Google opens App Engine to all

 

Gallery

By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 28 May 2008 at 10:22

Google has announced that its App Engine platform has been opened to all users

The service allows users to build web applications on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own in-house projects. At the moment this means applications have to be written in Python, though the company claims it will support other languages in the future.

The service was launched as a beta in April 2008, attracting 160,000 signups, despite there only being 10,000 accounts available.

The opening of the registration process is expected to create a flurry of development work among those who have been waiting since April to get their hands on the tool.

Free App Engine accounts will offer 500MB storage and enough CPU time and bandwidth for roughly five million page views per month. Users who exceed this amount will be charged between 15 and 18 cents per extra gigabyte. Extra CPU time will be charged at 10 to 12 cents per core consumed, and bandwidth at between nine and 13 cents per gigabyte of outgoing bandwidth.

Two new APIs will also be launched for the App Engine, including an image manipulation tool which will allow scaling, rotation and cropping to be performed on Google's servers, and a memcache API designed to streamline the rendering process for pages using the service.

Several applicaions have already been developed using the system, including the event planning tool, Mobaganda.