Google opens cloud to (all) earthbound developers
'Here's how much we'll charge (kinda, sorta)'
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
Google I/O Google has offered a spot on its cloud to every developer down on earth. And it can almost tell you how much it plans to charge for this sky-high real estate.
Early last month, Google unveiled App Engine, a service that lets outside developers build and run web apps on the company's very own distributed infrastructure, and this morning, it opened the platform to world+dog. Previously, App Engine was closed to all but 10,000 quick-with-a-sign-up preview testers.
Google technical lead Kevin Gibbs announced the news during a keynote at Google I/O, the company's first large-scale you-pay-your-own-way developer conference, and he received the second biggest cheer of the morning. The biggest arrived during a demo of Android, Google's fledgling mobile OS, but more on that later.
"We're heard that you really want to try App Engine out," he told an audience of several hundred dev types. "In response to that, we're announcing that Google App Engine is now open to anyone who wants to sign up."
Kevin Gibbs
App Engine offers dynamic web-serving, storage, automatic scaling and load balancing, APIs for authenticating users and sending email, and a local development environment that lets you code on earth before uploading to the cloud.
"Using the GUI text editor you're already familiar with, you can write your app on your machine, and our APIs let you complete it, save it, and do all of your development locally," Gibbs explained. "Then you can deploy your app to Google. This is as simple as pressing a button or running a command line script."
Currently, the platform is completely free. But you're limited to 500MB of storage and "enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month." Sometime later this year, Google will sell resources above and beyond these limits, and today, it also announced that it has a pretty good idea what it plans to charge:
- $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
- $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
- $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
- $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
Gibbs estimates that under this pricing plan, another 5 million page views would cost around $40 a month. And he wants to make sure everyone knows that the first 5 million will remain free.
He went on to say that he and his Google Apps Engine will release two new APIs "sometime this week" - one for memcache, a standard for distributed memory caching, and one for image manipulation. "This allows you to resize, crop, and otherwise alter images more efficiently from within App Engine."
Bootnote
At one point during his speech, Gibbs asked himself the question "What sort of apps are people building with App Engine?" Then he answered himself by demonstrating an app called TweetWheel, which gives you "a graphic representation of all your friends on Twitter." But hopefully, you'll aim for something a little more useful.
COMMENTS
Comparison to Amazon?
It would be interesting to see a comparison between Google's offering and Amazon's EC2.
So who's going to be the first
while 1:
print "Pay google.... ",
Oh and good job on just offering Python, that is going propel Python to the number one slot.
And for those lamenting their favourite language not being there, just make the shift over to Python - as Larry Wall (Perl inventor and author) says, 'Python rocks' :)
And it is good to move applications over or create a new field in IT every now and again, it keeps people in coding jobs.
I imagine it would be a mess, if many languages and environments were offered, so best not to hold out too much hope of getting your lang in, and instead just wade on with the Python.
Python
Are there any other languages.
I dowlaoded the dev environment last month and played with it and there are several things going for this:-
1. Pure python code. Joy to use and just as fast as java.
2. BigTable -- seriously good database technoligy.
It morphs between a traditional SQL based RDBMS, an
an Object store, and an even more traditional hierachical
DBMS depending on which flavour of API you choose.
3. Django - You dont have to use it but Google recomends this
Python based web framework which is very neat and clean.
Very different approach -- "XML free Spring" is the best
I can come up with.
On the down side I dont see how you could easily port your application away from Google, "BigTable" is the only database and is quite unlike any other DBMS, but at $40 for 10,000,000 page views why would you want to move?
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