I Got a Google App Engine Account!

Sorry, I might be running a company right now, but I'm still a geek at heart.

Scoble had the Qik cam going during this evening's Google Campfire event where they announce Google App Engine - a direct competitor to Amazon's AWS (S3, EC2 and SimpleDB) offerings. Unlike Amazon, however, with Google App Engine you don't have to worry about instantiating machines, adding new ones, clustering, etc. You just create an app, upload, tweak a bit and Google takes care of the rest. Scaling, clustering, backup, etc.

For a small company without a SysAdmin, this solution is going to be extremely important!

Right now they only support Python and since TickerHound was developed using PHP we won't be able to use the service right away. But we're creating some other mini-applications at the moment that this will be perfect for.

Good news though - according to Google, "Python is simply the FIRST language we'll support, it won't be the ONLY language." So as soon as this thing supports PHP, TickerHound is going to be moving.

The one negative I see right off the bat is that it's still a proprietary platform - it doesn't seem like it'll be easy to move to another service (if one ever wanted to). That doesn't give me the old "warm n' fuzzy", but if this platform is as good as it sounds, I doubt I'd want to move anyway.

Built in analytics, trouble shooting, version control, roll backs, monitoring, etc. - Google App Engine seems pretty tight to me! Psyched to have an account and I'll be posting updates and links to our apps as we build them.