Hello, Google announced a "business" version of AppEngine some time ago
http://code.google.com/appengine/business/ It's got an SLA which is published in draft at http://code.google.com/appengine/business/sla.html Prices for public apps are still not listed (and I guess it would take quite a long time to get them published). I don't know if regular AppEngine will benefit from a similar SLA, but in the Business FAQ they state developers can "get these features by migrating your app to Google App Engine for Business", so I guess no SLA will be published for regular GAE. I hope terms stated in the SLA draft can help you figure out what you can offer to customers. As a developer I'd better leave SLAs and customer refunds questions to lawyers, since they can be more accurate in evaluating their implications (sad but true) :-(. Regards Lorenzo On Jun 14, 1:23 pm, rvjcallanan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All, > > This is a roadmap question hoping for a response from a member of the > Google App Engine Team. > > When GAE finally moves out of Beta (is January 2011 too optimistic?), > there is a general expectation that developers will be able to run > mission-critical web apps with best-of-breed scaling, redundancy and > downtime. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this assumption (and if I > am wrong then that raises other obvious questions). > > When that nirvana moment arrives, I expect that Google will have fine- > tuned its SLA to reflect its confidence in the robustness of its GAE > platform and associated infrastructure. > > But what about GAE developers whose apps provide "critical" services > to end-users - a CRM application would be a good example. In this > case, the developer would be expected to provide an SLA to his > customers. Obviously the two main technical considerations in framing > this SLA will be the quality of the App Software (the developer's > responsibility) and the reliability of the platform/infra-structure > (Google's responsibility). > > Looking purely at the platform/infra-structure side of things, a > conservative end-user SLA might water down Google uptime guarantees > just to give a little wriggle room. But the guarantees are not the > real issue here. The difficulty lies in what recourse the end-user has > to an SLA violation. If Google fails to meet it's uptime guarantees, > e.g. due to a major outage taking a couple of days to stabilise, then > what recourse can the developer realistically expect from Goggle if he > has 10,000 angry business customers? > > Of course this question is pertinent to all "hosting" companies. The > critical difference here is the level of control which the developer > has in a GAE scenario compared to, say, a dedicated server cluster. > For example, in a dedicated server scenario, you could have a worst- > case disaster-recovery plan in place to get your web app back on-line > within say 8 hours. But with GAE, that level of control is completely > relinquished to Google. And it is worsened by the fact that your app > is mixed up with zillions of other apps in the GAE soup. > > I'm not expecting miracle answers here. I'm thinking more in terms of > how GAE developers can approach end-user SLAs, bearing in mind that a > watered-down SLA could be a deal breaker for end-users. I'm wondering > also if Google is thinking of offering enhanced GAE services for > developers of critical apps, offering an extra level of redundancy > using a special "backup" cloud on independent infra-structure. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
