As is the fashion when you are the world's favorite search engine/portal/SEO-optimizer, Google has detailed its latest application development focused news in a relaxed and informal blog from one its product managers rather than the more formal press release style. The company's Jessie Jiang has this week noted that there are more than 200,000 developers who have created apps on Google's cloud services and that this week has seen the announcement of several enhancements to its services targeted at programmers looking to build applications in the cloud.
Seeking to highlight its recognition of the importance of uptime guarantees, easy management, and support, the search giant now offers Google App Engine Premier Accounts for $500 per month. For this sum, developers will reportedly receive premier support, a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, and the ability to create an unlimited number of apps on their account domain.
The company has also announced the limited (free of charge for now) preview of Google Cloud SQL to power Google App Engine applications with a relational database in a fully managed cloud environment. The proposition being that a programmer can focus on developing applications and services free from the chores of managing, maintaining, and administering relational databases.
Why announce one new developer enhancement when you can make it a party is clearly Google's philosophy; so also making headlines this week is Google Cloud Storage's emergence out of the company's Code Labs sector. This newly released beast is now called Google Cloud Storage and it boasts a service that lets users store data on Google's infrastructure with very "high reliability, availability, and performance". As well as compatibility with static content (e.g., images and video), this service will also (logically) work with other Google services like App Engine, Prediction API, and Big Query.
Finally, in this quite neatly grouped set of developer augmentations is the Google Prediction API, which has similarly graduated from a labs-based existence to form an offering that gives what the company lists as "two of the most requested features" for the API: PMML v4.01 support and data anomaly detection.
"Prediction API has a variety of use cases from helping increase fuel economy to creating movie recommendation services. It is one of the services which provides a clean and simple API to machine learning that anybody can understand," said Google's Jiang. "At the same time, it is hosted in the cloud and situated for integration with your web application. We are enabling our enterprise customers to build business solutions that take advantage of the computing power and scalability of Google's cloud services without all the hassles of deployment of applications."
