Google has released a new upgrade for its popular App Engine service that allows developers to pay to extend their application’s resource quotas beyond those that have historically been offered by the free service. According to Google this has been the platform’s most oft-requested feature, as developers with rapidly growing applications have been unable to expand beyond the set thresholds to meet demand. Developers will be able to set aside a specified amount of money each day, which will be distributed across fees related to CPU usage, bandwidth, storage space, and email (you keep any money that isn’t spent that day). For more details, check out the company’s blog post here.
To coincide with today’s announcement, we’re giving away three more tickets to Google’s upcoming I/O event this May. If you’d like one, leave a comment below telling us how you’re going to use Google’s new premium quota extensions, and we’ll pick out the best ones. Be sure to use your real Email address so we can contact you directly.
“I/O event” – people at Google are complete nerds!
I’m really excited how App Engine will continue to perform in competition with Amazon’s offerings. By now, I see a clear strategic advantage for the latter, as they have a) more experience and b) management seems to be more focused on this topic that Google is.
I’m going to use them to extend data storage to Soeet.
Something I had previously not planned on doing.
Of course I am not going to let anybody that licenses our software know that the cloud their data on is Google’s, and I will keep a compressed backup on our servers, but our drive space is limited until we get more funding.
I already have tickets to Google IO, but my some of my coworkers and friends do not. I would like 1 more ticket for a friend please. I have 2 more places to fill in the car for the ride up to SF.
I lied. I can’t stand it anymore. There’s no way I’m using Google’s servers to store customer data. It’s not really secure, and it’s error and downtime proned. They’re practically giving away 1TB HDDs on Newegg, and 2U servers are like $99
http://www.surp...on-2.66ghz.html
Bandwidth in LA is so cheap, I would never, ever pay Google for it.
I do like Android and am using the maps API though. So I came clean, can I have a ticket anyway?
ahaha, that’s so funny !
I agree with you on the data security aspect of your comment but the claim that you can put together a cheap server and buy TB drives as an alternate is somewhat innocent.
What you are paying google if you use app-engine apart from the obvious three (Bandwith, Storage and CPU) is the ability to scale on demand. This is something that you cannot throw together quickly. It requires significant engineering effort and expertise to build scalable apps and google provides a great way to solve that problem.
I do this for a living. You probably didn’t know that. But who cares.
4-8 of those $99 dollar refurb servers from surplus computer behind a reverse proxy like the one Techcrunch is using (Varnish) can take A LOT of traffic and burst on a good backbone.
There is something to say for managed clustered computing, just as there is for managed programming languages.
But you’re not being metered when you write code with java, and you can do so locally.
The idea is not if you can build an infrastructure to support a LOT of traffic but at what cost and effort and more importantly when do you invest in scaling ? In the age of Digg and Techcrunch ‘on demand scaling’ has a whole new meaning. (http://en.wikip...iki/Digg_effect)
You are obviously not going to put enough servers behind a reverse proxy expecting a torrential traffic but when you do get that kind of spike can your infrastructure hold up ?
Thanks for listening.
Techcrunch itself runs on a few rsyched servers behind Varnish through 1 DNS pinhole with massive traffic.
“expecting a torrential traffic but when you do get that kind of spike can your infrastructure hold up ? ”
My guess is yes. The sites that usually go down as a result of a Digg front page posting are those that are on shared servers with minimal resources.
Buying the hardware in today’s age of hardware for nothing, meaning very little cost is the way to go. If you need brand new name brand hardware and want to use 1rst tier government style 10 gigabit duplex, then yeah, Google would be a good place to *start*. Like to create a mock up of what your schema should look like.
For small business, or even enterprise, you can probably do better than the Amazon or Google services. They are pretty rinky dink.
These services are like an educational project come to life.
TechCrunch does outsource their DNS to easydns.com, MySpace used to use UltraDNS.
If something really load crippling did happen, they could switch it off to a backup in their control panel. EasyDNS may even have an automated system to fall back to. You think they would if people pay them to big $$$ use their port 53. Ah, they probably don’t. People are lazy.
This is a bad example because it’s only 10MBPS, but locally in downtown LA, you can pick up a quarter cabinet for about $299 a month
http://www.misd...on-hosting.html
and sit 5 of those $99 rackable systems racks in there behind Varnish or the load balancer of your choice.
Of course you want 100MBPS or Gigabit duplex, and you can always negotiate with the center about that.
I’m strongly guessing that Google won’t give you Gigabit either though, so keep that in mind. They’re going to throw you on the last tier of their bandwidth while their own services take the prime stuff.
test test
Step 1) Release an opensource or Free version of a product to disrupt the market and scare the shit out of the competition.
