Google’s App Engine Changes Pricing Model

Today Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the Google App Engine, announced they will be taking the GAE and the GAE4B (Business-class) out of “preview.”

This is Google parlance for it’s time to start making money.

As an IT services firm we have often had to overlook the GAE for projects due to the relatively narrow-scope of software design architecture the GAE is built to accommodate. The announcement today is a welcome change for Google’s PaaS. Much of the business-class features found in the GAE4B are being rolled into GAE and enforced SLAs.

The downside to all of this is in order to provide the enhanced functionality Google is changing the pricing model of GAE dramatically making it very similar to the pay-for-what-you-use model Amazon Web Services employs. Free apps will now be more restricted in their free resources and paid apps now have a monthly fee on top of usage fees.

This change in pricing model doesn’t go into effect until later this year but it brings a warning for all companies looking to deploy applications to the cloud. Providers can change their pricing model at any time and you must be prepared for it. Unlike on-premise software where a change in pricing often results in either sticking with a current software version or hardware appliance and foregoing upgrades while alternative are considered, cloud vendors may not give you such latitude.

We have always believed strongly in having a cloud deployment strategy that takes vendor migration into consideration. If you haven’t considered a multi-vendor cloud strategy then perhaps now is the time.