Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 8, 2008 | Share This |

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Google yesterday announced the launch of Google App Engine, a hosting platform for web application developers. From the brand-new Google App Engine blog:

The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users… 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… 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.

The service is similar to and will compete with Amazon’s S3 platform. But because Google has such extensive services that many startups take advantage of (email, docs, etc.), Read/Write Web wonders what additional reliance on Google means for startups that will use the App Engine, too:

But looking at the bigger picture, startups which use Google App Engine are essentially tying themselves into Google’s technology. They’ll need to host with Google, do their processing with Google, store their data with Google, etc. And as some people have already speculated, having a web app built and deployed with Google App Engine makes it much easier for Google to eventually acquire that web app. It does make you wonder: would you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment?

These are certainly important implications for startups to think about, but ultimately the promise of a free sandbox to develop and storage to do it with will likely outweigh any reservations developers might have.

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