This morning Google announced AppEngine for business and integration with VMWare tools for Cloud portability at its annual developer conference Google I/O. Until now AppEngine is available for developers with many restrictions and no support. With the new offerings Google is trying to tap into the enterprise market.

Google AppEngine for business
With this announcement Google opened the doors to the IT departments to build and maintain their applications in Google cloud, with added management and premium support features tailored specifically for the enterprise.These are the features that will be available on AppEngine between Q3 2010 and EOY 2010:

Enterprise Administration Console
Company-focused console which allows you to manage access control lists to determine who has access to the application data, and who can deploy new code. You can manage, and set security policies for all applications in your domain.

Support
There are three types of support options available to suite the enterprise needs. Below is the table which lists out various options:

SLA

Formal Service Level Agreement between you and Google, defining 99.9% uptime for your application.SLA draft can be found at http://code.google.com/appengine/business/sla.html.

Pricing

For Intranet, each application costs $8 per user and $1000 maximum per month. No limits on processing power and it comes with plenty of storage needed. Google didn't provide the details on the storage limits, but there is a option to buy if you need more than the default storage. Also there are no pricing details for public web sites, but Google is assuring it's not per user :-).

Dedicated SQL servers

Until now AppEngine is only supported Datastore which uses Google's BigTable database system, but Google is planning to provide hosted SQL servers in Q3, 2010. With this enterprises can access the full capabilities of a dedicated relational database, without the headache of managing it. Set up is just as easy as with an AppEngine application, and the traditional configuration and maintenance work required to run a database server is taken care by Google.

SSL on Your Domain

SSL on your company’s domain for secure communications, and access to all your App Engine applications, not just on the *.appspot.com domain.

Google Cloud Portability and integration with VMWare's SpringSource tools

Surprisingly Google announced cloud portability to build the Java rich applications that can be hosted in a variety of Java-compatible hosting environments. Having AppEngine in their arms, it is a surprising move from Google to let the developers host the application in other clouds.

The applications built using Google cloud portability tools can be deployed onto Google AppEngine for Business, a VMware environment (your vSphere infrastructure, your choice of vCloud partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. You can download these tools from http://www.springsource.com/products/springsource-google-download. This tool set includes Sprin Rio - next-generation rapid application development tool, GWT, SpringSource tool suite - Eclipse based suite to deploy the applications directly into the cloud, Speed Tracer -  tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in web applications.

It is announced by Google, but the support is coming from VMWare. In reality, VMWare added support for the Google AppEngine deployment in its SpringSource tool suite. I assume with this Google is discontinuing their own tool set for Java applications and embracing the SpringSource tool suite as the tool set for Java AppEngine developemnt/deployment! If then, yes it is a true Cloud Portability from Google and hats off to Google openness!