April 8, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Tuesday saw Google launch its new Google App Engine, an obvious competitor for Amazon’s services and perhaps the strongest evidence yet to suggest Google is inching towards providing a full blown web hosting service.
10,000 users got to sign up for the new service, which allows developers to use Google as a hosting platform and a home for their applications. Built on top of Google’s infrastructure, developers can easily integrate their applications with Google’s range of APIs and services, including email. Its 500mb of free storage and ample bandwidth provide quite enough clout to appeal to your average developer, but a paid service that allows developers to purchase more of each is in the pipeline.
Although the service is only in beta and has some limitations, Google App Engine is an obvious competitor for Amazon’s S3, EC2 and SimpleDB services. During the period beta the service will be free but with usage limitations. Despite these limitations, the system offers the potential for the equivalent of 5 million page views. Although the service is intended to be platform neutral, Python is the initial supported language, probably because they use Python themselves and its use will make it easier for developers to integrate their applications with Google.
