Google launches App Engine dashboard

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Google on Tuesday announced a dashboard to detail system status for the Google App Engine.

The move is the latest by a cloud provider to improve transparency in the event of an outage.

On the Google App Engine blog, the company said that it has launched the App Engine system status site and a quota dashboard to detail items like bandwidth usage and CPU. Google said it also plans a billing dashboard to preview what happens if you go beyond those quotas.

Here's a look at the dashboard:

(Credit: Google)

[lennysan]

This is big news for the cloud computing space. It raises the bar for every other cloud computing platform, now that both Amazon, Salesforce, and Google have health dashboards. Next I'm looking for a status dashboard for Google's Premium App services, to raise the bar in the SaaS space.

[glamourati]

These "me too" additions to Amazon Web Services, Force.com and Google Apps are just putting ribbons on pigs and don't adresse the real problem with Platform as a Service, and that is that they are all closed, limited systems with proprietary technologies. Sure, it's nice to have dashboard, but it is only showing you how much Google gas or Force fuel you have. To be a "real" tool for developers and companies to want to invest their time and money into it, the system needs to be open, letting the developers and designers use whatever languages, tools, servers, etc. they want. This "Open Platform as a Service" (OPaaS) , (e.g., ModBox http://www.sullivansoftwaresystems.com/) will be the next big thing in the PaaS and SaaS world because it is open.