Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 14:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 7
I asked Stocky to explain the Google App Engine, which he explained had only been launched a few weeks ago. As an early stage product in a “preview release”, Stocky explained that for now, there are a few limitations and features yet to come, with Google looking forward to feedback so it can improve the Google App Engine.
In explaining what it is, Stocky said that it is trying to solve a specific problem which developers can face: essentially that of resources and the ability to scale.
Stocky said that entrepreneurial developers usually require significant upfront investments in computers, and then someone to configure the web server, SQL databases etc, with these being significant technical challenges, especially once you get popular, if you get popular.
Stocky said that if you get popular, you then need to scale your app – and the infrastructure around it, and all those system admin efforts can take a lot of time. Apparently 20% of engineering time is spent of system admin and maintenance – and for a 5 person start up, that’s effectively one person looking after all of that.
The Google App engine is designed to give you access to these scalable resources. Stocky said that you run your app in “Python” (a programming language), then quickly deploy it to Google’s servers, which are “easy to run and easy to scale.”
I forgot to ask what it would cost developers to run their web apps on the Google App Engine, so I called Google’s PR people back, and got the low down, which was the same as at the Google App Engine
website.
In essence, it’s free, with some limitations. Google’s site says that the Engine “enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications” and needs “no assembly” as it is a fully-integrated application environment
The site says that it’s “easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches” and is free to get started, with “every Google App Engine application [able to] use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.”
As Stocky said, it’s currently a “preview release”, so applications are “restricted to the free account limits”, but anyone can try the Google Apple Engine without waiting for an account, so... pretty cool. Developers should go nuts!
I then asked if apps created in the Google App Engine would run on the iPhone – and I asked about another Google web app that already works on the iPhone and specifically asked about a problem that I was having with it, which it turned out Stocky was experiencing, too.
Please read on to page 5!
