Google heads into web services with App Engine
As reported by TechCrunch earlier in the evening, google is taking on Amazon’s web services with their new App Engine. Registrations are currently limited to the first 10,000 developers to sign up but that is only for the preview release. Google didn’t give a timeline for when it will be out of preview so it could be a long wait until anyone can sign up.
Google is giving developers 500mb of storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for about 5 million page views a month. That looks like a pretty good deal for being free. What would make App Engine even better would be if it supported Ruby on Rails or php as their two widely used languages. TechCrunch asked google that question and they responded by saying that python is the first language they are supporting but the infrastructure is language neutral. Hopefully Google will add support for more languages by the time they start charging for extra features.
The one upside to Amazon’s web services are you can pick and choose what you want. If you want EC2 just get it, same with S3. It does look like Amazon’s services are better right now if you just want to add one of those to your app. An example would be of you wanted S3 for storage you just pay for that where as Google App Engine is free but its all or nothing.
App Engine does look like something that alot of people are going to use for their web apps. As it is only a preview currently google can still change things up and make it an even better compeditior to Amazon’s web services. If you were looking to sign up for App Engine you better hurry as it will most likely fill up soon.
