Google App Engine - First impressions

* It is free, but with quotas. The business model is probably to get others to build apps so that Google can get users, searchable data & then eventually offer a business edition.
* You don't have to worry about hosting, load balancing & scaling which is indeed huge since writing the web application is the easiest among all of the above.
* The initial release is not ready for business apps, it doesn't have an SLA nor does it have a good support for authentication & authorization.
* You need to learn Python if you haven't already, but future support for ruby or php could be expected soon.
* There are no issues in hosting flash or flex application except for the login to google account issue.
* Python frameworks like Django are natively supported, but you can use your own framework as well.
* It is possible to do GQL queries and Google full text search support.
* And there is the full offline sdk for those who can't get an account yet.
* Just use your own user model instead of Google's to avoid lockin.
* Some have even gone ahead and ported AppEngine to Amazon EC2 even though without the BigTable support.
* I wonder how Amazon EC2 & other $5.99 webservice providers are going to react?

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