Google Announces App Engine For Business

It’s Google I/O time again, and that means plenty of cool new cloud technology announcements.  One such announcement came today in the form of a new product called App Engine for Business.  It’s Google’s same cloud based application hosting platform with some new tools and features that should make it much more appealing to enterprises.

Some of the new features in App Engine for Business include a centralized administration interface, namespaces tied to your Google Apps domain, and a 99.9% uptime service level agreement.  Along with that, Google promised to have hosted SQL databases, and SSL support in the near future.

Google also announced a new partnership with VMWare that is very similar to the recent partnership between VMWare and Salesforce.com called VMForce.  The idea behind this partnership is to make it easier and quicker to develop and deploy applications to either Google App Engine for Business or one of VMWare’s other environments like VMForce.

Pricing for Google’s App Engine for Business is $8 per user per month, with a maximum of $1000 per application per month.  I like this pricing model because it scales to easily meet the needs of a small rarely used application, all the way to an application used daily by thousands of users.  If your application doesn’t have any users for a month, you don’t pay anything to Google.  On the other hand, if you have thousands of users in a month, the most you’ll pay is $1000.

Keep an eye on Google I/O for the next couple days to hear more about App Engine for Business as well other cool new technologies from Google and their partners.