Google App Engine
While I was asleep, Google rolled out this thing. Unfortunately, it’s a preview only available to 10,000 people, all of which had (of course) applied by the time I became aware of this. In any case, it looks to be an awesome idea. From the blog:
During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.
So, Google offers you a data store with an API, integration with existing Google accounts (e.g., GMail), reliable servers that scale effortlessly, and a programming environment based on Python — yay, a real language! — all without you having to setup anything, or indeed pay anything until you have massive traffic or more than 500 MB to store.
What Google offers you is really a free lunch while providing you with a strong incentive to pay for dinner yourself, should your app be successful: 500 MB really isn’t much, but it’s enough to test your app. Excepting the storage, it looks like a modestly successful app will be able to run off this thing within the free quota (say I, who have never developed a modestly successful app).
Here are the docs. Have a look. The immediate disadvantage is, of course, that you’ll be locking yourself in with Google. This, I think, isn’t much of a problem for the small-scale developer. It certainly won’t stop me from playing with this once it becomes available.
