Monday, April 07, 2008

Google App Engine Announced - Limited to 10,000 Accounts

Google's announcement tonight is much bigger than I thought. Google is releasing Google AppEngine (site goes live at midnight EST) tonight, a fully-hosted, "automatically scalable" web application platform that consists of Python App servers, BigTable and GFS.

By making App Engine available only for Python, Google is giving the language a big boost.

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows developers to choose their own stack. Furthermore, Amazon's S3 allows third party applications to connect directly. With Google AppEngine it seems one must interact with BigTable using Python application.

Here's what Google's AppEngine promises developers:
- Write code once and deploy
- Absorb spikes in traffic
- Easily integrate with other Google services

Google App Engine is limited to first 10,000 developers
The website for Google App Engine (http://appengine.google.com/) goes live at 12:00 AM EST tonight. Only the first 10,000 developers will be given beta accounts. So hurry now before you are left out.

What is offered
The current limits imposed by Google include:
- 500 MB storage
- 200 million megacycles/day CPU time
- 10 GB bandwidth per day

Google App Engine Pricing
During the beta period, the service is completely free. Google has not announced the pricing after beta period finishes.


UPDATE:
I tried gaining an account right at 12:01 AM but thanks to Google "profiling" (which they have complete right to :) ), I got the following message:
Unfortunately, space is limited during Google App Engine's preview release. As we expand, we'll invite more developers, but for now you'll have to wait.

Would you like to be notified by email when space becomes available?


It seems like an "invite only" service. If you have invites or figure out how to get an account, please let me know. I'd love to get one.

UPDATE 2:
Many thanks to Nick Johnson of Google and others for sending me invites. Also, thanks to those who posted a comment. I was able to get an account and couldn't be happier.

Sources:
- Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google AppEngine.
- Google App Engine readies for brawl with Amazon
- Google Launching App Engine for Python Developers
- Google Cloud Now on Tap for Python Developers


"The apps all appear on the appspot.com domain. Each developer currently gets three application ids. When apps are uploaded they will appear at http://application-id.appspot.com. Developers can, of course, bring their own domains. You can see the current set of apps in the application gallery. I love the Appspot domain name; it's an homage of sorts to Blogspot and fits in nicely with Jotspot."
- App Engine: Host your Python Apps with Google
- Google App Engine Blog- Introducing Google App Engine

3 comments:

Ronald Bradford said...

I got the same waitlist message.
http://blog.arabx.com.au/?p=1023

Kinch said...

===============================
It seems like an "invite only" service. If you have invites or figure out how to get an account, please let me know. I'd love to get one.
===============================
You could click the button shown at that page and wait,once your account's been actived by Google, you would get a notification email saying:
---------
Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine! Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications!
---------

This is how I get my Google App Engine account .

Regards,
kinch

Anonymous said...

Google rocks. Very nice move! The rush started not only in USA but caught the attention worldwide. Here at MoveYourWeb (based in Eastern Europe - offshore outsourcing destination) we are working on several demo applications already and should ship in 1-3 days.