Google App Engine – Enters into services bussiness

Today google is launching a Google App Engine on which you can simply deploy your application other things are taken care by google. What you get is full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

As per google:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

A big competition to Amazon web services. Lets see if it wins. I know google is very strong on server side and opening it to world means we all have access to super computing power which google has. In next few years we are going to see huge number of new application running on google machines which will do bigger and great work. Possibly the major industries which will use google power are Video based services, Bioinformatics , Astronomical data based services etc. which requires huge computation and reliable 24X7 network.