Last week we rolled out side-by-side billing to give you a more detailed preview of how you’ll be affected by the price changes that we announced in May . We received a variety of feedback and have made a few important changes based on it. Our intent is to be as open and transparent about the changes as possible and to give you enough time to prepare. In that spirit, our Engineering Director has also shared some of his personal thoughts .Extended review period : We’re now giving you almost eight weeks before introducing the new pricing. You now have until November 1 to configure and tune your application to manage your costs. Increased free Instance Hours : We are increasing the number of free Instance Hours from 24 to 28. This means that people who are using a free app to try out App Engine can run a single instance all day with a few spikes and still remain below our free quota. This will be reflected in the comparison bills soon.Extended discount : We’ll continue to offer the 50% discount on instance prices until December 1st, at which time Python 2.7 should be available. Python 2.7 will include support for concurrent requests, which could further lower your costs. Faster Usage Reports : We appreciate the importance of quickly being able to see the effect your tuning has on your bill and starting today we’ll provide your Usage Report (and the included comparison bills) within one day instead of the previous three. Better analysis tools : We are working on better ways for you to model the cost of your apps. We will add the “billing” line into the instances graph on the Admin Console. We’re adding datastore billing information into the dev console to making it easier for you to track how the changes you make affect your bill, which should also help lower the cost. Premier accounts : we know a lot of our customers are eagerly awaiting Premier accounts to get operational support, offline billing, unlimited accounts, and the SLA. So we will not wait until November 1st for this, but rather launch Premier accounts as soon as possible. If you are interested in a Premier account, please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com .Set Max Idle instances : Setting Max Idle Instances to a lower level will help lower your costs as we will only charge for idle instances up to the maximum you set. This could impact your performance so it’s worth reading up on the ramifications. Always-On reflected in bills : Currently the side-by-side bills still include the cost of always-on even though it will be retired when the new pricing launches (to be replaced by min idle instances). We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate. Reserved instance hours : The simplest way to lower the charge for instance hours is to consider using reserved instance hours. They are 37.5% cheaper than on-demand, but you do need to commit to a certain number of them over the course of a week. Managing resources : Check out this article , which provides more helpful advice on how to efficiently manage your resources and lower costs. appengine_updated_pricing@google.com .
Excited about the analysis tools. Thanks for listening to our feedback.
ReplyDeleteI would like to say thanks App Engine team to listen to your user; the 28 instance hours increase is a gooood news.
ReplyDeleteMy billing went from $0.14/day to $3-$4/day (i can't afford $4/day... $1/day is my maximum right now).
ReplyDeleteI set the "Set Max Idle instances" to 1 since I don't really need more than that most of the time, the 5-8 instances that I had were idle almost all day serving few requests.
My costs are down to $0.39/day. 3x increase is more than ok with me, the old prices were to cheap anyway.
New pricing model is ok, but terrible job of explaining the new situation. Seeing from 0.14 to 3-4, is annoying. And having to wait 3 days to see if I could lower it down was even more annoying.
Now that this is settled... Back to developing my appengine app. Looking foreword to python2.7 and datastore search :)
Thanks
App Engine team,
ReplyDeleteThis is great news. The last week has been very frustrating for many people, and I think this will go along way to helping repair some of the lost good will. This shows that you are listening to us and responding to our feedback. Keep up the good work, and together we can all build the community and end up on the other side of this billing change with a strong App Engine community