WebProNews

Google opened App Engine for hosting and scaling web applications to an early preview group of 10,000, first come first serve, developers.

The arrival of App Engine happened during one of Google's coding events, Campfire One. App Engine presents Google's infrastructure to web application developers, with the heavy features Google uses to help people quickly find information in search.

App Engine's blog highlighted some of the mouth-watering features the initial group of accepted developers will get to play with on launch:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

"During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day," Google said. "We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month."

To give that some perspective, Matt Cutts put it in context, offering his blog's performance as a benchmark:

I checked out my pageview stats for the first three months of the year. If you subtract out a couple posts that got hit by digg, I’m running at about 500,000 pageviews a month. So you can scale your web app up to be ten times more popular than my blog (which is relatively well-trafficked) before you’d be looking at paying for storage/CPU/bandwidth. By then, you’d know that your start-up idea was on to a good thing.

One commenter on that post said it appears the first 10,000 spots available for developers in this preview of App Engine were snapped up in a couple of hours.

Startups have plenty of appeal today, thanks to a foundering economy and stagnating paychecks. Someone who has a dream of building the next Twitter and eventually cashing in will need infrastructure; based on Matt Cutts' observations, App Engine could help with that necessary first step.