Here's my complaint:

I, and many others, spent a lot of time figuring out how to write apps that do it the "app engine way":

  * Fast completes (30 second timeout)
  * Offloading to task queues when you cant
  * Channels
  * Blobstore two-phase upload urls
  * Mail eccentricities

We did so, because we believe Google when they told us If you write your apps in this really weird way then we will be able to give you scale and cost benefits that you wont be able to get elsewhere

We believed them, because it seemed reasonable. We laughed at those who complained that django would hit the 30-second limit: "Its not a general hosting! Figure out the App Engine way!" And we educated on how to do it right, and many were happy.

Well, it turns out that it is general purpose hosting, with all of the costs, and yet also with all of the (once rational, now bullshit) idiosyncrasies.

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But that's not the biggest complaint. The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don't like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google's engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.

If the paywall is affecting you:

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is resigning as editor of the popular technology blog, and will run a $20 million venture-capital fund backed by TechCrunch-owner AOL Inc. and several venture-capital firms.

Mr. Arrington "will run the fund and will continue to write for TechCrunch, but will have no editorial oversight," said an AOL spokesman. Erick Schonfeld, who has served as co-editor in New York, will become interim editor while AOL searches for a replacement for Mr. Arrington, the spokesman said. AOL purchased the site last year.

Mr. Arrington's new fund, called CrunchFund, closed Thursday with $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter. AOL leads the limited-partner group, which includes a long roster of venture firms that kicked in $1 million each: Austin Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Several individuals contributed money, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; general partners at Benchmark Capital; angel investors Ron Conway and Kevin Rose; and Yuri Milner of Russian firm DST Global.

It isn't immediately clear what is the fate of AOL's venture-capital arm, AOL Ventures, which has made recent seed investments in start-ups such as spam-defense company Impermium and price-tracking service Shopobot.

Mr. Arrington's partner in the fund is Patrick Gallagher, who has been a partner at VantagePoint Capital Partners since 2008.

Mr. Arrington wasn't immediately available for comment. He posted a message on Twitter after news of the fund broke: "slow news day."

Mr. Arrington, a former lawyer who is known to be well connected in Silicon Valley, started TechCrunch in 2005. The site built up a following for its coverage of young tech companies.

Long an angel investor himself, Mr. Arrington announced on TechCrunch in 2009 that he would stop making investments in start-ups due to a perceived conflict as both publisher and investor. It's "a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility," he wrote at the time.

But in April this year, after AOL acquired TechCrunch, Mr. Arrington announced he was investing in start-ups again, while also becoming a limited partner in venture funds Benchmark Capital and SoftTechVC.

Mr. Arrington has often said that transparency and full disclosure keep things above-board when his blog writes about companies he has some financial stake in.

I took the liberty of rewriting this in slightly more idiomatic English:

http://pastebin.com/tHDPJsUt

It is tricky: Japanese chat logs don't have all that much context to go on, and you have to make a judgment call as to what sort of "voice" they'd be speaking with. I gave them fairly informal young American programmer personalities but with just as much reason I could rewrite this to loko like it was two frat boys.

Disclaimer: I don't exactly go all-out for accuracy when translating to procrastinate about going to sleep.

Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places.

So back when I worked there Google had no clue what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their machine usage? That really crystallized when the bottom fell out in 2008 and suddenly there was going to be no more new machines/data centers for a while and everyone had to 'make do.'

They mobilized an effort to figure this out, its not like it isn't knowable, and ever the data driven company the first signs of light were appearing just as I was leaving. It should not be a surprise but they discovered many things they did not previously believe was true, and I don't doubt it has driven a lot of change going forward. One of the more interesting outcomes was that projects/products were actually getting cancelled if they cost more to run than they could generate in revenue (I'm looking at you Goog-411)

So this knowledge is being applied to GAE, which is great, its also another way to back compute some of their operational efficiencies.

But that it costs money to run stuff? Well that isn't really news is it? That it costs that much? Well there is the whole if it doesn't make money it will get cancelled threat.

And the kicker is pricing out the scarce resource. It looks (and I've been gone over a year and half so I am speculating based on this move on their part) like their 'scarce' resource is web server front ends. (the labeled "Frontend instance") Traditionally they've been like most multi-tier web properties split between front end machines which host the web facing stuff, and back end machines that do the heaving lifting and storing. And by this change one can reason that residency on the 'front end' is more valuable than crunching in the 'back end.'

I'm guessing PlusFeed gets a lot of web traffic. So they spend a lot of time 'actively' on the front side, and from their numbers they do practically nothing on the back side. This fits well with the sudden massive price increase.

This gives you an insight into Google's business dynamics as well. Where page-views are the limiting resource, and computation is not. When you look at it that way, you can see that most of their 'revenue' has to be delivered through their front end services, and so consuming that resource reduces (potentially) their income. Hence the charge inconsistency.

Now contrast that to Billy-Bob's Web Farm (fictitious service) where every machine in their data center can be a web server, and front end serving is trivial, its all about the bandwidth. Their pricing would probably be more gigabytes transferred.

I would not be surprised at all if it is impractical to run such 'translation' services (basically all web traffic very little compute) on a hosted environment like Google's.