Perspectives - Google App Engine

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Google has announced that the App Engine free quota resources will be reduced and pricing has been announced for greater-than-free tier usage. The reduction in free tier will be effective 90 days after the February 24^th announcement and reduces CPU and bandwidth allocations by the following amounts:

· CPU time free tier reduced to 6.4 hours/day from 46 hours/day

· Bandwidth free tier reduced to 1 GB/day from 10 GB/day

Also announced February 24^th is the charge structure for usage beyond the free-tier:

$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

--jrh

James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services

1200, 12^th Ave. S., Seattle, WA, 98144
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | james@amazon.com

H:mvdirona.com | W:mvdirona.com/jrh/work | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com

Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:41:29 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Comments [3] - Trackback
Services

Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:20:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Interesting. My first impulse was that it's kind of unfair to get people hooked and then raise the price, I'm much more likely to adopt a service if I think the provider is actually making a sustainable business out of it. Plus, even 4 hours/day of CPU time for free is pretty generous, a VPS with that kind of guaranteed CPU would be at least $30/month.

Overall the pricing is pretty attractive, on par with AWS, but the fine grained billing on CPU use seems like it could be a big savings over EC2 for web application use patterns. Plus, no worry about managing instances. On the other hand, the potential for lock-in is a little unsettling.

eas

Saturday, February 28, 2009 1:11:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Getting service pricing to exactly parallel the cost of providing the service is very difficult to do prior to operating at scale. I expect it’ll be common to see new services need to do some tuning as they move from beta to a public offering.

--jrh
jrh@mvdirona.com

James Hamilton

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:27:58 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Hi James, I have a question...

What does Google means on this: "CPU time free tier reduced to 6.4 hours/day from 46 hours/day"? what is CPU time? 6.4 hours/day means my site will be up and running 6.4 hours a day when using free appengine? what is "reduced from 36 hours/day"? I don´t understand... day has only 24 hours... maybe an app could use more time if using computers in tandem? what about an app that is not being used for a couple of hours? this extends to 8.4 the hours my app will be available on the Internet?

Thank you for all your support!

Giannino Alvarez

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