Two weeks after announcing a business version of its Google App Engine application building and hosting service, Google is acknowledging that the performance of the product's datastore has been chronically deficient for weeks.
To make up for the recent string of outages, slowdowns, and errors, Google is waiving datastore CPU costs retroactively effective to the May 31 bill and until further notice.
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The datastore problems, which have rippled out to other App Engine components, have been caused by the platform's growth, which has outpaced server capacity, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.
"There are a lot of different reasons for the problems over the last few weeks, but at the root of all of them is ultimately growing pains. Our service has grown 25 percent every two months for the past six months," the blog post reads.
Jason Spitkoski, co-founder and director of Schedule Bin, a Web application that lets employers create and manage employee work schedules, has been using App Engine for two years, and started seeing performance issues in the past couple of months, with a marked deterioration in the past two weeks.
Because Schedule Bin is still in beta, customers have been understanding about the performance problems, but Spitkoski has been left red-faced in front of prospective customers.
"It is more of an issue when we approach new customers, explain the benefits of using a cloud and then show them the product, only to find slow performance and having to improvise our pitch to avoid the awkward silence that looms as the app slowly interacts with the cloud," he said.
Google is scrambling to build up the service's infrastructure to stamp out the issue, but performance is expected to remain rocky for the next two weeks, Google said.
"I was a bit surprised with how long it took them to address the current performance issues," Spitkoski said. "For a company with so much data and information, I would have expected them to be more proactive."
The situation is ironic because Google App Engine is a cloud-based application development and hosting platform created so that developers could focus on building applications without having to worry about garden-variety computing issues, such as server problems.
As with other cloud services, App Engine's selling point is that the vendor, in this case Google, is better equipped to handle IT infrastructure tasks than most, if not all, potential clients, and thus should be entrusted with handling tasks like hardware provisioning and software maintenance.
