Google Appengine

Google launched a application engine for web application developers to take advantage of the "Google" Infrastructure. This would mean that application programmers can now write engaging applications without worrying about hosting, responsiveness and all other maintenance related issues, Ah but there is a catch!! you qualify as a developer if you can read and write python, which is a interesting and fun to learn language but it also means that you are supposed to throw all that PHP, Perl, Java experience in trash and come unto Lord's feet. Appengine comes preloaded with django 0.96 which is a powerful python web framework quite popular for its clean implementation of MVC, but you can also upload and use a different framework best suited for your application. Appengine comes with a admin panel for each application where it shows many statistics about data transfer, url's visited, popular url's etc. Google Appengine is an attempt to answer Amazon's EC2 and S3 if at all its an attempt to answer anything. Amazon webservices on the contrary are not free but support any framework/language, where S3 is more like a data grid independent of EC2.
Some Facts and Figures About Google Appengine:

• 3 Apps per developer
• limit of 1000 files each being maximum of 1 mb although limit on overall application storage is 500 megs :P
• In and out Data transfer of 10,000 megs each per day
  
• 2000 e mails per day
• 650,000 Http Requests per day
  
• CPU limit of 200,000,000 Mega Cycles per day
  
• GQL (read SQL for Google data store) is used which do not use joins, hence is the structure of Big Table (Google Technology to store data in database) but you can do all you would want to do with joins and also get the performance which SQL joins suck out of your applications.
• User System is based only on Google Accounts, which means if someone needs to access a user specific feature, then he/she needs to authenticate with his/her google account.
• Type of Content hosted/served is bounded by Terms of Service
• Not all python libraries are supported, A full list can be found out here
  

So all get started . Well not all, but those of you who can talk python . There has been demand in past that google provide hosting on its reliable and bleeding edge infrastructure, but this was not what we expected .