Google App Engine Launched
Google has announced the preview release of the Google App Engine. It allows developers to build web applications and run them on Google’s infrastructure. Currently the only language that is supported is Python. The service is free, but limited to “500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views”. Google is also limiting registration to the first 10,000 developers who sign up.
The development environment includes the following features:
- Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
- Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
- Automatic scaling and load balancing
- Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
- Fully featured local development environment
It will be interesting to follow the development of this. Hopefully Google will support more languages when this goes live (Ruby and Java would be really nice). At a minimum, this might just give Python the boost that it needs.