Updated
For all the rivals Google is making as it continues to expand into nearly every facet of the Internet, Amazon has thus far remained one fellow power relatively unscathed. That is about to change. Tonight, the search giant is announcing Google App Engine, which will allow web developers to build and deploy apps on top of Google’s infrastructure.
This is great news for a lot of developers, as it will take the headache of system administration and maintenance out of their hands. (Now all they have to worry about is coming up with a good idea and writing the code…) On the other hand, if you’re a startup focusing on web hosting and deployment, there is a new 700-pound gorilla in your room.
Yet, it’s still Amazon who must be worrying the most. With this new release, Google is aiming squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. 
Amazon has garnered a lot of praise for these services, but if Google is able to undercut its prices — look out. No specific pricing details have been given yet on Google’s service, but the preview release (limited to the first 10,000 developers who sign up), which goes live tonight at 9 PM PST will give away a free quota of 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and network bandwidth to support approximately five million pageviews per month for an app. Amazon’s prices vary based on which service customers are using, but it typically charges a per gigabyte rate for both storage and data transfer.
The remaining details are thin right now — for example, we don’t know exactly what kind of applications will be supported — but it’s probably safe to say that with Google’s reputation, the app engine is going to take off very quickly. For one thing, we can probably believe Google’s claim that, using BigTable (Google’s high performance database system) and other Google products, it will absorb any surges in traffic without any trouble. The company also promises easy integration with other Google services as well as its library of APIs.
It’s also not clear yet if the Google App Engine will be a central part of Google’s OpenSocial initiative going forward, though one could probably assume so.
Our own Anthony Ha is at the Campfire event taking place right now at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA and will update throughout the evening with more details on the launch.
[Update: Google's presentation just ended. There was a long, in-depth demo showing off the App Engine and Google's software development kit. The presenters built, deployed to the web and managed a guestbook application in just a few minutes.
They also emphasized the Google App Engine is still in very early stages and will evolve based on developer feedback. In the months to come Google plans to add support for uploading and downloading large files, additional capacity, other languages (right now it just supports Python) and offline processing.
Google also showed off some sample applications they've built on the App Engine, which (probably intentionally) ape existing internet applications: a movie quote finder, a bar finder that integrates with Google Maps and a chat room that looked quite similar to Campfire. Google has also ported an early version of recent acquisition Jaiku to the App Engine.
(NB: Holding the event outdoors was a bad idea. Presenters spent almost as much time complaining about the cold as they did explaining the product. Also, my fingers are about to fall off. Maybe there's something to this "blogging yourself to death" scare after all ...)]
[Anthony Ha contributed to this story.]
[photo: flickr/johnnie w@alker]
10 Comments
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FaceySpacey Technologies said:
FaceySpacey Technologies is scooping up an account and being one of those first 10,000 users right now…We’re experts in Amazon AWS hosting services and will be all over this. Check us out here to see our EC2 Expertise:
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MG Siegler said:
@faceyspacey - good luck, let us know how it goes.
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Adam said:
From the looks of Googles new offering, it could very well have been built on top of Amazon Web Services. Muahahhahaha
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Charbarred said:
I must admit that Amazon runs a tight ship, and it will be hard to sway me to switch to Google. Saying that, Amazon’s service when it comes to their development tools is atrocious. Their attitude is “here are the tools, here’s the documentation, if you have a problem go post it on a forum.”. I can’t recall the last time I saw Google posting a customer support email address though.
I got my invitation…looking forward to testing it out…. -
MG Siegler said:
@adam - now that’s an interesting thought.
@charbarred - definitely let me know what you think, I’m interested to hear about the hands on usage.
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Ferodynamics said:
Can someone get me an invite, it’s already maxed out! You would think they would open this to any and every developer interested.
IMO Google needs to do this now because Facebook is basically Windows 3.1 for the Internet, already.
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startup said:
if google owns your users, content and code, what do you own?
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Kaiyzen said:
It is great to have a competitor to Amazon. This service poses no threat in the short term to Amazon but will spark competition not only on featurset but also pricing. Next we need Microsoft to step things up as well as IBM.
Until the Big G starts letting developers build their own stacks and run whatever language they want it will not be widely adopted and pull people from Amazon. At this point I think you are looking at hobbyists and the Google/python fan boys.
In the end it is the developers who benefit the most.
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MoJo said:
thanks for the news
23 Trackbacks
8:38 pm
Google unveils new Web Application Engine : The Blog Herald said:
[...] coverage available via TechMeme, VentureBeat, CenterNetworks, and CNET. Digg [...]
8:48 pm
Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off? - mathewingram.com/work said:
[...] will be drawn to Google as a host for their distributed services over someone like Amazon. I think they might. And if the Python limitation is only temporary (as Google suggested it is) then that could open up [...]
8:59 pm
Google’s AppEngine - Application Hosting modeled on Django - Dave Naffziger’s Blog said:
[...] outlets are quickly picking up that tonight Google is launching a hosted platform for web developers: App [...]
