Google have just further opened up their resources to developers with the introduction of Google Application Engine. Essentially it’s a web application hosting environment built upon Google’s network so it’s robust, distributed and scalable. If you’re familiar with Amazon’s S3, EC2 and SimpleDB, this is Google’s offering.
However, Google have gone further than Amazon and other utility computing providers by providing 2 key differences. Google’s offering is a stack. Not the usual LAMP stack people are used to. It’s Python and Google APIs focused at the moment, but it’s a stack.
The other difference is that it removes virtually all barriers to entry for developers as you can get a free account which they reckon will enable you to serve up to 5 million page views per month. Now, the limited number of free accounts have all gone, but once this is opened up wider, the entry free account will still be available. In the meantime, you can experiment locally with the SDK.
Essentially, it’s a free development area for you to try out web apps in an environment that you know is going to scale if they get popular, without incurring any hosting/hardware costs until you’ve proven the viability of the project.
Slam the brakes on!
Now before you walk into your bosses office to resign your job and go home to build that web app that is going to make you a million just take the following into consideration.
- it’s a preview. Free accounts are limited to the first 10,000 developers to sign up, and they’ve already all gone. There is a waiting list though…
- you’ll have to know python … though more languages are on the way, I wouldn’t hold your breath. I doubt any other languages will be added for another couple of months.
- If you did manage to get an account, you’re limited to 500MB of storage so you’re not going to create the next Flickr
- You can’t write to the file system – making the 500MB seem very reasonable.
- Queries are limited to returning a result set of 1000 rows
If you’re still interested, and you should be, here are a couple of videos from YouTube to help get you started. Links to the documentation and the SDK are below. It might be worth doing some reading up on Python as well. I imagine Python books are going to be flying off the shelves.
Presentation by Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python
Actual code examples of someone working with Google App Engine and Django
Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, New Technology , Django, google app engine, python
