Google Cloud Platform Blog: A few adjustments to App Engine’s upcoming pricing changes

Google Cloud Platform Blog

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A few adjustments to App Engine’s upcoming pricing changes

Friday, September 9, 2011

we rolled out side-by-side billingthat we announced in Mayhas also shared some of his personal thoughts

Extended review period: We’re now giving you almost eight weeks before introducing the new pricing. You now have until November 1 to configure and tune your application to manage your costs.

Increased free Instance Hours: We are increasing the number of free Instance Hours from 24 to 28. This means that people who are using a free app to try out App Engine can run a single instance all day with a few spikes and still remain below our free quota. This will be reflected in the comparison bills soon.

Extended discount: We’ll continue to offer the 50% discount on instance prices until December 1st, at which time Python 2.7 should be available. Python 2.7 will include support for concurrent requests, which could further lower your costs.

Faster Usage Reports: We appreciate the importance of quickly being able to see the effect your tuning has on your bill and starting today we’ll provide your Usage Report (and the included comparison bills) within one day instead of the previous three.

Better analysis tools: We are working on better ways for you to model the cost of your apps. We will add the “billing” line into the instances graph on the Admin Console. We’re adding datastore billing information into the dev console to making it easier for you to track how the changes you make affect your bill, which should also help lower the cost.

Premier accounts: we know a lot of our customers are eagerly awaiting Premier accounts to get operational support, offline billing, unlimited accounts, and the SLA. So we will not wait until November 1st for this, but rather launch Premier accounts as soon as possible. If you are interested in a Premier account, please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.

Set Max Idle instances: Setting Max Idle Instances to a lower level will help lower your costs as we will only charge for idle instances up to the maximum you set. This could impact your performance so it’s worth reading up on the ramifications.

Always-On reflected in bills: Currently the side-by-side bills still include the cost of always-on even though it will be retired when the new pricing launches (to be replaced by min idle instances). We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate.

Reserved instance hours: The simplest way to lower the charge for instance hours is to consider using reserved instance hours. They are 37.5% cheaper than on-demand, but you do need to commit to a certain number of them over the course of a week.