Google has just started informing developers who use Google App Engine that the service will be leaving preview mode in late September. I’ve included parts of the email received by developer Darren Stuart below. From viewing the new pricing link, it appears that the cloud services offered by Google will now be known as, “Google Cloud Services”.

The biggest change comes to the pricing model in which Google notes, “…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..” Pricing will fall into three tiers: free, paid and premium. The paid plan will be $9/app and the premium plan will be $500/account. It is important that if you use Google Cloud Services/App Engine that you review the pricing because Google notes that the pricing will go into effect immediately once the preview mode is turned off in September.

Some important bits from the email:

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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).”

Google has created an optimization faq to help you streamline your apps to keep the costs down. There is also a billing faq to help understand the new pricing model. Google is also offering a $50 credit if you modify your budget or setup billing on your Google Cloud Services/App Engine account.

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On Tuesday morning, hosting service Media Temple was out of service while the company dealt with a DNS resolution issue. Media Temple staff provided an overview of what happened in the comments section of my post.

Now today Amazon Web Services is down — actually only parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering is down. I use their S3 storage service and that is up and running. As of 9:00AM Eastern, the following message provides the current status related to the downtime, “6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.”

It’s interesting to watch bloggers including Martin Bryant and Mike Butcher only point to the same set of sites (Quora, Foursquare, Reddit and Hootsuite) that use Amazon’s EC2 and are down. There are plenty of other sites that are down including Easybib, a site run by a close friend of mine that is the largest online bibliography site in the world. And Easybib is just one example of time-critical services that are affected. So while it’s easy for us to look at a few social media services that are affected, just think about all of the business, professional and utility services that are also currently down.

Update 10am Eastern – it looks like the problems are expanding – here’s the latest update:

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.

You can follow the updates around the Amazon EC2 issues on the Amazon Health Dashboard. As with all downtime, please feel free to report in the comments if your site is down due to the Amazon issue.

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Earlier today Amazon announced the launch of their Cloud Drive service. Amazon describes the service, “these services (Cloud Drive plus their player apps for web and Android) enable customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.”

MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka notes that the launch, “isn’t earth shaking”.

The Amazon Cloud Drive service comes with 5GB of storage at no cost. You can upgrade to 20GB for $20/year, 50Gb for $50/year and up to 1TB for $1,000/year. If you purchase a MP3 album on Amazon, you get a one-year upgrade to the 20GB level for free.

Here’s how to get the upgrade to 20Gb for only $0.69 — purchase the Trouty Mouth Glee album on Amazon. If Glee isn’t your cup of tea, you could purchase a Beethoven album for $0.89. The Glee album is already up to the #6 paid MP3 album on Amazon – let’s see if we can push it to #1!

The upgrade should be instantly added after you purchase an album. Here’s the email I received after I purchased the Beethoven album, “Thanks to your recent purchase of an Amazon MP3 album, you have qualified for a free year of the Amazon Cloud Drive 20 GB storage plan starting today for one year. You can find details about Cloud Drive at: (url removed). This storage plan is not set to renew automatically and will be reverted back to the free 5 GB plan at the end of the promotion. If you have already upgraded your Amazon Cloud Drive account to a paid storage plan of 20 GB or higher when you qualified for this offer, this offer has been saved to your account as a $20 credit toward future Amazon Cloud Drive fees you may incur due to the renewal or upgrade of your existing plan. If you elect to downgrade your plan to a free plan at the time of renewal, your upgrade offer will be automatically applied to the 20 GB plan at that time.”

Note: the two links to Amazon are affiliate links.

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Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of CloudFormation today. No we are not talking about cirrus clouds here.  The blog post announcing the launch, written by Amazon’s Jeff Barr, talks about baking and recipes and the difference between a cook and a baker. I guess today if you use Amazon Web Services, you can become a baker.

Becoming a baker means, “you can create an entire stack with one function call.” You setup a template of services and then when you run the job, Amazon will create and setup everything to your recipe. The recipe can include pretty much all of Amazon Web Services offerings including EC2, load balancers, Simple DB, SQS (Simple Queue Service), SNS (Simple Notification Service), etc. The template is written in JSON.

The blog post provides a sample template which “bakes” a WordPress setup on Amazon Web Services. It appears that if your goal is to run WordPress on Amazon, you could use their template, make your specific changes, and be up and running in minutes.

