The Cloud: Watch your step ( Google App engine limitations )

Any blog which promotes the concept of cloud infrastructure would be doing injustice if it doesn’t provide references to implementations where it failed horribly. Here is an excellent post by Carlos Ble where he lists out all the problems he faced on Google App engine (python).  He lists 13 different limitations, most of which are very well known facts, and then lists some more frustrating reasons why he had to dump the solution and look for an alternative.

The tone of the voice is understandable, and while it might look like App-Engine-bashing, I see it as a great story which others could lean from.

For us, GAE has been a failure like Wave or Buzz were but this time, we have paid it with our money. I've been too stubborn just because this great company was behind the platform but I've learned an important lesson: good companies make mistakes too. I didn't do enough spikes before developing actual features. I should have performed more proofs of concept before investing so much money. I was blind.

Cloud is not for everyone or for all problems. While some of these technologies take away your growing pain points, they assume you are ok with some of the limitations. If you were surprised by these limitations after you are neck deep in coding, then you didn’t do your homework.

Here are the 13 points issues he pointed out. I haven’t  used Google App engine lately, but my understanding is that App engine team have solved, or on the path of solving (or reducing pain) some of these issues.

  • Requires Python 2.5
  • Cant use HTTPS
  • 30 seconds to run
  • URL fetch gets only 5 seconds
  • Can’t use python libraries compiled in C
  • No “LIKE” operators in datastore
  • Can’t join tables
  • “Too many indexes”
  • Only 1000 records at a time returned
  • Datastore and memcache can fail at times
  • Max memcache size is 1MB

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