Google Cloud Platform Blog: The Year Ahead for Google App Engine!

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The Year Ahead for Google App Engine!

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Google App Enginelaunched in Preview status in 2008Google App Engine for BusinessGoogle App Engine for Business (GAE4B) was announced at Google I/O last year

Our customers are really excited about many of the features of GAE4B: SLA, SSL for custom domains, SQL, etc

The per-user, per-app pricing is not appropriate for many customers that are excited about the GAE4B features because they are not always building applications focused on users within their organization.

Because App Engine is currently a Preview product, some businesses are reluctant to heavily invest in the platform.

App Engine graduating from Preview later this year!

We will be leaving Preview to become an official Google product! This is the top priority for our team and we are on schedule to graduate in the second half of this year. This does not mean we’ve stopped development of other much needed features, for example today we are releasing Backends.

Most of the GAE4B features are going to be rolled into App Engine, enabling all paying customers to take advantage of them. This includes: SLA, SSL for custom domains, SQL, Operational and Developer support, and the new business-oriented Terms of Service. The domain console is currently in trusted tester and will remain so for the time being. GAE4B will no longer be offered as a standalone product.

In order to become an official Google product we must restructure our pricing model to obtain sustainable revenue. Based on customer feedback this means focusing on usage-based pricing and placing per-user, per-app pricing on hold until further notice.

99.95% uptime service level agreementnew Terms of Service agreementNew App Engine Pricing Modeldetails of the new pricing model

Free Apps: Similar to the Free Apps of today but with more restrictive quotas

Paid Apps: Similar to Apps which have Billing Enabled today, except they will have a 99.95% SLA and cost $9/app/month in addition to usage fees. Customers will need to opt-in to this.

Premier Accounts: A new offering which will allow a company to not pay for individual Apps but rather use as many as they need. Premier Accounts will be eligible to receive Operational Support for $500/month in addition to usage fees.

Instances: Due to customer feedback and to better service memory intensive applications, we will be eliminating CPU hours. Instead, our serving infrastructure will charge for the number of Instances running as a new unit called “Instance-hours (IH)” (1 instance running for 1 hour). These instances will be similar to the instances you can see in the Admin Console today with the exception that we will be improving our scheduler to ensure each instance has an appropriate level of utilization. IHs can either be pay-as-you-go ($0.08/IH) or you can commit to a minimum number of IHs over the course of a week and pay less for those reserved IHs ($0.05/IH).

APIs: All APIs which are currently charged as CPU hours will instead be charged per operation. This is intended to make it easier to predict and understand the cost of an application. Our website contains the details of the API pricing.

Datastore Storage: High Replication Datastore (HRD) storage is being reduced in price from $0.45/G/month to $0.24/G/month as of today. HRD has delivered essentially 99.999% uptime since we launched it in January. As of today HRD is the default option for new applications, and we strongly encourage users of the M/S Datastore to migrate to HRD. Master/Slave Datastore storage will increase to $0.24/G/month when App Engine leaves Preview. We are actively working on better tools to make this migration easier.