Google on April 7 launched its highly anticipated development infrastructure called Google App Engine. App Engine is Google’s fully integrated hosted application environment that allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Announced at Campfire One, App Engine is currently in preview release and is limited to an initial pool of 10,000 developers. (The first 10,000 developer accounts were fully allocated on April 7th) Google App Engine initially only supports Python but will roll out other popular development languages over the next few months.
Google App Engine will provide 500MB of storage, 10GB bandwidth per day and 200M megacycles of CPU per day during the preview period.
The preview development environment includes the following features:
Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
Automatic scaling and load balancing
Fully featured local development environment
While not direct competition to Amazon Web Services or Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine will allow developers to create an entire web application stack on the Google App Engine infrastructure. This will work great for developers for example who are new to ondemand cloud computing and will help them scale as the use of their applications grow.
Google has a number of applications in its appspot.com application gallery that were created with the first iteration of Google App Engine. Although their are only a couple of enterprise applications (versus the normal glut of Web 2.0 applications) listed in the gallery so far, I would expect the number of enterprise applications to grow quickly.
Project Virgle is dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars.
To start the process one has to take one of Google’s famed personality questionnaires (I passed with flying colors…not to give away hints… but answer honestly the questions about how you win at backgammon and your affinity for eating algae)
Assuming you have the right stuff and you pass the questionnaire you are then invited to enter in an application video after viewing welcome video’s from Sir Richard Branson, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
I have entered in my application video and have received an enthusiastic early response (The UK is 9 hours ahead of the US West Coast this time of year) from a staff member at Virgin Galactic!
Although I will have to end up missing my wife’s planned tupperware party with her friends next month, and will end up missing the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series later in this Century…it will be worth it. A chance to further humanities mission on Mars!!!
Google on April 7 launched its highly anticipated development infrastructure called Google App Engine. App Engine is Google’s fully integrated hosted application environment that allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
