Google aims App Engine at the enterprise
Google's now aiming it's cloud-based App Engine at the enterprise. Previously, it had been more of a consumerish type of offering, mainly for developers to tool around, for small-time or experimental apps.
With that, the enterprise platform-as-a-service market now really gets hot and heavy, with contenders such as IBM and Amazon Web Services in the mix.
Google's new offerings in this space include Google App Engine Premier Accounts, priced at a flat $500 per month and including premier support, a 99.95% uptime service level agreement "and the ability to create unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain," Jiang says. Last week, Google announced a limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, designed to power your App Engine applications with a relational database in a fully managed cloud environment.
While Google brands its offering as "premier support," in the true do-it-yourself credo of the Web world, this is a bare-bones offering, warns SOA World's Maureen O'Gara and InfoWorld's Bill Snyder: "Interested parties are advised to read its terms of service and definitions of downtime before rushing in," says O'Gara. "Google is demanding that users try hard to fix any problems before bothering Google in writing and don't expect any help on weekends or late at night."
A Google App Engine customer needing help after 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time is out of luck, Snyder adds. "If support were free, that would certainly be understandable. But App Engine customers who opt for the $500-a-month Premier service, are no better off -- support stops at 6 p.m. Pacific time for them, too. (It reopens at midnight, leaving a six-hour gap.) Got a problem on the weekend or a holiday? Sorry, nobody's home."