Google is turning up the heat with its cloud services for the enterprise. Today the company bundled up several announcements ranging from the Cloud SQL service in limited preview to promoting Cloud Storage out of Google Labs. App Engine developers are also getting a premier support option with a 99.95 Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Cloud Storage
What used to be Google Storage for Developers is now just Google Cloud Storage. The service was announced earlier this year with free trial use accounts and a promotional plan set to expire by December 31. Unlike Google App Engine pricing, which went up substantially and angered developers, the Cloud Storage pricing is actually going down.
Data uploads are now free, and download (“egress”) pricing starts at $0.12 per TB in the U.S. and Europe, $0.21 per TB in Asia. Google also charges minimal fees for requests for manipulating data (PUT, GET, POST, etc.).
New SLA for Google App Engine
For the customers Google really wants to target, there’s an new SLA in town. The App Engine Premier Accounts provide premier support and a 99.95% uptime SLA, along with the ability to create unlimited apps for a premier domain account. This will run enterprise customers $500 per month, plus whatever fees are incurred by resources used.
Google is also providing billing by invoice rather than by credit card, which will be important for companies that are making use of App Engine.
Google Cloud SQL
Google is also getting into the relational database game with Google Cloud SQL. Google Cloud SQL offers “the capabilities” of a MySQL database, so companies can deploy SQL applications in the cloud.
Right now, this is a preview-only service that doesn’t have pricing announced. Given Google’s App Engine pricing snafu earlier this year, customers might want to tread cautiously before betting the farm on this one.
Google is obviously putting a lot of wood behind its App Engine arrows. The question is whether it’s enough to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google’s argument is that it offers managed services and takes a lot of hassles out of building and deploying cloud services. The downside is that applications written for GAE are going to be a lot harder to port to competing services.
Developers, what do you think? Is Google coming up with a compelling set of services, or is the garden wall a bit too high here?