Jeff has another blog post showing how the CloudFormation process works within the admin console. Some of the sample templates include: Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, PHP Hello World and Rails Hello World applications.

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One of the things I like about Amazon Web Services (that’s the cloud computing division of Amazon) is how often they add new features and options to the various services under the umbrella of Amazon Web Services. I’ve also noticed a bunch of small UI improvements over the past few weeks. And unlike other cloud computing vendors, they continue to work to lower the prices of their services.

Today Amazon announced the launch of Multipart Upload for the S3 storage service. As an aside, this reminds me of using newsgroups in the mid-1990s where you would download 180 parts to get one image of Cindy Crawford. The Multipart Upload allows you to upload large files in parts and then Amazon puts the pieces together to create the final file. Amazon says this new feature is great for uploading multiple parts of the one file at the same time, ability to pause and resume and upload and also the ability to upload a file of unknown size.

You can find out more about using the new Multipart Upload with Java, .NET and PHP on the Amazon developer documentation site. The Multipart Upload also works with the REST API. If reading documentation isn’t your style, there’s also a demo webcast next week.

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Last week Amazon Web Services (that’s the cloud computing division of Amazon) announced a reduction in pricing for the largest versions of their EC2 server offering.

Today Amazon has launched a new version of their EC2 server — the “micro instance”.

Amazon’s Jeff Barr explains how the Micro instances work, “Micro Instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are available now in all Regions. You can buy Reserved Micro Instances and you can acquire Micro Instances on the Spot Market. Interestingly enough, they are available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors, both with 613 MB of RAM. The Micro Instances have no local, ephemeral storage, so you’ll need to Boot from EBS.”

It looks like the Micro instances could also be a good option for starting with EC2 as you can always move to one of the larger server offerings if the need arises.

Jeff also notes that the Micro instances could be used for non-traditional uses including:

1. DNS servers, load balancers, proxies, and similar services that handle a relatively low volume of requests.
2. Lightweight cron-driven tasks such as monitoring, health checks, or data updates.
3. Hands-on training and other classroom use.

Pricing for the Micro instances starts at $0.02 (two cents) per hour for Linux/Unix and $0.03 (three cents) per hour for Windows.

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Amazon Web Services keeps reducing pricing on their cloud computing services. This past June they reduced pricing on their cloudfront CDN offering. Today they announced a reduction of up to 19% on High Memory Double Extra Large (m2.2xlarge) and Quadruple Extra Large (m2.4xlarge) instances for Linux/UNIX and Windows. These server instances are part of Amazon’s EC2 offering.

From the announcement, “Effective immediately, we have lowered the On-Demand and Reserved prices for High Memory Double Extra Large (m2.2xlarge) and Quadruple Extra Large (m2.4xlarge) instances for Linux/UNIX and Windows by up to 19%. If you have existing Reserved Instances, your hourly usage rate starting September 1st will be lowered to the new usage rate and your estimated bill will reflect these changes later this month. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and are excited to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices.”

To-date I’ve been pleased with my experiences using a variety of Amazon’s cloud computing services. The only area I would suggest for improvement is to create a customer service group that’s as good and responsive as the main Amazon customer service group.

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Amazon’s CloudFront service is part of their Amazon Web Services offering. CloudFront is a content delivery networks or CDN. If you aren’t familiar with how a CDN works, here’s an easy way to think about it. When you upload your files to a webserver, the files generally sit in one place at your hosting company’s physical location. CloudFront (and any CDN) takes your files and puts them in a variety of locations to speed up the delivery to the end user. The idea is that the shorter the trip, the faster the delivery. We added CloudFront to CN last and it has helped the site to load both faster and smoother.

Amazon has made three important announcements today related to the CloudFront service. First, they have dropped the price of using CloudFront by 25%. Pricing  now starts at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.

Next, CloudFront now supports SSL for secure transfers. To use the new SSL option, just change the links from http to http to your CloudFront content.

Lastly, and most importantly for Yankees fans, Amazon has opened a NYC edge location. This means people accessing your content from NYC and the northeast will grab your content quicker. We do believe that Mets fans will also be able to use the new edge location.

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The Amazon S3 storage service is currently showing elevated error rates. We’ve noticed several images not loading correctly and we’ve heard from multiple CN readers with the same issue on their sites. The issues are apparently only hitting the U.S. Standard centers — other S3 centers including Northern California, Europe and Asia are functioning correctly.

