Should I use App engine for my Saas project?
Hi! My name is Kevin, from Peru. I'm making an app called Kollect, to help social media managers dealing with thousands of inboxes/comments. Most of the info will be proccessed with asynchronous task queues.
The app is made with Python/Django, Graphql and Angular4. Since I'm newbie on server stuff, I was thinking about using App engine, so I not worry about server config and dealing with CPU, RAM, workers, traffic, etc etc (sorry I'm too newbie about this stuff).
It is a good decision? It will be too expensive? Thanks for your advice.
GAE or Heroku should work perfectly fine for you since you are new to server stuff. Heck I'm familiar with server deployments but reach for PaaS before thinking about spending time managing my servers. It will cost more than using a VPS or some kind of fancy Kubernetes setup but your time is better spent serving your customers.
Thanks @locnguyen, that definitely makes sense to me!
I guess it depends on what you know already.
I've used GAE for a few side projects and like the fact I can get something up and running quickly, and know it will scale if required.
It does indeed cost more but this usually only happens when your project is successful (a nice problem to have). I'm currently doing around $1700 MRR on a project with hosting costs of $70 per month and lots of spare capacity.
Thanks @sevenfortysix! Those numbers look promising, so maybe we will not have to migrate from GAE until we're making real money to pay a server guy 🤔
Here's for the opposite opinion ;)
Going to any kind of cloud app engine or api DB requires you to learn things. But you are learning something only useful for this one vendor. It will be a huge cost if you ever need to migrate away.
I go with the most standard tech imaginable. Linux vps (crazy cheap at Scaleway.com for example) and nginx . If you load an image with Nginx and Django preinstalled there is literally nothing you have to learn except how to ssh ;)
Vps Servers die really in frequently and are so cheap that you can just start with 8gb ram. i think going with managed solutions adds unecessary complexity when you are just starting.
@BibHack thanks for your advice! That is so true, I'm readking GAE docs and its not the simplest thing in the world. Basically is a decision between complicate things right now learning GAE stuff and then forget about server or deploy right now with Nginx, Django and Celery (for task queues) easily but deal then with the traffic, CPU and RAM, that are things I will have to deal with in the future.
You may need managed environment which is essentially kubernetes node. It will not be cheapest option possible.
On google platform the no-worry setup is Firestore for DB, hosting on firebase, and API via appengine standard environment.
Thanks @Denis! I didn't know about kubernetes 🤔. I will check the docs of Firestore and Firebase.