Google has been playing catch-up for a while now in the one area no one expected: cloud. Thus far, I've been vehemently shouting that Amazon has already won the cloud war with its robust and varied Amazon Web Services offerings. But today, Google stepped up its war on the stratosphere with the announcement that it has finally come up with some payment plans for hosting App Engine applications. Until now, the service has been free, a boon to armchair developers, but not entirely hospitable to the business crowd.

But today, the Google App Engine is getting a make-over. For the free users, the available resources will slowly diminish over the next 90 days. That means existing resource quotas will be shrunken like a year-old cucumber. But for those willing to pay to use the App Engine, the benefits should be more room to breath.

Most of the cloud analysts I speak to position Google and Amazon at exact opposite ends of the spectrum. Amazon has a mostly "do it your way" approach, while the Google cloud is very much a "Here is how you do it" strategy. Google ties your hand, Amazon gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Both of these services will certainly have a place in the cloudy future ahead. But for now, I'm still putting most of my dough on Amazon, simply because they were the first out of the gate, and everyone else is learning from their mistakes, successes and plans.