The Amazon service health dashboard shows an update as of 5:01 Pacific Time noting, “We are investigating elevated error rates.”

As of November 2009, Amazon S3 stored over 82 billion objects.

Leave a comment if you use the S3 service and are experiencing issues.

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Last December, Amazon Web Services lowered their pricing  for the S3 storage service. Today Amazon announced that they have reduced the outbound data transfer chages for all of their services by $0.02/GB. The affected services include: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon VPC.

The new outbound data transfer pricing will be:

• First 10 TB per Month: $0.15 per GB
• Next 40 TB per Month: $0.11 per GB
• Next 100 TB per Month: $0.09 per GB
• Over 150 TB per Month: $0.08 per GB

Amazon CloudFront, their content delivery network (CDN), has also reduced rates for the service by $0.02/GB. Amazon’s Jeff Barr noted, “We are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices.”

In other cloud computing news, last month Rackspace raised their cloud service monthly base pricing by 50% to a base rate of $150/month and reduced their overage charges.

Update: Om Malik has a related post from a chat he had with the Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in Munich.

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This evening Rackspace sent a notice to all current customers of the Rackspace Cloud service (formerly Mosso) about some changes to the pricing structure for their Rackspace Cloud service.

The big change is a 50% increase in the base price for all new accounts. The old pricing had a base of $100/month and the new pricing has a base of $149/month. Current customers will remain at the previous $100/month pricing.

Rackspace notes the reasoning for the increase, “Although the price for Cloud Sites has not been changed for over three years, the cost of managing the Cloud Sites platform has increased.  We felt it was necessary to update prices for new customers to reflect the value provided from the service, while still remaining very competitive versus other cloud platform as a service offerings.”

The reduction comes in a change to the overage charges which are now $0.22/GB which is a reduction from the $0.25/GB previously charged. Rackspace notes that this decrease is to align better with their other cloud service offerings.

Editor’s note: we use Rackspace Cloud for CenterNetworks and pay full price.

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Last month Amazon announced that 82 billion objects are stored on the S3 cloud computing storage service.

Today Amazon has made two announcements regarding pricing for the S3 storage service. First, Amazon has setup a dedicated “sales” site to help convince business users to switch to Amazon cloud computing services. It’s called the AWS Economics Center and has lots of charts and graphs.

The other change Amazon has made is regarding the pricing for S3. Pricing for the largest users — those using multi-petabytes will see a 15% reduction on their usage fees. The discount is for the US and EU regions. The EU region is also receiving a discount for overall S3 usage at any level and EC2 computing usage as well.

The other change applies to all customers through June 30, 2010, “data Transfer into AWS will be free of charge from now through June 30th, 2010, making it even easier for customers to get their data into AWS.”

Looks like Amazon is on a mission to acquire customers.

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Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has posted a chart (displayed below) of Amazon S3 storage usage over the past three years. The latest number for Q3 2009 is 82 billion objects inside of S3. Pretty amazing growth considering that the service was barely used in 2006. Early 2007 shows 2-3 billion objects.

So many startups I talk to are using Amazon’s cloud computing services in some fashion. For example, Twitter uses S3 for icon storage. We use S3 for storage on all of our projects including all static images and files on CenterNetworks.

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IBM has published an announcement of a new partnership with Chinese city Dongying. IBM notes that they are bringing cloud computing the Dongying in the hopes of making the city “smarter”. From the announcement, “Dongying will use IBM cloud technology to build a common platform to promote e-government, and support the city’s transition from an industrial to services-based economy.”

Additionally IBM noted, “IBM is helping the Dongying government build a cloud that will provide software development and test resources for software startup companies via the web through a self-service user interface.”

Dongying will create The Yellow River Delta Cloud Computing Center which will be used to foster growth in the city and help its petroleum industry develop more innovative application services.

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NY-based CA has announced the acquisition of NetQoS today for $200 million in an all-cash transaction.  CA trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol CA. NetQoS had annual revenue of $56 million in 2008 and has over 1,000 active customers worldwide.

The release talks about the combined technologies of both companies and the strengths for their customers. The combined companies, “will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services.”

They also discuss cloud computing and note, “As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.”

From the release, “At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit”. The release also notes that a “majority” of NetQoS’ 250 employees will remain on with CA.

The deal is expected to close by December 31.

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