Google released an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of its infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance. Google initially is limiting the App Engine to 10,000 developers. of whom will be restricted to the free quota of 500MB of storage and enough CPU and network bandwidth to sustain around 5 million page views per month for a typical app. Eventually, Google plans to charge developers for additional storage and bandwidth.
Google said its new App Engine provides developers with the following capabilities:
- Write code once and deploy. This would save the developer the cost and complexity of provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage. The Google App Engine dynamically provides computing resources as they are needed using Google infrastructure.
- Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves re-architecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google's scalable infrastructure.
- Easily integrate with other Google services. It's unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google's broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.
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
"Google has spent years developing infrastructure for scalable web applications," said Pete Koomen, a product manager at Google. "We've brought Gmail and Google search to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and we've built out a powerful network of datacenters to support those applications. Today we're taking the first step in making this infrastructure available to all developers."http://code.google.com/appengine/
