Google Launches App Engine

Last night at Campfire One, Google announced the preview release launch of the Google App Engine, “a tool enabling developers to run web applications on Google’s infrastructure.” Google’s goal is to “make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.”

Google’s new service, which is similar to Amazon’s EC2 Services, gives developers access to the same tools that Google uses to build applications. The development environment includes:

Dynamic web serving, 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

Google’s App Engine initially will have limits of 500MB of storage, 10GB of daily data transfer bandwidth, and 200 million daily cycles of processor use. That should be enough to power a Web site with about 5 million page views per month.

After the preview period ends, all comers will be able to use that amount of capacity for free, and using more will cost pay-as-you-go fees that Google isn’t yet announcing.
For more information check the official Google Blog or the New Google App Engine Blog.