Why I don’t use AppEngine

I was recently asked why I don’t use Google AppEngine for some of the larger projects I am working on.

Quite simply, I would love to. But currently there are a few issues:

1) There is no SLA whatsoever. I could wake up one morning, and all of my content could be gone. I cannot even efficiently make backups of the data.

2) There is no guaranteed availability of expanding quotas. The projects that I would like to deploy on AppEngine would use the storage capacity alone in less than 2 days. Im happy to pay for that, but the service is not yet available.

3) The inability to support wildcard and top level domain names. This is a major issue for the kind of platforms we build. We’re looking at overcoming this by simply treating AppEngine as a datastore.

4) Lack of coherency between the google apps accounts and google accounts have meant that my mobile number is already in use on a deleted account, and I cannot register a new appengine profile. There is NO support whatsoever to address this, NO way to contact google about it, and their SMS feedback form gives nothing in the way of “feedback” (aside from the cryptic message “comment” if you fill in too many characters for the comments section).

5) No support, No support, No support.

These are my own thoughts about the AppEngine platform. There are others that people have mentioned, such as the inability to upload files over 1MB in size - but I would say these are issues easily overcome when you treat AppEngine as an application layer in front of (what appears to be) a kickass datastore, instead of a complete web production environment. Those familiar with CouchDB will be aware of the ease of integration that these platforms can provide (although I dare say BigTable is without the scalability issues that plague the current releases of CouchDB).

That is exactly how we intend to leverage it, having being let down by the limitations of SimpleDB, and our currently unstable internal datastore not yet holding up to the demand of our soon-to-be-released platform.

Heres hoping that my (multiple) “SMS feedback” actually went somewhere - no “thanks for your feedback” or anything…

If you’re listening Google, please let me activate my account! I promise i’m not a spam-bot