Huh?
You’ve got to be kidding (from today’s O’Reilly Radar):
Google released App Engine less than a year ago (Radar post). It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google’s servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was free (within limits). It now supports 45,000 apps and those apps get over 100 million page views per month. Those pageviews were all free, but they had limits.
Only 100 million page views per month? Across 45,000(?) applications? Isn’t that something like 2222 page views per month per application (or 74 per day)? Is this the auto-scale platform we’ve been waiting for? (Please see update below.)
Google also announced pricing for App Engine. It is essentially in-line with Amazon’s Web Services pricing.
App Engine Running on Joyent
I was interested to understand what Google App Engine applications, all of them, running on Joyent Accelerators might cost. We currently have a customer that pushes 2 billion page views a month. That customer spends $60,000 per month or $0.00003 per page per month with Joyent. (Bandwidth and storage are bundled into the pricing.) This means the entire Google App Engine application portfolio, all 45,000 applications or 100 million page views, could run of Joyent for $3000 per month. Astonishing. Dear Google Operations: if you are spending more than $3000 per month running Google App Engine, please give us a call. We can save you some money. (Please see update below.)
These realities are layered on top of a closed, proprietary platform. Truly misfit.
Yes, Joyent is investing in a platform, based on Javascript (to begin with) that will compete with Google App Engine. It will be priced aggressively, will be completely open, and run on the same blazingly fast Joyent Accelerators serving up customers that need real (2 billion page view) performance.
Citizens of App Engine: come to Jill!
Update: the traffic for App Engine has been updated from 100 million pages per month to 100 million pages per day. So, if App Engine costs more than $90K/month to run…the offer remains the same.
11 Comments
I dev on GAE so let’s take the thought a bit further.
I noticed Python is not one of the languages listed on the What Scales on Joyent page.
If Joyent could point to fully-managed Python, MySQL, Apache with mod-wsgi, memcached stack across geo-distributed datacenters with a packaged localhost dev environment there might be a better point of competition. Developers and the companies behind them might pick the best platform for their language of choice.
I wonder if that 45,000 counts apps like mine, where I’ve made an app but done nothing with it. That would skew the calculations.
Just thinking that one interesting side effect of quota based systems like GAE, AWS and Aptana Cloud is it encourages more fine tuning. The effort profiling and tuning could has an obvious monetary benefit. Sounds like a good thing…
I would love a fully-managed but private server offering.
I would gladly give over root access to Joyent if that meant they kept my system up-to-date.
Essentially, what you get on a shared server but on my own Private VPS.
I would love to be an early beta tester for your javascript platform. I am developing an open source javascript based media player that will be able to hook up to any back end and do all of its communication via JSON. I’d love to be able to write JS for the serverside portion as well.
Are you guys looking for beta testers?
@Niall: I wasn’t really claiming Joyent Accelerators are the same as GAE. Nor is GAE Amazon EC2. GAE and Joyent Smart will be more comparable.
Could you point me to a version of Google BigTable I can run on Joyent, then I’ll provide you with a solution so that “developers and the companies behind them might pick the best platform for their language of choice”.
@Brian: send me an email to david {at} joyent and we’ll get you into the beta queue.
@“David”:http://www.joyeur.com/2009/02/24/google-app-engine-misfit-toys-come-to-jill#c010316
BigTable is the underlying common name for the GAE datastore. It’s really Megastore, a new data abstraction layer maintained by Google for internal use. Discussed at SIGMOD and at Google I/O last year. BigTable is so 2006…
Greenplum, Aster, HBase, etc. abstract the datastore across multiple machines in ways that may prove similar to GAE’s implementation. I’m less familiar with geo-distributed data stores (e.g. east coast and west coast US) available from managed hosts.
Joyent is great but I wish it was a bit easier to setup and manage an instance of python above 2.4 on joyent without pain. Django support easily would be nice.
Why don’t you improve your own service and pricing instead of bashing other services that have a perfectly justified spot in the hosting cloud.
And doing so on the company blog. Where the target audience is hosting professionals. I came.
Today you are in good shape, thanks for the post
Best wishes, your constant reader