Google App Engine Starts Serving The Business Cloud

Google App Engine now runs an enterprise solution for businesses to build their own apps on Google’s cloud.

Here are some of the improvements that businesses will be able to leverage with the new enterprise services (from the Google Code Blog):

Centralized administration: A new, company-focused administration console lets you manage all the applications in your domain.

Reliability and support: 99.9% uptime service level agreement, with premium developer support available.

Secure by default: Only users from your Google Apps domain can access applications and your security policies are enforced on every app.

Pricing that makes sense: Each application costs just $8 per user, per month up to a maximum of $1000 a month. Pay only for what you use.

Enterprise features: Coming later this year, hosted SQL databases, SSL on your company’s domain for secure communications, and access to advanced Google services.

Obviously, this is a move against Amazon’s cloud services. However, App Engine has been playing second fiddle to Amazon’s services for two years, so not sure how much this is going to put a dent in Amazon’s business.