costs and encouraged some very wasteful practices. The only other option to actually charging enough to cover costs would be to shut the service down. I'm sure more people would be more upset about that. App Engine has always been a unique PAAS because its APIs were designed to try to force developers into better distributed app architectures. The non-relational DB with entity groups and limited queries, the 30s request limit, originally not offering long-running instances, the task queue, memcache as a service, all made for scalable apps. But the costs unfortunately weren't designed the same way. Charging by CPU time, and having datastore access free was especially bad for a market where apps typically use very little CPU, but access data a lot. A lot of blog posts came shorty after the price change that said after making the recommended changes to datastore calls, and enabling multithreading that they got their bill down and performance up significantly. Many apps were doing absolutely no caching, or logging every request to the datastore, because datastore was ridiculously cheap for small records. Some were doing what should have been batch work per-request because they didn't use task queues. Since 2011, I think all price changes with Google Cloud have been price drops, some pretty big. Last year, App Engine prices were dropped 30%. |
The users didn't decide any of these things, and are not to blame for them. What kind of service blames its customers for its own mistakes?
Google earned this distrust fair and square by suddenly forcing huge numbers of customers to rewrite all their existing code. Little price cuts don't matter: other services are already more cost-effective and are cutting their prices all the time, but even if there were price parity the risk attached to the lock-in just isn't worth it.