Google App Engine

[Duncan Booth]

Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which may 
be of interest to some of the people here (although if you want to sign 
up you'll have to join the queue behind me):

>From the introduction:

> What Is Google App Engine?
> 
> Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's
> infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to
> maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs
> grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just
> upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. 
> 
> You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com
> domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can
> share your application with the world, or limit access to members of
> your organization. 
> 
> App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account,
> and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see,
> at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to
> 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5
> million page views a month. 
> 
> During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts
> are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase
> additional computing resources. The Application Environment
> 
> Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs
> reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The
> environment includes the following features: 
> 
>     * dynamic web serving, with full support for common web
>       technologies
>     * persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
>     * automatic scaling and load balancing
>     * APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google
>       Accounts
>     * a fully featured local development environment that
>       simulates Google App Engine on your computer 
> 
> Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python
> programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python
> language and most of the Python standard library. 
> 
> Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App
> Engine, we look forward to supporting more languages in the future. 

http://code.google.com/appengine