OakLeaf Systems: Google App Engine Opens to All Comers and Gets Price List

Friday, May 30, 2008

Google App Engine Opens to All Comers and Gets Price List

Updated May 30, 2008: See end of post for Garrett Rodger's take on GAE vs. AWS pricing (from ZDNet)

Google's May 27, 2008 Google App Engine to Announce Open Sign-ups, Pricing Plans, and New APIs at Google I/O press release announces that:

Google App Engine is announcing open sign-ups. More than 150,000 developers have joined the product's waiting list over the past 6 weeks; on Wednesday, Google App Engine will be available to everyone -- no waiting required.

Later this year, once the preview period has ended, developers can expect to pay:

Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month

$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Google App Engine will provide two new APIs in the coming weeks. The image-manipulation API enables developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server, and the memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.

For comparison, here's Amazon's SimpleDB pricing:

Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Data Transfer $0.100 per GB - all data transfer in$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month

Notice Google's aggressive pricing for their version of "structured data storage"; otherwise Amazon's rates for SimpleDB are similar to Google's.

Here are the US rates for Amazon S3, which are similar to those for GAE:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.100 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests except DELETEs

Amazon EC2 has the same data transfer rates as SimpleDB and S3. EC2's Small Instance [1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform] is $0.10 per hour or approximately $72.00 per month. Google's price for 160 GB of storage (at $0.15 per GB/month) is $24.00 per month.

I'd say Google is the price leader at the moment and will set the bar for pricing by all cloud service vendors, including Microsoft, for services that aren't advertising supported (when these services go commercial.)

Update May 30, 2008: ZDNet Googling Google blogger, Garrett Rogers, finds Google App Engine pricing a disappointment in his May 29, 2008 post. Garrett makes a comparison similar to mine and concludes:

It wasn’t a secret that this was going to happen, but I have to admit, I am a bit surprised by the cost of the service. If there was any doubt before, Google has made it clear that it’s in direct competition with Amazon’s web services by making their pricing nearly identical. This surprises me because Google is the king at making things ridiculously cheap — not comparable.

As Garrett admits, it's Google's free quota of 500 MB of data storage and 5 million page views that differentiates their service. Substantially undercutting Amazon's rates for production applications might be considered predatory pricing.