Google announced their much-anticipated web services product - now known to be called Google App Engine - at a press conference/party earlier today. TechCrunch, as always, has the first details out the gate. The product will be formally announced at 9:30 PM PST.
Web development geeks (and I’m not one) will have a greater appreciation for the finer points, but the short story is that Google App Engine is very similar to Amazon’s S3 offering - disk space, database services, and bandwidth, available on an as-you-need it, highly scalable basis.
Amazon’s S3 has become popular with certain types of developers, and probably won’t lose any business to Google’s product at this point. However, Google App Engine is free during the beta period, which has a few limitations, as reported by TC:
- Only the first 10,000 signups will be activated
- 500MB storage
- 10GB bandwidth
- 200,000,000 megacycles/day of CPU time
- The only supported language, for now, is Python
The Python thing is weird, but it’s what Google uses, and they’ll add support for more languages over time. If a developer is looking to deploy and app they’ve already written, I assume Amazon Web Services will be the way to go for a while, but Google App Engine may be good for developers writing new Python-based apps - especially, as this TC commenter points out, they want to get bought out by Google.
don’t forget about Nirvanix… they are similar to Google’s new deal, and Amazon S3, providing the API to build an app on, except their bundle is fully loaded. Not to mention, they don’t just support one language, like google’s python only, you can access their service with any language.
They market a little bit more to the enterprise end of things, but the pay-as-you-go pricing allows businesses on both ends of the spectrum to enjoy the “full service” storage.
check it out if you’re interested http://www.nirvanix.com