- Making clouds of computing power more accessible to all developers
- Making the client -- i.e., the browser -- more capable and more powerful
- Ensuring the connectivity that enables the client and the cloud to work in harmony
"Google App Engine™ enables developers to build their web apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications. So developers eager to build highly scalable web apps will be especially pleased with the following piece of Google I/O news: Google App Engine is announcing open sign-ups. More than 150,000 developers have joined the product's waiting list over the past 6 weeks; on Wednesday, Google App Engine will be available to everyone -- no waiting required.
Google App Engine is also announcing its pricing plans (effective later this year) for purchasing additional computing resources; this is something developers have been asking for ever since the initial launch. The product will be free to get started, and in the current preview release apps will continue to be restricted to that free quota. Later this year, once the preview period has ended, developers can expect to pay:
- Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
- $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
Lastly, and likewise in response to developer feedback, Google App Engine will provide two new APIs in the coming weeks. The image-manipulation API enables developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server, and the memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.
More information about Google App Engine is available at http://code.google.com/appengine/."