Google's App Engine Brings The Cloud To YouThere's been much discussion this week about Google's App Engine beta test, offering developers the opportunity to deploy their (Python-based) apps on Google's infrastructure, and take advantage of Google's enormous storage, bandwidth and scalability resources, for free. Information Week's Serdar Yegulalp contrasts App Engine with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud: "App Engine might be the more immediately accessible of the two. It's for coders, not coders who now have to moonlight as sysadmins. Many of the things about EC2 that some people have liked have been limitations to others. You need to create and administer a full virtual machine in the [Amazon] cloud as well as write apps for it. That's great if you're already an administrator, but maybe not so great if all you want to do is get something running." At Dr Dobb's Code Talk, in a cleverly titled post, All Your Apps Are Belong To Google they have some reservations: "Of course, we can't help but wonder if this is yet another step towards GoogleWorld (tm). Particularly when you compare the come-on with that you might get from your friendly corner dealer of illicit substances: On Slashdot, some commenters question the value of Google's offering compared to similar functionality that can be obtained, more flexibly, and almost as inexpensively, from any of a multitude of other hosts. Others, of course see it as a big Google win, at least from a mindshare perspective. And at Information Week, Thomas Claburn sees another competitor eyeing the field: "It's probably only a matter of time before Microsoft gets into the act. Microsoft, after all, has been shadowing Google's moves for a while now, and it's hard to image that the hypercompetitive Steve Ballmer wants to cede the cloud computing platform space to Amazon, Google, and a few plucky startups." For more from Google themselves, see their App Engine home page.
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