Step 2) Sit around and do nothing while the competition lowers prices or scrambles to come out with a better offering.
Step 3) Launch a “Premium” version of your product at a fair price.
Step 4) Move on to the next industry.
I’m going to use Google App Engine as the backend to a couple iPhone apps I’d love to write. I haven’t written them yet because I’ve been too concerned about running out of quota space on App Engine, but it seems like the perfect fit for what I’m up to with the new quota extensions.
GoogleAppEngine guys offer Python and BigTable specific solution.
Now compare this with Amazon EC2 offering – it is way ahead of the game, where you can have the tech stack of your choice – no lockin nothing.
For any serious business – Amazon EC2 is clearly the choice.
I love it how the presenter keeps breathing into the microphone. Awesome
wish i could fly to SF
Amazon Web Services is the leader of the gang.
What market will Google address?
- Amazon has the early adopters market (Start-ups)
- Amazon Web Services has the support from IBM (= world wide sales) thus entering the larger enterprise and corporate business world.
- Microsoft will address its’ market: the Small and Medium Sized Businesses.
We use GAE for our web application and are very pleased!
My opinion is: with AWS you may have a larger degree of freedom but this comes to the cost of more required knowledge. With GAE you can set up your cool application and don’t waste any thoughts about traffic spikes and running more instances at specific times of the day – and the free quota is a BIG benefit for small start ups which are often faced with a hen-egg problem like:
I need servers to get the app running and serve customers – but before having money to pay the servers I need to have customers.
I’m a recent USC entrepreneurship grad with a few AppEngine projects I’m working on:
– I’m a Regular.com helps restaurants convert occasional diners into fanatics. We find out what patrons love about a restaurant and use personally-targeted promotions to give them more of it. We consolidate all this information into easy-to-use analytics to tell our customers at a glance what makes their patrons’ hearts flutter. The whole thing is built on AppEngine.
– Story Stash enables artists to focus on what they do best – entertain. It’s a storyboarding web app that declutters the creative process. I haven’t attached it to AppEngine yet (that’s my next step), but you can see a prototype in my portfolio at http://appsforartists.com It’s pretty neat. I developed the workflow under the advisement of some friends at Disney.
– 360video lets the audience member decide where he wants to look in a live video feed. It’s like QTVR for video. We’re using AppEngine to store both image content and metadata (the videos come from a CDN).
I also volunteered at the TechCrunch50. Can I please have a ticket to I/O? =)
Awesome! Glad to see USC grads active in the tech/web space. I hope your apps take off. Fight On!
Have app, will travel. Slide that I/O ticket this way.
Self-funded startup Wine by the Bar. Use a variety of front ends to note the wines you’ve tasted or cellared for future reference. Simply scan the barcode, add a note, and you’ve got the information for later.
Running Google App Engine as the server. Interfaces include a released Android app (a much improved version due out this week), email, SMS, and Facebook. Other mobile platforms slated for this summer.
And how has your experience with appengine been to this point? Pros/cons?
GAE let me go from zero to live in literally a couple weeks. The learning curve is stunningly low and the cost is free. (Let’s face it, if your site is going to get more than 5 million hits per month, the free threshold, you probably could figure a way to monetize it for the couple dollars you’d need to finance it, right?)
Pros:
+ Simple to get started, with great examples, active forums, and responsive Google R&D support.
Cons:
+ Difficult to manage database itself (difficult to make backups, upload revisions enmass, etc.). This is a very serious flaw.
+ Very limited text search. This has been harped upon constantly with sayings like, “Google is a search company, why can’t I search my data?” There are some workarounds but they are just that.
I can’t say that GAE is better than other platforms, since I’ve not used them. Given GAE’s accessibility and ease-of-use getting started, though, I would recommend it highly. Some consideration to the myriad other Google resources that come along with it need be considered too: Email for your site, map support, blogger, picasa, on and on. It’s the entire package.
Seems like I’ve had my attention too long on getting my Android app updated. GAE now as a ‘remote_api’ that allows manipulation of the datastore from scripts running on your local machine. This will allow a huge amount of freedom in manipulating the database (making backups, upgrades to datastructures, etc.). Good stuff!
Yeah would love the I/O ticket we’re using GAE to power some iphone twitter apps and for small time devs it’s great. Has all the power to launch ideas quickly.
PHP someone??
$0.15/GB/month sound really expensive.
What if I want to backup 1000GB on Google’s servers on the cloud? Do I really have to pay $1800 per year?
