I’ve registered and had some hand-on experiences with Amazon Web Services (S3 and EC2) since they were launched. I like the idea behind them and theoretically they provide very flexible hosting environment where you can deploy and publish your apps on fly. Yet, in practice, it’s not that simple: you must be an expert to create a system of high availability for your apps. In many cases, time to configure EC2+S3 is more than time to create the app. Also, running your apps 24 hours/day on EC2 is as costly as on average dedicated servers.

Great news of the midnight comes that Google now offers an alternative: Google App Engine (GAE). Unlike AWS, GAE’s architecture is more integrated (therefore, somewhat less flexible) which consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services.

Here is excerpt from a presentation on Google App Engine, delivered by Kevin Gibbs at Campfire One, April 7, 2008:

From the ground up, Google App Engine is an attempt at making creating and running web apps easy. In the same way Blogger made it much easier to create a blog, we’re looking to make it easier to create and deploy a web application - and make it free to get started.

…

First, Google App Engine provides an infrastructure for running web apps. By that, I mean that we’re focused, specifically on web applications: making them easy to run, easy to deploy, and easy to scale. App Engine is different than a lot of other things out there: App Engine is not a grid computing solution– we don’t run arbitrary compute jobs. We also don’t give you a raw virtual machine. Instead, we provide a way for you to package up your code, specify how you want it to run in response to requests, and then we run and serve it for you. You don’t reserve resources, or machines, or RAM or a number of CPUs, or anything like that. It’s a fluid system,that runs your code in response to load and demand.

What you define are the URLs you use, what code they map to, and upload an application. We do everything else.

It means that you just write your apps and Google will do the rest to make sure it can scale.

Regardless of limitation to Python only now, GAE gives you 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day for free - enough for most of apps at early stage, I suppose.

I’m very exciting at what GAE offers but unluckily have got no invitation yet. Find more info about GAE here and go to its home page for SDK/docs.

Update: I’ve got invitation for Google App Engine today (Apr 12, 2008). I’ll give it a try and hope to share some hand-on experiences on the service with you.