What is Google App Engine?

What is Google App Engine? Here is a good description from their website:

Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The environment includes the following features:

• dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
• persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
• a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

I love it that Google eats their own dog food. These guys didn't invent a new "product" or come up with something to sell to the masses; they're using the same things that they built their company on! They have enough faith in their internal infrastructure that they're using it to allow us (the masses) to use these great products to build some really neat applications. Google is using the following components for their framework: Python application servers (more languages forthcoming), BigTable (Google's home grown database), and GFS (Google File System) data store services

As pointed out by TechCrunch here, this appears to be in response to Amazon's suite of web application enabling services: S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers), and SimpleDB (database). The difference is that Google is offering the whole stack instead of more loosely coupled services. Some SOA junkies would argue that this is not what they want, but I would beg to differ. First, it's Google doing what Google does well: offer everything seamlessly so that a developer can easily get one SDK, use one API, and one common environment to get an application written and deployed quickly. Basically, my money is on Google.

Now, if I were only one of the first 10,000 who got in on the Beta! Here's hoping to a quick run through the wait list! I'll probably download the SDK to play with anyway; I really want to see how Google's Query Language (GQL) stacks up against my favorite: SQL.