[Catalog-sig] Rewrite PyPI for App Engine?

[Ian Bicking]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:16 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

> Almir Karic wrote:
> > i would like to help out with the move.
> >
> > is anyone actually opposed to moving to GAE (either moving the current
> > code base or re-write, whichever seems more appropriate)?
>
> I don't think people are opposed to having a PyPI clone on GAE,
> but moving the existing installation to GAE is something we would
> have to discuss separately.
>
> I for one would not welcome such a change, since we then completely
> lose control over service availability.
>

I don't really understand what this means.  Services become unavailable
sometimes.  A computer breaks, a company shuts down, an agreement ends.  We
don't necessarily have "control" over these situations, but we can respond
to them.  If App Engine goes down and the App Engine team is all like
"whatever, we'll get around to fixing stuff sometime" then sure it's a
problem.  But it's not a plausible problem.  The plausible problem is that
App Engine goes down, as it has from time to time, and we have to wait for
them to figure out what's wrong and fix it.  *We* don't have to fix it, we
only have to *wait for someone else to do it*.  I don't see any reason why
*we* are any better at fixing issues than the App Engine team would be.
Also presumably when there is a failure we want for the failure to be
understood and avoided in the future.  The App Engine team does that.  And
they do that *for us*.

In some catastrophic case we could move the site to another server, use
TyphoonAE to move the code over (or simply require that there is a
sufficient abstraction layer to allow for a more normal environment) and
bring the site up.  We control the domain, we can ultimately control where
it is hosted.  This kind of failure seems like it would be far more likely
given our current situation than on App Engine, but moving to App Engine
would not somehow make this kind of move impossible.

Someone would also have to do some math to calculate the monthly
> costs for the PSF:
>
>    http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html
>    http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html
>    http://code.google.com/appengine/business/
>

It seems unlikely we'd have to pay for the service.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/attachments/20100624/561dbd46/attachment-0001.html>