Google Reveals App Engine

By Andrew Tetlaw | April 8, 2008 | Programming

From their secret techno-lairs the Google developers have revealed a preview of their latest creation: App Engine:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

The features include:

dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
automatic scaling and load balancing
APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

App Engine currently supports Python, but apparently other languages are coming. The free account (the only one offered during the preview) is limited to “500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day”.

The App Engine blog is also up and running.

These certainly are interesting times! Thanks to @lachlanhardy for the news!

Andrew Tetlaw

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{ 8 comments }

shabda April 12, 2008 at 12:05 am: If you want to learn using Appengine, and already know Python, here is a tutorial, http://www.42topics.com/dumps/django/docs.html . Thats my site, but the tutorial is pretty good, so I hope this is OK.
phpimpact April 10, 2008 at 9:26 am: Here’s an interesting story of what heppened with an application that the Google team developed for this new engine:
http://tinyurl.com/5wcxzt
Go Google, go Python ;)
banago April 10, 2008 at 5:31 am: I love Mama and I love Google!
SPGWhistler April 9, 2008 at 11:57 am: I think these limitations will change as it rolls out – and 5 million page views a month seems like a lot to me… but 500mb storage is laughable.
But I think this is a really great thing. It’s like if anyone has a great idea, they can simply code it and get it on the web – in no time flat. It could prove to be a great medium for new development ideas.
I really think their pricing structure and support of languages will either make this something very awesome, or just a blip on the radar… we shall see…
ionix5891 April 9, 2008 at 7:28 am: @atetlaw
the limitations are very steep, see limits @
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/quotas.html
they don’t have to worry about scaling as the damned apps cant scale much in first place without hitting the limits! once you start digging this is actually nothing revolutionary just another way google are trying to lock people in into their ecosystem
atetlaw April 9, 2008 at 7:13 am: @AlienDev, that was a direct quote from their blog :).
@ionix5891, it’s probably too early to make such a judgment. It’s only a preview after all.
ionix5891 April 9, 2008 at 1:19 am: HTTP Requests per Day = >650,000
sheesh i go thru that in a few hours, with a medium size web app, nah too many restrictions and its fairly proprietary, no thanks google
AlienDev April 8, 2008 at 11:08 pm: Shouldn’t “200M megacycles” be “200M cycles”?
“200M megacycles” would mean 200 million million = 200 tera = 200T cycles