Sounds affordable...
...but not sure what kind of developer support you get - I hope it's not Google's usual 'post in a forum which we monitor, trust me'...
Microsoft just downshifted its Azure platform cloud so it could support raw virtual machines and any old applications companies want to cram into them, and now Google has followed suit with Compute Engine. Announced today at the Google I/O extravaganza in San Francisco by Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of infrastructure at …
Hah! Google make some fantastic software, but their support - even when you pay for it - is utter shite.
Our BOFH's Google Apps gmail account 'got corrupted', some bad disks. OK, shit happens, you might think. It took 2 weeks for them to restore his account from a backup, and he lost a weeks worth of email, and he's one of the few people in the company who actually has a relationship with google support.
2 weeks to recover a mailbox - if that had happened to our CEO, we'd already be back on Notes.
I'm glad to hear that Google is finally getting into this space the right way.
When we moved to the cloud last year the options were to rewrite large portions of our app to fit the Azure or Google model or buy VM space on Amazon. At the end of the day the pricing structure of Azure and Google wasn't important. What was important is that we didn't have to rewrite the app and Amazon won our business.
The way I read this is that pretty soon there will be a price war on VMs.