Google, a large Silicon Valley company, has launched another beta product. App Engine, unlike many of their offerings, has a less than typically generic-sounding name, which is a clue that somebody has higher hopes for this than for, say, Google Base.
App Engine lets you host your Python-based (only) web application on Google's servers. It's free for the first 500MB of hosted space and 5 million pageviews per month. Hard to argue with free! The price for exceeding those limits has not been announced.
The initial test is open to 10,000 lucky people who were quicker on the mouse button than I was. Really, 10,000 people signed up in the first few hours after the announcement? Let's hear your stories.
There are a few little catches, as always.
Another point is that "Application code only runs in response to a web request, and must return response data within a few seconds." That means no cron jobs, no background processes, no batch index-building scripts, and so forth, which significantly limits the potential of App Engine apps. One of Google's major assets is its tons of processor power – why are they being so stingy with it here?
But the big obvious catch is the implicit lock-in. There's a nice low barrier to entry, and a complementary high barrier to exit. After you've spent time fine-tuning your app to work with Google's APIs and infrastructure, and it starts turning into a hit, your options seem to be: keep paying Google and leave it where it is; invest deeply in porting it to your own servers, with all the reprogramming that'll require; or maybe Google'll buy it off you.
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