Mountain View, California-based Web search leader Google has opened up its vast cloud computing  infrastructure resources to developers looking to build and host their Web applications, with a preview free base version of a new service called the Google App Engine, the company announced Monday night. Amazon S3 and Salesforce.com Face New Challenge Google's App Engine will compete with two of the most popular similar services, Amazon's AWS collection of web services including its Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2, SimpleDB and Simple Storage Service (S3) products, and Salesforce.com's Appexchange. While these competing services can be considered rivals to Google's new App Engine, they provide a less cohesive bundle of services than the tightly integrated all-in-one hosting and development environment offered by the Google service. In its preview release form, which saw Google quickly giving away accounts to the first 10,000 who applied online, the App Engine service will be free with certain usage and bandwidth limitations. The preview version of the service allows each account to host three applications on Google's servers, each with 500 megabytes of disk storage and a total data transfer bandwidth allowance of 10 gigabytes per day both going into and coming out of the firm's servers. Each preview account is also allowed a maximum of 2,000 emails each day, 650,000 daily Web page HTTP requests, and a maximum computational load on Google's servers of 200 million CPU megacycles per day, which Google said is enough computing resources to serve about 5 million Web page views monthly. The preview version also places an upper limit on the number of application programming interface (API) calls that can be made to Google's data store, at 2.5 million, as well as limiting the maximum number of URLFetch API calls to 160,000 daily, Google said. Capacity To Absorb Usage Spikes Developers who were not able to get one of the initial preview accounts can add their name to a waiting list on Google's Web site for inclusion in additional App Engine test accounts to be given out in the future, Google said. Google hopes its App Engine service, the type of tool  sometimes referred to as an application cloud service, will make it easier for developers to build, maintain and scale Web applications that become popular over time and require additional data storage and server resources. "When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves re-architecting their databases and entire systems several times a year," Google said in a Monday statement. "With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google's scalable infrastructure," Google added. Offering such features as version control for keeping track of application changes during development, server log file access to analyze detailed status information, control of file and process permissions to grant or deny specific portions of code access to various parts of an application, a collaboration system to manage multiple developers, and the ability to display all application source code, indices and data, Google's App Engine hopes to attract Web application programmers. Python Programming Language Initial Choice The preview version of App Engine uses the same Python script-based programming language that Google uses internally, and expects to support various additional programming languages in the future. Tapping into some of Google's own development infrastructure appears to be one selling point the firm is using to advocate the new App Engine service. "[App Engine] gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data," Paul McDonald, Google App Engine product manager noted Monday in a statement on the Google developer blog. McDonald noted that Google App Engine is essentially a "developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure." Matt Cutts, Google engineer and noted member of its Webspam team, noted that even with the restrictions in place in the preview version, the App Engine service should allow hosting of popular Web sites, such as his personal blog. "I’m running at about 500,000 page views a month," Cutts wrote on his personal blog. "You can scale your web app up to be ten times more popular than my blog - which is relatively well-trafficked - before you’d be looking at paying for storage, CPU, [or] bandwidth. By then, you’d know that your start-up idea was on to a good thing," noted Cutts, a popular speaker at search engine industry events such as WebmasterWorld's PubCon series of conferences. Google built the App Engine service to automatically scale the Web applications it hosts to meet the demands placed when used by millions of consumers, Google said in its Monday press release, and hopes it will attract both programmers and sizable companies. Matt Cutts Sees Service Simplifying Web Application Management The App Engine service, which was launched at Google's Monday night Campfire One developer event, is based  on a distributed storage system called Bigtable that is used in the search company's Google Earth mapping application, and is also based on its internally developed Google File System (GFS), both of which the company has used on its rise to becoming the dominant Internet firm. "You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System," noted Cutts. "There are a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching URLs. Your application can authenticate users that are using Google Accounts, so you can avoid the whole 'Ask your users to create a new account' issue if you want," added Cutts. Google did not reveal details on pricing for the service once it passes the closed preview and Beta-testing period, however those applications operating within the bandwidth and storage limits set out Monday for the preview version will continue to be free once the App Engine service is launched, Google said. Years Of Google Development Bring Service To Consumers Google has worked for more than two years on the technologies underlying its new App Engine. "Google has spent years developing infrastructure for scalable web applications," said Google product manager Pete Koomen. "We've brought GMail and Google search to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and we've built out a powerful network of datacenters to support those applications. Today we're taking the first step in making this infrastructure available to all developers," Koomen said in Monday's release. When launched, the service is expected to include support for offline, desktop-based applications, charging application users for computer usage, and the ability to work with very large files, Google's Koomen noted. Google Opens Its Infrastructure With Free Web Hosting Service With its new hosted Web application tool Google hopes to take over management of many of the technical housekeeping and administration chores that can take valuable time away from pure development, and to  "make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance," Google said. The limited preview release is expected to help Google gather feedback from developers using the system, and to gain their input on which additional programming languages the service should add next. As more consumers move to using software that is hosting on the Web as opposed to traditional software installed on individual desktop computers, services such as Google's new App Engine and those offered by Amazon and Salesforce are likely to grow and may soon become an online battleground as competitive as the booming online advertising market now is. Related Links:
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12:18 am on April 9, 2008 (utc 0)
