Google introduced Google App Engine as a way to simplify the job of creating, running and scaling web applications at Campfire One on April 7th, 2008. Google App Engine lets developers run web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The idea is to simplify the infrastructure needed to build, to maintain (no servers to maintain), and to scale with traffic & data storage needs.

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python language and most of the Python standard library. Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, I am sure Google is pulling out all stops to push more languages shortly to increase developer adoption of this new platform.

This was a preview release; it’s not feature complete and there is a quota system, a set of limits in terms of storage, CPU and bandwidth that applications can use during the preview period, right now for free. Once the preview period is over, that quota will remain free, but developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed. The cost at this moment has not been disclosed.

The quotas in the preview release included: 3 apps per developer, 500MB storage per app, and per day (rolling 24 hour) quotas of 2000 emails, 10 GB bandwidth in, 10 GB bandwidth out, 200M CPU Megacycles, 650k HTTP Requests, 2.5M datastore API calls and 160k URLFetch API calls.

I have been tracking reactions and there are interesting mixed opinions:

• For some the free 500MB worth of storage was attractive.
• Almost everybody wants more languages supported.
• Business owners are contemplating the dependency factor on Google. This means that early adopters would be independent developers and startups.
• Farhan Mashraqi said that this gives the Python language “a big boost”; so also did blist.
• A Digg comment by Fuzzmeister suggests that this could have a strong impact, “this could evolve into something that fundamentally changes the way websites are hosted and run”.
• Wayne Pan believes that the ‘free’ angle is the biggest news, and that App Engine needs other languages and an external service model to really gain traction.
• Few people see some important privacy and security concerns here.
• Few think this as a very clever move by Google for more domination.

I think last is an interesting angle. Also it will be interesting to see how this will play in Google app framework and Google’s enterprise play. Stay tuned, the story in not over yet.