“The engine that hosts the company’s online applications suite will shortly be available by a limited number of developers, for testing their own Web services at their own pace…on Google’s servers.”
San Francisco — In an exceedingly plausible move yesterday, Google Inc. took the wraps off a new hosted software platform offering developers access to its application servers, to the first 10,000 developers who apply.
The company’s App Engine service — which will be offered free to developers during a preview period — that includes a distributed Web server, database and storage, software development kit, which enable developers to write Web applications in Google’s SDK, and upload them to the company’s servers for hosting.
The Google App Engine is an online service that is aimed at giving developers access to similar structure that Google uses for its own applications, thus making it simple for developers to create an application that runs reliably, even under heavy loads and large amounts of data, Google said.
“The service is intended to bridge the gaps for small developers who can build wares that might be visited and used by millions.”
“The Google App Engine is identical to that of Blogger that made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is planned from the ground up to make it easy to develop and run Web applications,” said Kevin Gibbs, technical lead for Google App Engine in a blog post.
During preview 10,000 developers were awarded a free account with 500mb of storage capacity and adequate processing power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month, according to Google. Hereafter, developers will be able to buy additional computing resources as needed, Google added.
At the beginning, App Engine will only support applications written in Python version 2.5.2, but Google plans to expand its language capabilities. The runtime setting consists of full Python language and a large amount of the Python standard library.
The offer arrives at a time when a growing number of tech companies are shifting their operations to the cloud, and this places Google squarely in competition with Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) offerings.
Developers can choose to get a free domain name on the appspot.com domain or upload their application from their own domain. Applications will run in a protected sandbox setting that offers limited access to the underlying operating system, Google said. This will allow App Engine to dispense Web requests for any one application across multiple servers as well as start and stop servers based on traffic demands.
Google summed up that its servers are configured to balance the load of traffic to developers’ applications, scaling to meet the demand of an influx of traffic. App Engine also includes APIs for user verification to allow developers to sign on for services, and for e-mail, to manage communications.
It is perhaps getting crowded over there on the cloud, but Google is making a bet that its flexible hosting capability — and its reputation as a data-management and — serving giant — will give it the inside track.
“Our imagination with Google App Engine is to provide developers a more holistic, end-to-end solution for building and scaling applications online,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.
Google, which plans to continue offering a free, basic level of App Engine service even after the initial period, kept mum on how it will price the service for additional resources, when the App Engine goes live.
“Today’s launch is a preview release,” Gibbs wrote. “We have got a lot left to do, and there are a lot of features we still want to add to the system.”