GAE FAIL? You can track the #GAE and “google app engine” tweets and also in TechCrunch:

“A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.”

nice term – “unplanned maintenance”

Several messages have been posted on Google App  Engine Downtime Notify Google Groups:

“Now in unplanned maintenance mode. Application deployments, Datastore
writes, and memcache writes have been disabled temporarily. Please
catch CapabilityDisabledError exceptions to handle this properly:

from google.appengine.ext import db
from google.appengine.runtime.apiproxy_errors import
CapabilityDisabledError

myModel = db.Model()
try:
myModel.put()
except CapabilityDisabledError:
# fail gracefully here
pass

Will update as soon as more information becomes available.”

and

“We’re currently seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as
well as elevated serving error-rates. This problem began around 6:30am
Pacific time. All applications accessing the Datastore are affected.
Our team is investigating this issue and will post more information as
soon as it becomes available.”

Let’s see how fast Google can put GAE up – another one of those crises in the cloud!

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo

A discussion about Heroku: Best Money Ever Spent in HN quickly became a Heroku vs. GAE discussion. Jonathan Siegel writes in his article:

“We’ve been using Heroku for several of our own self-launched products. From iPhone backend applications to our MMOCG (where C = casual). Now that we are used to the Heroku toolset and infrastructure, it costs us about 15 minutes to deploy a Heroku app including a domain name purchase and redirecting the DNS. It’s really that easy–and that’s why we’ve gone from 1 test project to over 30 active projects on their platform.

We’ve also been using Heroku for staging servers. Especially client staging servers. We generally maintain a QA and Staging server for our projects. We don’t like to cobble deployments together–so if we are creating a staged deployment infrastructure, we generally invest several days, to several weeks in creating a robust, monitored, backed up and secured deployment configuration. This is great for our large projects, but complete overkill for our smaller project work.”

Hey, I’m a Heroku fan myself – I’ve asked my students in VERTSOL to deploy E-Commerce apps like Spree over Heroku before. The comments in the HN posting are interesting though:

“You can build a full Rack app w/ DataMapper, one that is portable (i.e. no lock in) and scalable, w/o having to pay anything, prior to some serious traffic.(Caveat: Tool chain for Ruby on Google App Engine is a little raw at the moment, but it’s coming along)It’s worth pointing out that Google App Engine + JRuby & Rack Apps is considerably cheaper than Heroku. – knowtheory“

knowtheory had more things about to say about this:

“Both EC2 and Heroku cost you money as soon as you start to use them. So, sure i will agree, it’s easier to get up and running on Heroku if you’re a vanilla Ruby dev. AppEngine’s scaling is a lot more sensible economically imo. And this absolutely not to knock Heroku, they are doing some really cool stuff. But for speculative projects, AppEngine is nice, and free for a lot of uses.Yeah, and with AppEngine, you can build an app, deploy it, and continue to hack on it, and improve it without having to pay any money, Heroku gives you 5 megs of space free, yeah?  AppEngine’s currently limit is a gig of storage space, 46.3 CPU hrs, 10gigabytes of incoming, and 10gigabytes of outgoing traffic PER DAY. – knowtheory“

Other developers like mrkurt chimed in:

The app I have running on Heroku uses a number of prebuilt gems, including things like twitter-auth that sort of assume you’re using migrations and ActiveRecord with it. I may move it over to AppEngine at some point, but the absolute fastest way for me to get an app up and running was with Heroku. To be fair, Google AppEngine gives you that same ability. The difference is, you have to build your app for AppEngine rather than building a plane jane vanilla rack/rails/sinatra/whatever app with postgres. – mrkurt“

Heroku should be the winner, FOR NOW – once GAE figures out how to make instant deployment on its platform as easy as it is now to deploy in Heroku – it should be able to overtake Heroku (not that they are really competing with each other).

Posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo