Google Cloud Going Prime time

Google announced several enhancements to its cloud services over the past week that are worthy of note. The improvements will likely be attractive (or at least interesting) to businesses looking to build apps on its platform, as competition in the marketplace - from Microsoft’s Azure to Amazon’s AWS – heats up.

Are Google’s cloud services ready for developer primetime? Here’s a quick roundup of the new features and offerings:

- Premier accounts for App Engine have been released. Priced at $500/mo, the enterprise SLA promotes “premier” support and a 99.5% uptime guarantee, along with the ability to create an unlimited number of apps in the account.

- Google recently announced a limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, which powers applications on App Engine with a relational database. The offering is now available free available free of charge but Google indicated it will likely have to charge developers in the future – right after it works out the “kinks”.

- Developers are now able to read and write files to Google Could Storage via the App Engine Files API, and Google will be providing detailed access information, including access analytics and storage use data.

- Those interested in machine learning will be excited by the v1.4 release of Google’s Prediction API – which now includes two user-suggested features including PMML v4.01 and data anomaly detection.