Google jumps on Big Table of Web Services

by on April 7, 2008

Google announced its new App Engine tonight. I was there shooting video and Mike Arrington has all the details in a wrapup post.

I shot four videos. Here they are:

Meeting some geeks before the event.
Part I.
Part II.
Part III.
Part IV. Watch Pownce’s developers give some feedback at the end.

UPDATE: Google just uploaded the official video, which is better quality. You’ll see me sit up at the front.

  • Tom
    Hm trying to work out what the market for this would be... Eg. I use a VPS with hostmysite which comes pre-configured with all development tools I need: database server, web application server etc. ... they do all the system management, security updates etc. . I can go do a dedicated server with the same feature set (at a greater price of course) if I need more performance.

    There are only two situations where I could image this would makes sense:

    1) I need a massive scale eg. 20million+ users

    2) I need a free solution

    I doubt Google would offer this for free if I want to serve 20 million customers.

    But maybe I am missing something...

    PS: Markus Frind is running PlentyofFish.com on two database servers and 2 web servers... sounds plenty cheap to me.
  • Jayakumar Hariharan
    A full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform, and to begin with, 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day - all for FREE!

    Now, this is what I would like to call "Change Technology" - disruptive, you bet, but kickstarts a lot of things in a lot of places.

    Jay, from Bangalore
    http://www.ideaburger.blogspot.com
  • Tom
    ah... I think I might get it now... they are offering "hosting" for web application on a large scale at no cost...

    ... hm, I wonder what their business model is.
  • If you want a more detail set of scribbled notes of what was said in the six different video clips spanning 45m or so hit this link and goto bottom:

    http://timbauer.bauerfive.com/2008/04/08/google...
  • D
    This is excellent news as there is competition now.

    Prices come down and uptime goes up !!
  • Curios to see how this will compare to Amazon's AWS.
    By the way, Robert, what is your impression from developers? Any current AWS user which is commenting Google's new move?
  • I don't care about Google unless they are going to support their product, With a live person I can call. Maybe they will offer support when it comes out of beta in 10 years. Google seems to be announce many things but they haven't been finishing any of them lately.
  • i dont know what you think about google, but i'm not going to provide my source codes to google.. think about it: google knows all about you right now, and if any cool app runs in their ecosystem, they have 2 choices: first: they can lookup the sources, copy it, or make you a offer to buy your company (is this the best way for crowdsourcing ever done?) second: they let you pay a lot of money to use the service... and if you want to leave the service, you can't because you have to rebuilt the app (the apps built on googles systems are not very portable.. )

    that are only a few arguments, to not use this GServices... what do you think?
  • After reading about App Engine, now I finally understand the nugget I stumbled on last week. It looks like they opened up all of their search systems to App Engine Apps:

    http://eugeni.us/blog/index.php/2008/04/03/fina...

    http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/document...
    http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/documenta...
    http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/docume...
  • Christopher Coulter
    Non-starter preview concept-only with serious limitations slash privacy issues, not sufficient at all for Enterprise developers lacking fully relational data, and hitting the deck with python only? Maybe in a year it will have some filling. Just always go by the Undeniable Law of the Universe: If it's pure fluff, Scoble reports.
  • Stu
    While I watched the first video of the evening on YouTube I was thinking about how they could have really hit the nail on the head for devs. So I came up with what I would have said if I were Google.
  • Sam
    Ahha what a way to make everyone DEPEND on Google for even their webapp!
    There is nothing new in this idea as there are bunch of services which do such stuff.
    Also you are now tied up with Google and technology they support for this service, so where is the innovation part for developers?
  • Google just announced Google App Engine, and certainly (driven by Robert Scoble) that has been running like wildfire around the blogosphere. It solves some very interesting problems, and does it in a slick way, but it also creates some questions….
  • Non-starter preview concept-only with serious limitations slash privacy issues, not sufficient at all for Enterprise developers lacking fully relational data, and hitting the deck with python only? Maybe in a year it will have some filling. Just always go
  • i don't care their free services.May be some free services can be perfect but if you want to make money you have to spend money.
  • Google works very hard,they have many services,i think they will give us free host in the future also they will sell domain.
  • Google just announced Google App Engine, and certainly (driven by Robert Scoble) that has been running like wildfire around the blogosphere. It solves some very interesting problems, and does it in a slick way, but it also creates some questions….
  • Very nice, but we need HeLL
  • Non-starter preview concept-only with serious limitations slash privacy issues, not sufficient at all for Enterprise developers lacking fully relational data, and hitting the deck with python only? Maybe in a year it will have some filling. Just always go by the Undeniable Law of the Universe: If it’s pure fluff, Scoble reports.
  • Non-starter preview concept-only with serious limitations slash privacy issues, not sufficient at all for Enterprise developers lacking fully relational data, and hitting the deck with python only?
  • I don’t care about Google unless they are going to support their product, With a live person I can call.
  • Also you are now tied up with Google and technology they support for this service, so where is the innovation part for developers?
  • On first blush Google App Engine (released to 10,000 developers yesterday) seems to be just another entry into scalable computing.
  • I don’t care about Google unless they are going to support their product, With a live person I can call.
  • key
    Maybe in a year it will have some filling. Just always go by the Undeniable Law of the Universe: If it’s pure fluff, Scoble reports.
    thank you
  • Also you are now tied up with Google and technology they support for this service, so where is the innovation part for developers?
  • Also you are now tied up with Google and technology they support for this service, so where is the innovation part for developers?
  • thankS
  • hi good thank you I use a VPS with hostmysite which comes pre-configured with all development tools I need: database server, web application server etc. ... they do all the system management, security updates etc. .
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