Google App Engine

May 15, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News

Google and free are synonyms right? I mean - who isn’t tired of hearing about some google ‘product’ that is beta and free to customers.

Of course when I say free - I mean in exchange for your privacy and ad attention..

So Google announced its long-awaited App Engine a few weeks ago. The Google Application services will directly compete with Amazon’s ever-growing S3 and Db services. Think Cloud Computing.

What is Google App Engine?

Well, the Company described this as an application-hosting tool by which developers can make use of in order to put up scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. There are no servers to maintain. All you have to do is to upload your application and you are ready to serve your users through a free domain name on the appspot.com or simply use Google Apps itself if you want to serve it your own domain.

It is easy and you will have a choice whether to share it with others or limit access to members of your organization.

The free account can give you up to 500MB space with sufficient CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. If this is not enough for you Google offers a paid increase (price unknown).

Is it reliable? You are kidding, right? Has google every been down for you ?

The App Engine development environment comprise of outstanding Web serving, automatic scaling and load balancing, large space for better file storage, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending e-mail and a full packed local development environment. With all these, one can surely assume that the service is possibly reliable because Google is known for being almost invulnerable to widespread outages.

There are a few reasons to dislike the service - the most notable downside is the fact that developers can only make use of Python as their programming language. Google assures the public that Python is merely the first supported language, and that the whole infrastructure is intended to be language neutral.

Data Portability is increasing - as is the availability and ease of use of cloud computing services.

Amazon really set the pace with S3 and continues to lead in the area. Competition and choices are always a good thing - so we should all welcome google into the game.

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