Google’s AppEngine, Yes Free Web hosting!

Google just announced its new AppEngine Aka Web application hosting service. This is another big announcement from Google after OpenSocial. What a coincidence, I was reading about Amazon’s Web hosting service and here comes AppEngine. What more does a developer or a broke entrepreneur need?

Looks like AppEngine is going to compete with Amazon web Service and tons of other cloud computing companies. Check out this interesting article from Gigaom. In fact, I did read Dave winer’s article about Pig that stopped him in Walnut Creek . So the cat was let out of the bag last week by Dave Winer. That smarty’s out there got the message loud and clear. I’m sure Google has a daunting task ahead to win the race with Amazon that boasts a cool 330,000 developers hosting their Web services on Amazon Web cloud service.

AppEngine is more like a platform for hosting applications. This engine shall run in the same Google data center that hosts Gmail, Google Docs and other Google apps. So, you don’t have to worry about service availability. It should be highly redundant. The bad news is- Only 10,000 luck folks get to use the App Engine. My Bad, I wasn’t lucky enough to get into that 10000 list.

So what’s in store for developers, here’s a quickie
• 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

The AppEngine supports only python for now. It’s a shot in the arm for python developer’s world wide.

Here is some restrictions/limitation for the free usage:
• An application on a free account can use up to 500MB of storage and up to 5 million page views a month.
• During this preview period, you can register up to 3 applications.
• Application resource limits, or "quotas," are refreshed continuously. If your application reaches a time-based quota, such as bandwidth, the quota will begin refreshing immediately at the rate for the given limit. Fixed quotas such as storage use are only relieved when you decrease usage

For more information about AppEngine, checkout the link Google AppEngine