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Google strategy to initiate a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will catch the attention of programmers and sooner or later companies needing a resilient basis for online applications.
App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a mixture of more than a few online Google services for those who want a place to swarm software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those contain the Big Table service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with substantiation to let citizens sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications. At an occasion called Campfire One Monday night, Google tactics to bragger some inside urbanized Web applications written with the examine. One of them lets people sign up for carpools, amalgamation the service, declaring whether and when they want to drive or be driven, and then being matched to expected associates.
The corporation is plunging App Engine as an easy way for programmers to build software without having to worry about transformation it once it gets too big for its unique hardware or software britches. "We've seen cases where developers have had to rearchitect systems every six to nine months because of the stack of escalating traffic," Koomen said. Using Google's App Engine fail to deal with those issues by distributing software athwart Google's own servers, mechanically managing larger-scale usage.
It looks to me like the move could put some competitive pressure on other online services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Salesforce.com's AppExchange. But Stephen Arnold, author of "Google Version 2," sees grander ambitions in the App Engine plan. Google's Big Table software and accompanying Sawzall technology for analyzing huge quantities of data offers big companies a way to tackle data-mining tasks they currently can't manage, such as American Express plumbing five years' worth of credit-card transactions to determine the merits of Father's Day promotions. "This is a real zinger for the banks and credit-card agencies,"
App Engine programs can be written in the Python programming language, Koomen said, though Google is seeking advice on what other languages to support. With App Engine, programmers can use a Google software development kit to write the software on their own computer, and then upload it to App Engine when desired. Google's App Engine initially will have limits of 500MB of storage, 10GB of daily data transfer bandwidth, and 200 million daily cycles of processor use. That should be enough to power a Web site with about 5 million page views per month, Koomen said.
After the preview period ends, all comers will be able to use that amount of capacity for free, and using more will cost pay-as-you-go fees that Google isn't yet announcing. Google expects to generate some revenue from the service and from Ad Sense if developers incorporate that service into their Web applications, said Tom Stocky, another Google product manager. But the real payback from the service is indirect, Koomen said.
"The primary motivation is to enable the Web as a platform and move it forward," Koomen said. "If it's easier for developers to build a Web application, means more applications. That attracts more users to the Web and helps Google as well." Future features will include mechanisms for storing files larger than 1MB, billing users for computer use, and support for offline applications, Koomen added. Google engineers also will discuss the site at the Google I/O developer conference in May.
All the early spots appear to be taken, but you can sign up for the waiting list at Google's Web site. Some more links for the project include a thorough overall App Engine description; source code for the project, under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, available for download; a gallery of applications; and Google's App Engine Blog. Also, I removed a potentially erroneous reference to a database in Amazon's EC2 service; Amazon hasn't described what its SimpleDB service uses.
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