Welcome!

Symbian Authors: David Deans, David Weinberger, Carmen Gonzalez, John Funnell, Lars Hartkopf

Related Topics: SAP, Open Web

SAP: Article

Virtualization - Google Puts a Price on Its Cloud

Google Has Opened Up App Engine to One and All
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
June 5, 2008 07:45 AM EDT
Reads:
 7,886

Google has opened up App Engine to one and all.

The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications – and in the process locks them into Google instead of Microsoft – has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers.

Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company’s two-day developer event in San Francisco, it took down the barricade.

Google also disclosed what it’s going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

The product will be free to get started, and during the current preview release developers will continue to be restricted to the free quota of 500MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about five million pageviews a month.

Once the preview period is over, they can expect to pay 10-12 cents per CPU core-hour. 15-18 cents per GB-month of storage, 11-13 cents per GB outgoing bandwidth and nine-11 cents per GB incoming bandwidth.

Google also says it will have two new App Engine APIs in the next few weeks: an image-manipulation API so developers can scale, rotate and crop images on the server, and a memcache API described as a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster.

Every web application deployed is of course a shot at Microsoft.

App Engine is more restrictive than the a la carte Amazon Web Services.

Applications, for instance, have to be written in Python 2.5 and you can forget MySQL and Postgres and other third-party packages.

In exchange developers get access to the Google File System (GFS) and Bigtable, Google’s storage system. Of course users need a Google account to access a service, which may inch them toward using Google Docs and YouTube.

It’s only another step from there to Google-placed AdSense ads. And for trusting Google with the click-stream and user data, a clever developer could get bought.

Published June 5, 2008 – Reads 7,886
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

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.

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.