New Google Web Services: Good News for Developers
Well if you are a developer you might be excited to hear that Google have jumped on the web services bandwagon and just launched Google App Engine. It is a service, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), for developers to create and run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
The infrastructure given is the same what Google use in house on its own apps and projects just like AWS came from Amazon’s own technology. So in Google App Engine, developers can get to use, application servers (now Python only), GFS (Google File System) for file (data)storage and Bigtable, (database) a scalable distributed storage system. Thus similar to AWS’ EC2 (servers), S3 (data storage) and SimpleDB (database).
Google App Engine differs to AWS in that its services are packaged together to provide a scalable infrastructure while with AWS developers can choose to use one service independent of (or without) the other. For example one can use SimpleDB without the other two.
Even though Google App Engine is live, for now it is still in the preview release stage and its only accepting limited applications from developers. Google say that the service is FREE for starters during the preview stage and after but the amount of computing resources an app can use is capped. After preview, developers will be able to buy additional computing resources as needed like with AWS, Mosso and MediaTemple.
Google App Engine is limited to the first 10,000 developers for now and also you can only use Python (no PHP, Ruby, Perl etc) but Google say the will be adding more features and support. So go on, register and download the the SDK.
update: Techcrunch have built a small sample web app here to using Google App Engine
