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App Engine vs Heroku

14 points by fleclerc ↗ HN
Hi,

I am currently considering two options as a back-end to a CRUD type mobile application: App Engine and Heroku. While it is fairly easy to calculate the costs of the Heroku option, I do not have experience with App Engine so I don't really know what to expect if I get a decent number of hits per day. App Engine looks like the easiest option technically but is this worth having your data and app logic tied to Google's platform?

Have you used App Engine / Heroku lately? Any thoughts?

Thanks!

10 comments

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rbanffy
The free tier of App Engine (I'm only familiar with the Python platform) is somewhat accommodating. If it becomes too expensive, you may choose to move your app to your own machines running Typhoonae or Appscale. Neither of those is easy to install.

Heroku runs more portable things you can easily deploy on your own boxes.

fleclerc
Hi,

I guess I have to decide whether I am ready to pay a monthly fee on Heroku during bootstrap time as opposed to basically nothing on app engine. You said you were familiar with app engine, globally are you satisfied with the platform? I will use Python, whether on app engine or Heroku.

outside1234
App Engine is a disaster - go with Heroku and Rails or with AWS/Azure/Linode with Rails on IAAS. :)
bcarlson
I've switched from app engine to heroku. Even if you can get past the vendor lock in, carefully review the limitations: file-size, collection size, etc. They may have good reasons for these, but I spent more time working/thinking around these than I expected.

I AppEngine is a great platform for getting an app off the ground, and for a POC... but beyond that I wouldn't recommend it.

-Ben

fleclerc
Hi Ben,

I know I would get to beta 1 or a prototype faster on app engine but I did not know the limitations you mention would cause such headaches. I thought we had more room.

What I like of app engine is the search service but I think it could become costly - there is no price right now but the api call limits seem rather low. And I see that you can do full text search in Postgres at no additional cost than the monthly database plan.

haegwankim
After trying the both PaaS, I recommend Heroku for better deploy experience and lots of add-ons you can use later if necessary.
jamesjguthrie
I might try Heroku later but for now I'm using App Engine - mainly with JSONengine
novaleaf
heroku seems interesting, but if you are a "starter" (like me) i have to say GAE's "one way of doing things" is attractive.
albumedia
App engine is great, especially for small teams. I personally like webapp2 and click to deploy.

It's important to note the various limitations(file size,writes to file system,etc).