Google App Engine Gets System Management, Quota Dashboards and ... Pricing!

Google App Engine, a platform for letting users develop applications in the Python language and host them on Google's infrastructure, is getting a lot of attention today.

Earlier today, Dec. 16, Zoho pledged allegiance to the Google platform by integrating it to work with Zoho Creator.

Later in the day, Google unveiled a system status site, a resource quota dashboard and a billing feature, all for App Engine. The features augment an app platform that has been fairly bare bones in the management and monitoring category, enabling it to better compete with Amazon.com's Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform and other PAAS (platform as a service) providers.

As you might expect, the App Engine System Status dashboard monitors the performance of application components.

Included are up-to-the-minute, though not real-time, system status checks; daily downtime status check for each of the Google APIs; and detailed latency and error-rate graphs for the App Engine components, including Datastore, Images, Mail, Memcache, Serving, URL Fetch and Users.

Google will also use this dashboard to announce scheduled downtime and explain any issues that affect App Engine apps. Tom Stocky, director of Google Developer Products, noted in a blog post:


Building in dependencies to third-party services or moving to a new hosting infrastructure is not something developers take lightly. This new App Engine dashboard provides some of the same monitoring data that we use internally, so you can make informed decisions about your hosting infrastructure.

One App Engine programmer congratulated Stocky and Co. in this comment, noting that it was good Google created this dashboard before a customer revolt. No subtle threat there.

Google also said this tool would complement work done by Hyperic with its CloudStatus monitoring tool, but I would argue this will neutralize that product, which was free anyway. Why leave the App Engine environment if you don't have to?

In a related dashboard, the Quota Details tool charts resource quotas to let users track how much of the free quota bandwidth, storage and CPU their apps are using. Users can simply click the "Quota Details" link on the dashboard for any application.

Finally, Google unveiled its previously announced billing plan, which lets programmers buy additional capacity beyond the free quotas.

For this feature, Google is borrowing a page from its AdWords book, letting App Engine users buy capacity based on a daily budget for their applications. Users, who will pay by the drink for CPU, storage and e-mail resources, will get fine-grained control over this daily budget.

GigaOm's Alistair Croll notes that it's easy for Google to offer a free daily quota because App Engine isn't built around virtual machines the way Amazon EC2 is. Will this prompt Amazon.com to introduce free cloud computing quotas for applications?

Croll suggests that Google is building an ecosystem for programmers to build and sell their software, and he's correct, especially when you note the company's willingness to work with Salesforce.com and Zoho to enable disparate cloud computing platforms to interoperate.

This innovation is all very exciting and portends great things for 2009; more complete, connected compute clouds. This will take on greater significance once Microsoft gets its Windows Azure environment up and running.

If Linux has been the alternative to Windows in the last decade, the work Google, Salesforce.com, Zoho, et al. are doing in SAAS (software as a service) will be the alternative to next-generation Windows.

Users will have the choice that makes the market so rich and inviting. If only the economy will cooperate.