Google is finally offering a cloud storage solution for web apps

Oct 12, 2011 11:40 GMT  ·  By

Along with the updated Google App Engine, Google is also making another big move, Google Storage for Developers has been graduated from Labs, meaning that it's now a fully supported service available to all developers and companies.

Now simply called Cloud Storage, the service offers exactly what it says, cloud storage for app developers. They can use it to store massive amounts of data that needs to be available to web apps and sites.

With the graduation, Google is also dropping the prices for Cloud Storage, quite significantly, depending on your usage.

"Google Storage for Developers is now out of Code Labs, and has a new name: Google Cloud Storage. In addition, we're also happy to announce some new features, and a significant price reduction," Navneet Joneja, a product manager for Google Cloud Storage, wrote.

As far as pricing is concerned, one big change is that Google no longer charges for upload traffic, meaning developers can send as much data as they like to the cloud and not pay anything.

Of course, they'll pay for any of the data stored, but that will be cheaper also. For example, the first 1TB of storage will cost $0.13, EUR0.095 per GB per month. Anything up to 10TB will be $0.12, EUR0.088 per GB per month.

Prices for outbound traffic have also been reduced and, this should be of special interest to big companies, you can get further bulk discounts if you need more storage and bandwidth than what Google is offering to most customers.

Along with the graduation, Google is also making a move to better merge its cloud computing offering. App Engine developers will now be able to use the App Engine Files API to read and write data to Cloud Storage. This is only available for Python now, but Java-support is in the works.