Google AppEngine: the beast stirs

One of the most important announcements of recent years was made by Google today: they are opening up their infrastructure for you or I to use in the form of Google AppEngine.

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.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

What this means to you or I is phenomenal - no longer do you require a legion of system administrators to configure, tune, tweak, and generally keep servers alive, as the big G will do all of that for you. Gone are the headaches of scaling, as applications scale automagically. This will cut costs for launching enterprise applications substantially, as well as removing the main costs for their upkeep (wages).

Interestingly, the datastore used is BigTable, which seems to similar to a distributed hash table. This is the same datastore used by all Google products, so you can be assured of security and data integrity. When was the last time you had Google data problems....?

This will create a problem for Amazon Web Services, who have experienced some issues in their reliability recently. Although, amazon are still offering raw computing power for anything you want, not just web applications like Google. One final thing I would say is that Google's offering lacks the need for anything like Scalr, which you need if you want to scale a web application with AWS.

In short, if you want to build a web app, Google AppEngine is the hottest thing out there right now. (In fact, it's so exciting I fell off my chair while watching the presentation below.) However, if you want to raw computing power for anything else, AWS is where it's at.