Google Revs App Engine Platform
Google has been busy over the past few weeks upgrading its Google App Engine cloud service.
The company last week said it has updated its cloud storage, added premium support and released the preview of a new cloud database service. Google App Engine is the company's Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offering, designed for those who want to build and host their applications.
More than 200,000 developers have built apps that run atop Google's cloud services, claimed Google Group product manager Jessie Jiang in a blog post. Google appears to be hoping that its newly announced upgrades to Google App Engine will make its cloud platform more appealing to larger enterprises.
Google Storage for Developers, introduced earlier this year, is now called Google Cloud Storage. The company has lowered the price of the storage service and is no longer charging upload fees. Larger customers are eligible for volume discounts, said Google Cloud Storage product manger Navneet Joneja in a blog post.
Pricing starts at 13 cents per gigabyte and scales down to 10.5 cents per gigabyte for up to 90 TB. For those requiring additional storage, customers can contact the company.
The company also added two experimental features to Google Cloud Storage. One is the ability to read and write data using the App Engines File API. The other is an API that gives users detailed usage information.
With the new Google App Engine Premier Accounts, customers will receive a 99.95 uptime service-level agreement and will be permitted to post an unlimited amount of apps on their accounts. Also, there are no minimum monthly fees for each app. Customers only pay for what they use, Google said.
The service costs $500 a month and is only available during business hours, not weekends or holidays. Customers are also expected to first "use reasonable efforts to fix any error, bug, malfunction or network connectivity defect without escalation to Google," according to the technical support guidelines.
Google also launched the preview of Google Cloud SQL, its cloud-based database. Google characterized a cloud database as one of the most-requested features for App Engine.
The preview, which allows customers to run MySQL databases in the cloud, is designed to support applications developed in Java or Python, allows for database instances up to 10 GB, and supports both asynchronous and synchronous replication.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 18, 2011