That just sounds completely ridiculous since TB drives cost below $100 on the open market today.
Can’t Google just buy about 2 of those to provide reliability even for the backed up content that needs to rarest amount of access and Google could just hook those two off the shelves TB hard drives to their computing cloud and dynamically scale only if required which could dynamically increase the price of storage depending on the scale of accesses required to that data.
If I want to store terrabytes of my HD video files on Google’s servers, with their current pricing for storage, I can just forget it and just keep hosting my own server on whichever 2mbit/s upload ADSL connection that I can find where I live. It sucks though that Google cannot provide a service that would be just as cheap or cheaper than building my own server.
Google needs to support PHP on App Engine as soon as possible. It will be great to host all Wordpress blogs, phpbb3 forums, mediawikis, Jaikus and other web community applications on the Google App Engine.
“That just sounds completely ridiculous since TB drives cost below $100 on the open market today.”
Not only a TB drive, you could get solid state for about that price, and you can bet your @ss that Google’s SAN array is not SS.
I’m using Google App Engine to create static Url’s for twitter images. I’m not sure if I’ll need the extra bandwidth or not, but having that option is a must-have to put anything production-worthy on App Engine.
Our plan is to use the GAE (or honestly Amazon EC2) for offloading more expensive operations off our cloud based education applications, such as advanced scheduling algorithms and perhaps analytic calculations that allow break out of the multi-tenant limits within the Force.com platform.
I’ll use the App Engine to host a Microlending Resource System we are working on.
I am going to use App Engine as the back-end for a social ad network. Current development plans have this ad network being ready to launch right around the time of the next TechCrunch50 event….
A few days back, when Yahoo BOSS started to charge, people were angry about that. Now see how people react to similar move from Google.
I am impressed by how much a single application gets just for free. It seems like you need to have a pretty busy app for it to make sense to upgrade.
I am going to use the paid extension to create a easier to use storage engine than BigTable and Sell it back to google…
MUahhh Ha Ha Ha……
You have to look beyond the numbers. Sure, you can come up with a cheaper solutions in terms of hardware and bandwidth, but the real value comes in freeing up limited people resources to focus on what makes your business different. A managed environment frees you from activities that add little value to your customers. Do you want to spend precious time on keeping your systems running, or focus on the business side?
Our new site CityCrawler will be leveraging AppEngine for JS file cosilidation and just-in-time delivery (basically a really fancy and dynamic JS script manager). It will also be used to do all image manipulation with the excellent Python lib provided. Storage of our unique “push” site notifications will be handled there in a special queue system we devised. I think these things are pretty cool uses of AppEngine, let me know where to pick up my tickets! ….joking…but seriously…
too bad they forced you to used python then restrict a lot of what you can do. me i would be too afraid of google stealing my code to use their service
I’ve been developing a wine-connoisseur site / network that connects people who love wine for the app engine. It’s not just a rating side but you actually characterize the wine and can also rate other people’s judgement and some really cool surprise features…
So far, I have been holding off with finalizing it, because the I/O limitation was always in the back of my head ~ thinking: I won’t be able to scale that up with the limitation…
I’m going to use app engine to allow firefox users to keep track of their favorite extensions.
The users install an extension which sends the profile information to appengine whenever an extension is isntalled or removed.
http://firenomi...rs/anotherjesse
Once enough data has been collected recommendations and other statistics can be shared with visitors.
Our service has been hosted on AppEngine for quite a while and I had been dreading this day since we already have elevated quotas during the beta period. We are using it to store mobile iPhone photos and all that data really adds up in terms of storage costs and bandwidth!
Luckily they are letting us keep our free elevated quotas for another 90 days
I would love to go to Google I/O!!
I am impressed by how much a single application gets just for free. It seems like you need to have a pretty busy app for it to make sense to upgrade.
My university is experimenting heavily with digital classroom technologies. Many of these technologies are experimental, conceptual, and need to be heavily refined before they can be proven. I would use GAE to experiment with applications that allow professors to engage the class by asking them questions and accepting responses through email/web/sms. Essentially, replace the clicker with a device students have. Powerpoint integration on the professor side too, so they can just initiate questions from slides.
This is great. I can use this for my facebook app, as the traffic/demand gets greater, i can easily tweak it on demand.
Definitely still interested in the free passes. Without them this is not a trip that I could justify making. With them this would be a fantastic opportunity to get access to both GAE as well as Android insights.
Groveling is not out of the question. Heck, it was Tech Crunch 50 that really made me think, “I can do this!” I owe you guys!
Still interested! Is a ticket still available? I’ve started using Gears now in addition to Android and Appengine.