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Google last night launched a preview of its App Engine web application hosting service.
App Engine provides a back-end platform, including a distributed Web server, database and storage, to run apps written with Google's SDK. As Google's App Engine Blog puts it, the service "gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications."
The preview period granted 10,000 developers a free account with 500mb of storage and enough processing power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month, according to Google. Not surprisingly, those accounts appear to have all been snapped up. But developers can still download the SDK and work on a non-hosted application.
For now, applications have to be written in the Python language. When it fully launches, Google says it will still offer free accounts with the same limitations as now, and that larger, more popular apps can purchase more resources. Applications can authenticate users with a Google account log-in.
The advantage with this setup is that you don't need to worry about the servers, systems administrators and the rest of the infrastructure necessary to provide a Web application. It sounds like even a single developer could grab the SDK and launch an application for the world.
The question is whether it will scale for what a company needs, as opposed to a single developer. Not in terms of resources - something tells me Google has enough computing muscle and bandwidth - but in terms of customization, monitoring, backups and the other things companies typically want to handle even if their site is with a managed service provider like Rackspace.com. Google might offer such things, but I haven't seen it mentioned on its site or in coverage so far. Then again, I'm guessing App Engine will cost far less than signing up with a managed provider, particularly for high-traffic apps.
With this launch, Google goes head-to-head with the similar Amazon Web Services. Amazon's offering differs in that developers can use just those parts of the service they want, such as Amazon S3 storage, whereas you can't pick and choose which parts of Google App Engine you want to use. It's all or nothing.
For more info, head to the App Engine site and blog. TechCrunch and the O'Reilly radar also have some good coverage.
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