ODK community,
I received the message below from Google today. Would we anticipate
that the pricing changes are likely to cause many of us to need a paid
account for Aggregate hosting? For example, under a usage scenario of
a 250 parameter text/numerical survey without multimedia features and
20,000 survey entries a year be likely to now require a paid or
premium account?
Thanks for your help!
David
Dear Google App Engine Application Administrator,
In May at Google I/O we announced that Google App Engine would be
leaving Preview status later this year. As part of Google's long-term
commitment to App Engine, we are also updating our policies, pricing
and support model to reflect its status as a fully supported Google
product. We plan to roll this out in the second half of September but
we wanted to let you know what this will mean for you and your App
Engine applications. Please be aware that the timeline may change, but
you can keep up to date on our progress on the App Engine blog. We
plan to send a second email once the new pricing is in effect.
For all paid applications using the High Replication Datastore (HRD),
we will be introducing a new 99.95% uptime SLA. The current draft form
of the SLA can be found at http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html.
For apps not using HRD, we will also soon release a tool that will
assist with the migration from Master/Slave (M/S) to HRD (you can sign
up to be in the Trusted Tester for the tool here: http://goo.gl/3jrXu).
We would like to emphasize that the SLA only applies to applications
that have both signed up to be a paid App and use the HRD Datastore.
App Engine has a 3 year deprecation policy. This policy applies to the
entire App Engine platform with the exception of "trusted tester" and
"experimental" APIs. This is intended to allow you to develop your
app with confidence knowing that you will have sufficient notice if we
plan to make any backward-incompatible API changes that will impact
your application.
We will be updating the Terms of Service with language more geared
towards businesses. A draft of the new ToS can be found at
http://code.google.com/appengine/updated_terms.html.
We are introducing new Premier Accounts that will have access to
Operational Support, invoice-based billing, and allow companies to
create as many applications as they need for $500 per account per
month (plus usage fees). If you are interested in a Premier Account,
please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.
We will be moving to a new pricing structure that ensures ongoing
support of App Engine. Details of the new structure can be found at
http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html. This
includes lowering the free quotas for all Apps. Almost all
applications will be billed more under the new pricing. Once App
Engine leaves preview this pricing will immediately go into effect,
but we've done a few things to ease the transition:
If you sign up for billing or update your budget between now and
October 31st we will give you a $50 credit.
In order to help you understand your future costs we are now providing
a side by side comparison of your old bill to what your new bill would
be. You can find these in your Admin Console under "Billing history"
by clicking on any of your "Usage Reports". Please review this
information. It's important that you study this projected billing and
begin any application tuning that you want to be in effect prior to
the new bill taking effect.
We have created an Optimization Article to help you determine how you
could optimize your application to reduce your costs under the new
model.
We have created a Billing FAQ based on the questions many of our
customers have had about the new pricing model.
The new pricing model charges are based on the number of instances you
have running. This is largely dictated by the App Engine Scheduler,
but for Python we will not be supporting concurrent requests until
Python 2.7 is live. Because of this, and to allow all developers to
adjust to concurrent requests, we have reduced the price of all
Frontend Instance Hours by 50% until November 20th.
Finally, if you have any additional questions or concerns please
contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com.
In order to graduate from Preview status, we've made and continue to
make large investments in platform features, scalability, and
stability that your applications will benefit from. Thank you for
your support, commitment, and feedback on App Engine as it has
developed. We look forward to working with you for years to come!
Thank You,
The App Engine Team
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You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update
you about important changes to your Google App Engine account.