Google now lets you pay for Google App Engine

Google are introducing paid-for extensions to Google App Engine quotas, which is great as it lets you build more complex applications if you're willing to pay the rates. At the same time they're reducing the baseline free quotas. That's a shame, but only to be expected in a recession: at least there's still wiggle room there for the casual developer to play with the service.

As far as I can see there's still no SLA in the Terms and Conditions (11.3 seems to be fairly clear on this), which is a thorny issue, not just for our clients. There's also no option I can see to increase your file number quota (as opposed to increasing the quota for total disk space) which means that deploying a Django app of any complexity presumably remains a pain in the arse.

Comments

It's still of beta quality (in usual meaning of beta - iow. "not ready for prime time but close"), just look at still unresolved issues - apart of usual "please provide PHP or whatever else" whinings, there is at least 50-60 of issues that severely limit the platform usability (no locale support, authentication only in English, wrong encoding of emails sent - just to name a few).

I suspect the beancounters took the initiative and said "hey, they want to pay so we'll let them pay even more!". This resembles vendor lock-in to me.