Google App Engine Supports Scalable Application Development

Google has announced the availability of its free Google App Engine which
provides a fully-integrated application environment, making it "easy
to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of
users without infrastructure headaches." According to the Google
announcement, "Google App Engine gives you access to the same building
blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to
build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with
large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following
features: (1) Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web
technologies; (2) Persistent storage powered by Bigtable and GFS [Google
File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed
data-intensive applications] with queries, sorting, and transactions;
(3) Automatic scaling and load balancing; (4) Google APIs for
authenticating users and sending email; (5) Fully featured local
development environment. App Engine applications are implemented using
the Python programming language. The App Engine Python runtime environment
includes a specialized version of the Python interpreter, the standard
Python library, libraries and APIs for App Engine, and a standard
interface to the web server layer. Google App Engine and Django both
have the ability to use the WSGI standard to run applications. As a result,
it is possible to use nearly the entire Django stack on Google App Engine,
including middleware. As a developer, the only necessary adjustment is
modifying your Django data models to make use of the Google App Engine
Datastore API to interface with the fast, scalable Google App Engine
datastore. Since both Django and Google App Engine have a similar concept
of models, as a Django developer, you can quickly adjust your application
to use our datastore. Google App Engine packages these building blocks
and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to
focus on writing code and improving your application... This preview of
Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign
up, and we plan to increase that number in near future. 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..."