Mountain View, California-based Web search leader Google has opened up its Google App Engine all-inclusive cloud  computing program to all developers looking to build and host Web applications, expanding a test begun last month, the company announced late Tuesday. At San Francisco's Google I/O, the search giant's largest annual developers event, Google revealed pricing details for the program and announced two new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that it will make available to developers over the next several weeks. Google Opens App Engine Hosting To All While Revealing Pricing In April Google launched its Google App Engine in a limited preview release form, during which developers quickly used up all 10,000 test accounts the company made available to those who applied online. Google's App Engine is a competitor of two 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. With Tuesday's announcement of open sign-ups for Google's App Engine, both developers who signed up on a waiting list after the initial test - a number Google said was more than 150,000 - and any other programmers interested in using the program were able to register and begin working with the service, the company said. With its Google Apps hosted Web application program Google can 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. Pricing Plans Released The Google App Engine service, which offers an all-inclusive digital environment for creating and hosting Web applications, is free within certain usage and bandwidth limitations. Each free account can 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. Free accounts are 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. Free accounts also have an upper limit on the number of 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 during the initial program launch. Additional disk storage for the Google Apps program has been priced at between 15 cents and 18 cents per gigabyte, Google said in the Tuesday statement, and will become effective later this year. Additional computer processing time was priced at between 10 cents and 12 cents for each extra CPU core-hour used. Developers using extra outgoing transfer bandwidth will pay between 11 cents and 13 cents per gigabyte under the pricing plans Google announced, with additional incoming transfer bandwidth costing slightly less, between 9 cents and 11 cents for each extra gigabyte used beyond the free base allowance. Graphics Add-ons Announced Google said it expects to make two new API add-ons available to developers within the next several weeks. "The image-manipulation API enables developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server, and the memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers," Google said in the Tuesday statement. Both APIs are intended to help developers create more powerful graphical hosted Web applications. Kevin Gibbs, a Google engineer heading the App Engine program, used Wednesday's Google conference to demonstrate several online applications that used the program, including a mobile offline Web-viewing application, called LaterLoop, and a social networking graphing program called TweetWheel. Google did not provide further details on when the Google App Engine program will graduate from what it has called a "preview period." Related Links:
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10:25 pm on May 28, 2008 (utc 0)