Tech Stuff

Today Google announced they have opened up Google Apps so that anyone can signup.  They also released the planned pricing for people who exceed the free quota.  However, they are not yet offering the ability for developers to purchase additional resources.

$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

I am curious how the CPU core-hour is going to be defined.  Will it be like Amazon where it is the time you instance is running whether or not your instance is actually processing anything.  Or will they just charge for the cpu used while processing requests to your application.

Google also announced that a new image manipulation API is available.  This is the same infrastructure that is used for the Picasa Web Albums.  The other new one is the Memcache API which is a high performance caching layer.

I received my invite to use the Google App Engine last night. Time to learn some Python now as they don’t currently support PHP.

Google launches the preview release of their cloud computing environment to compete against Amazon EC2/S3 called the Google App Engine. It was limited to the first 10,000 developers that signed up and of course I didn’t make it.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

One of the parts I find interesting is that Google plans on having a free version of the service that has a pretty good allotment of resources:

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.