9:40 pm
Google App Engine Launches: Goes Directly After Amazon »TechAddress said:
[...] MG at VentureBeat has details on a new product launch tonight from Google called the "Google App Engine" (link will work after midnight). MG notes, "With this new release, Google is aiming squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services." Brady notes that the app must be in Python for now. [...]
11:00 pm
Monday Night Thoughts: Google Apps, Why We Blog, A-Lists, and a Hardware Upgrade : The Last Podcast said:
[...] Google’s App Engine: I’m not a developer, but from what I see from the developer community, this is a big deal. If anything, it pushes the ideas of cloud computing further and gives Amazon a reason to keep innovating its products. [...]
3:17 am
Google App Engine In Brief | ThinkingNectar said:
[...] Venture Beat Tags: api, developers, Geek, google, google app engine, python [...]
3:19 am
Building Ambisonia.com said:
Developers are the new musicians… and Google is a ‘Record Company’….
Am I the only one who is seeing this?
Many see this new Internet economy as some kind of exciting free for all… where kids can turn a few insightful hours in front of a computer into a billion dollars almost overnight. Its exciting, its fast pace…
4:01 am
Gaffney3.com » Google App Engine unveiled: Scoble and Arrington on scene said:
[...] Google App Engine readies for brawl with Amazon [via Zemanta] [...]
4:46 am
Teabass - Andrew Nesbitt's Blog » Google App Engine Buzz said:
[...] Venture Beat: http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/07/google-app…; [...]
7:12 am
appengine said:
[...] [...]
8:08 am
app engine said:
[...] [...]
8:41 am
Google lanza su App Engine said:
[...] específicamente con Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB y Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), tal como señala MG Siegler en VentureBeat, donde ofrece detalles de última hora, sobre dicha [...]
1:21 pm
Google App Engine vs. Amazon | Entropy said:
[...] Google App Engine readies for brawl with Amazon [via Zemanta] [...]
1:21 pm
April 8, 2008 | next media update said:
[...] Google App Engine Launches: Goes Directly After Amazon VENTUREBEAT Google is launching a web-based application engine that will allow developers or startups to build, test and store applications online for free, using the search company’s servers. The service is called cloud computing as it refers to the ability to use the internet to create applications, saving costs and scalability problems usually associated with acquiring and operating servers. Amazon has garnered a lot of praise for these services, but if Google is able to undercut its prices - look out. No specific pricing details have been given yet on Google’s service, but the preview release), will give away a free quota of 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and network bandwidth to support approximately five million pageviews per month for an app. Amazon’s prices vary based on which service customers are using, but it typically charges a per gigabyte rate for both storage and data transfer. Source> [...]
1:56 am
» Is Google App Engine HuddleChat a Campfire Rip-Off? said:
[...] App Engine marks the first full-frontal Google assault on Amazon. [...]
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Roundup: Cleantech gets record investments, Google opens enterprise market and more » VentureBeat said:
[...] start paying off.Google opens marketplace for enterprise apps — Following Monday’s launch of the Google App Engine, the search giant is taking further steps to position itself as a [...]
2:06 pm
Seattle Ventures! said:
Google App Engine VS Amazon Web Services…
It’s too early to say how much of a threat they are to Amazon based on unknown pricing factors and the duration of the lack of support in a popular language called Python. However, I must say that my knees would be a little shaky at this point if I w….
2:33 am
http://ensarm.blogspot.com/ said:
Google App Engine - Repeating history…
20,000 preview accounts signed up within 48 hours. At an average of 3 applications per signup and assuming a minimum of 2 programmers behind each application what we have is 60000 apps in the making with 120000 programmers riding this super power Goog…
7:57 am
Roundup: Giving up on the “mobile web,” cleantech gets crunched, and more » VentureBeat said:
[...] allowing developers to build and deploy web applications on Google infrastructure, the move was widely seen as a move against Amazon’s web services. But just because they’re competing products [...]
8:40 am
RightScale gets boost from Benchmark, to offer cloud services » VentureBeat said:
[...] and because the startup uses its own servers to constantly monitor the system. Search giant Google recently announced that it’s also getting into web app deployment. Crandall (and others) say the Google App Engine a much more “closed” solution — [...]
12:16 am
Roundup: Another Google exec leaves for Facebook, Mosso adds more storage to the cloud, and more » VentureBeat said:
[...] Mosso to add more storage to the cloud — The cloud computing division of hosting provider RackSpace will lauching a new online storage service called CloudFS later this year, according to CNET. Developers will have access to almost limitless amounts of storage at the cost of 15 cents per gigabyte. This will compete against similar services from Amazon and eventually Google. [...]
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Cloud company Elastra gets $12M from Amazon » VentureBeat said:
[...] last few months have seen a number of significant cloud computing announcements, including the launch of Google App Engine, which allows developers to build and deploy their applications using Google’s [...]
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Google finally ready to take Jaiku seriously? » VentureBeat said:
[...] why the downtime? Google is moving Jaiku to the Google App Engine, its cloud-based servers capable of running applications, reports Jaiku Invites. This move should make the unreliable [...]