Google App Engine coming to Europe and gets custom domain SSL

Google has used its I/O conference to announce version 1.7 of its App Engine. One part of the announcement was that a new App Engine cluster has been configured in Europe in addition to the existing clusters in North America. The move should give applications better response times in Europe for application users; however the Europe cluster access is currently limited to premier account users only.

For the first time, customers of Google's App Engine service can serve HTTPS-secured content from custom domains. Google is offering SNI- and VIP-based SSL. The SNI (Server Name Indication) option allows multiple domains to share an IP address yet have a separate certificate for each domain and, for $9 a month, Google will allow a user to serve up to five certificates. The VIP option costs $99 per month and has a virtual IP address dedicated for use with a user's applications.

Google is now also offering a PageSpeed service for optimised delivery of static content; for $0.39 per GB of outgoing bandwidth, on top of other charges, Google will automatically optimise applications. The company has also added the ability to store longitude and latitude as a GeoPoint and perform searches based on distance from that point.

Other changes include migration tools for moving data to the HRD (High Replication Datastore), larger application code limits (from 150MB to 1GB), an updated Log API, and the release of an experimental Go SDK for Windows. There are also updates for the Java, Python and Go SDKs.

(djwm)