Google killed App Engine for Business

Last month, at the Google I/O conference, Google announced changes in GAE pricing, and caused panic among the developers. Without going into details, we'll just say that the developers initially incorrectly calculated the new fees, and only after Google's clarification post, it became clear that the prices would jump, but not so much. However, in the shadow of this panic another small announcement was unnoticed - the enterprise version of Google App Engine, launched a year ago - was closed. This does not mean that Google is no longer positioning its PaaS platform for business. Most of the features of the enterprise version (99.95% SLA, support for SSL, SQL, Spring framework) will be soon implemented in the basic version. However, this means that Google has done a lot of mistakes with the PaaS platform and currently loosing the game in competition with Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, VMWare.

And, strange enough, that the main reason of Google's failure in this sphere is the proprietary technologies of its platform. It supports only Google's own database - Big Table, and only 3 languages (Python, Java and Google's own language - Go). Thus, applications built on GAE can be hardly moved to any other cloud platform (so the developer stick to one platform), and the existing applications should be rebuilt to be moved to GAE. Unlike Google App Engine, the competing platforms (especially VMWare's Cloud Foundry) tend to provide developers with standard, open technologies and let them port their applications to other platforms.

See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms