Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Jill Tummler Singer , Ken Rutsky, Elizabeth White, Dana Gardner, Jeremy Geelan

Related Topics: Cloud Expo

Cloud Expo: Article

Google App Engine Goes Commercial

There are reportedly 45,000 apps currently running on App Engine

Google is ready to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform.

For the 10 months it’s been in preview it’s been free to use but limited to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU, bandwidth and whatnot to support about five million page views a month.

On Tuesday Google said it was ready to follow through on its intention to offer additional computing resources for a price and allow apps to scale beyond its free quotas. It said it’s been its most requested feature.

However, it’s going to lower its free thresholds in 90 days, claiming it overestimated the resources developers needed to get started. It thinks the free resources will still support five million page views a month.



Under the new regime, it says developers can set a daily budget for their apps representing the maximum amount they’re willing to pay for computing resources each day. They allocate this budget across CPU, bandwidth, storage and e-mail, and they pay only for what their app consumes beyond the free thresholds – prorated “to the nearest penny,” it says.

Mind you there are still no service level agreements to reimburse users if App Engine went down.

Google figures the resources paid for will scale to around 500 requests per second (qps) or more than 40 million queries a day, which is enough to handle traffic from being Slashdotted or Dugg. “In extreme cases,” it says, “(e.g. your application has been featured on Yahoo’s homepage), you can request additional CPU.”

Undercutting Amazon a trace, it’s proposing to charge 10 cents per CPU core hour and says the price covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage.

It’ll cost 10 cents per GB bandwidth incoming, 12 cents per GB bandwidth outgoing, which is supposed to cover traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.

It’ll also cost 15 cents per GB of data stored by the application a month and a thousandth of a cent per e-mail recipient for e-mails sent by the application.

Google warns users that they may notice an increase in the amount of data stored by their applications and listed in the Admin Console.

Seems data stored in the datastore incurs additional overhead, depending on the number of indexes, as well as the number (and size) of associated properties. It says this overhead can sometimes be significant and it’s been underreporting it.

So it’s doubling the free storage quota to 1GB.

Google wants the bills paid through its PayPal-like Checkout system (add VAT in the EU). And it says you can’t use multiple applications to avoid incurring fees.

There are reportedly 45,000 apps currently running on App Engine.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of clou...