Google App Engine

Posted by Leo on April 11th, 2008 at 12:20pm

Do you want to host a website in Google? Now you got the chance. Google announced the preview release of the new Google App Engine, which allows you to build and run applications in Python in Google’s server infrastructure.

And guess what, it is free!

The Google App Engine applications are easy to build and maintain. You do not need to maintain your own server or hosting, as Google generously provides 500MB space for free. All you have to do is to upload the application, and it would be done. You can use a free domain name from appspot.com, or your own domain. You can also choose to share the finished application with the world or limit it to just yourself.

Did I mention free? Same as most of the other Google applications, having an account is free. The bandwidth should allow you do serve about 5 million page views a month, according to Google.

At this stage only free accounts are available. However, in the near future, you would probably be able to purchase more disk space.

Other features include (but not limited to):

Sandbox - The sandbox isolates your application in its own secure, reliable environment that is independent of the hardware, operating system and physical location of the web server.
Python Runtime Environment - The App Engine only supports Python at the moment. It is running Python 2.5.2.
Datastore - App Engine provides a powerful distributed data storage service that features a query engine and transactions. Just as the distributed web server grows with your traffic, the distributed datastore grows with your data.
Google Accounts - You can of course associate your application with your Google account.
URL & Fetch Service - Applications can access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data, using App Engine’s URL fetch service.

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