Google's App Engine recently revealed a new pricing structure for those wanting to rent computing power from Google beyond its free quota. The pricing structure is in response to those applications that scaled beyond that of the free quota, often shutting down service once the quotas were hit.The downside to the announcement is the quotas for using the service for free are being reduced on February 24th to make way for the more pricey options.According to Google's announcement, the pricing plan beyond the free quotas are:
- $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage.
- $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.
- $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
- $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application
Ultimately, the pricing structure to use App Engine is competitive with Amazon's EC2. Google's only leg up is the free quotas practical for young sites or those just starting.After February 24th, the new free quotas will be 6.5 hours of CPU time and 1 Gigabyte of data transfer per day. That's down from 46 hours and 10 gigabytes in and 10 gigabytes out per day. The full list of quotas is available from the App Engine siteGoogle App Engine is a way for developers to rent out computing resources from Google. Relying on Google's systems bypasses the need for doing it yourself by renting from expensive data centers and also relying on Google to take care of reliability and uptime. Google is more or less known for being able to handle scalability well, so in many ways App Engine allows developers to spend more time developing, and less time babysitting web servers.See Also:
