Google aims revamped cloud tools at enterprise devs
Google has added enterprise-level support to its cloud-based App Engine platform, while also graduating various developer cloud tools from its Labs.
On Tuesday, Google product manager Jessie Jiang posted a blog announcing the launch of Google App Engine Premier Accounts. Priced at $500 (£317) per month, the service includes "premier support", a 99.95 percent uptime service level agreement (SLA) and the option of creating unlimited apps within the premier account domain.
The standard App Engine is free in terms of recurring costs, although developers have to pay for the resources they use while running their apps on Google's platform, and limits users to 10 apps per account.
App Engine is Google's rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It has been around since 2008 in preview form and is only now graduating to a fully-fledged enterprise product. Last week Google unveiled a limited preview of its Cloud SQL product, in an attempt to bolster its cloud portfolio with a simple, managed relational database.
"Cloud SQL is available free of charge for now. It will continue to evolve as we work out the kinks during the preview," Jiang wrote.
Meanwhile, Google has also graduated its cloud storage system out of the company's Code Labs. Launched in 2010 as Google Storage for Developers, it is now called Google Cloud Storage and comes with a new pricing scheme that introduces volume discounts for some users.
"In addition to leaving Labs, we are announcing several new features," Jiang said. "You can now read and write files to Google Cloud Storage via the App Engine Files API. We are also making detailed usage information, including access analytics and storage use data, available to all our customers."
Jiang also noted that the Prediction API, which lets developers hook their apps into Google's cloud-based machine learning tools, was also being taken out of the labs. The new version 1.4 of the API adds PMML v4.01 support and data anomaly detection.
Services that the Prediction API can tap into include document and email classification, spam detection, diagnostic and churn analysis tools, among others.