Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure!

On April 8 Google launched Google App Engine, a hosted dynamic runtime environment for (now Python) web applications inside Google’s geo-distributed architecture. The Google App Engine is designed to completely house your service, and to integrate easily with Google services. Revolution in web application hosting / deployment!?

Notes:

• Provides dynamic web serving and persistent storage (BigTable datastore, GoogleFileSystem) with queries, sorting and transactions; automatic scaling and load balancing!

• A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month (they plan to introduce pricing and service level agreements for additional resources, priced in a pay-as-you-go marginal resource structure, once the product leaves its limited 10,000-person)

• Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language (other languages are to come [please!: ruby, groovy]).

(Actual) Feature limitations:

• Python is now the only supported language (they already have many requests for Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and Fortran)

• users have to have a google account ? (comment by Gábor Farkas “as far as i understand, you do not have to use google-accounts for user management. you can implement your own user/session management if you want to.”)

• No offline processing (no cron jobs and other long-life processes)

• Served static files limited to 1 MB

but ~all this will be addressed (already in their pipeline, see GoogleAppEngine blog post ); App Engine is going to evolve fast.

Interesting reads:
Google App Engine for developers by Niall Kennedy.
Google App Engine: History’s Next Step or Monopolistic Boondoggle? by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Example (featured project): Vorby.com