Last night Google launched their cloud computing suite to compete with Amazon’s S3/EC2/SimpleDB stack of utilities. The SDK is aimed at giving developers a way to leverage the big iron of a company as large as Google on the cheap.
Things of note – some good, some bad, some both:
- Only Python is currently supported (more languages to come)
- You must have a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- You only need a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- Only 10,000 developers invited into the beta
-The SDK contains a staging server so you can test apps locally without having to push them into the cloud
- Your source goes into the cloud – but not for public viewing
- It appears to connect to, and utilize MapReduce and BigTable
- The toolkit launched without any flashy demos (much like FireEagle from Yahoo!)
Once the system comes out of beta, applications will have a fairly large free usage cap, so in theory, your application should be well on the way to self-funded before you start getting bills from Google.
In short, Google released a set of tools that allow you to build web applications specifically tuned to run in, and benefit from, Google’s huge infrastructure. Currently only a single, pretty nuts and bolts, language is supported and there aren’t a bunch of cool demos to pass around. I am excited.
James Vreeland
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