Apr 9, 2011

Google Maps API rate limiting and Google App Engine again

@bFlood : Maps Premium is an expensive service usually used by not public-facing, password protected Web sites, while what we are talking about here is the free Google Maps service, where G is penalizing all Apps running on top of GAE since they have to share the ip addresses pool of GAE ip adresses.
@Ikai : what you write applies to old maps (V2) API where you can obtain an application authorization key and applications are rate limited based on this key, although I feel that some kind of ip based limitations exists also.
Maps V3 which is the way to go especially for mobile appls, do not require an application key, instead there are rate limitations based just on originating IP addresses, this puts GAE based appls on a disadvantage since we have to share this with all other GAE based appls using the service.
(see : post publised in App Engine group)