Google Opens Google App Engine

SAN FRANCISCO—At the Google I/O developer conference here, Google plans to announce new open sign-ups, pricing plans and APIs for the Google App Engine.

Google App Engine enables developers to build their Web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own apps, and now developers looking to create highly scalable Web applications can sign up for Google App Engine. This means that the more than 150,000 developers who have joined the product's waiting list over the past six weeks can sign up to use the platform as of May 28. Google App Engine will be available to everyone, with no waiting required, company officials said.

Google also announced pricing for buying additional computing resources on Google App Engine. The pricing will go into effect later this year, company officials said. The product will be free to start, and in the current preview release, apps will continue to be restricted to that free quota. The free quota to get started is 500MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month.

However, later this year, once the preview period has ended, developers can expect to pay 10 to 12 cents per CPU core per hour, 15 to 18 cents per GB per month of storage, 11 to 13 cents per GB outgoing bandwidth, and 9 to 11 cents per GB incoming bandwidth.

Google App Engine also will provide two new APIs that will appear in a matter of weeks. One is an image-manipulation API that enables developers to scale, rotate and crop images on the server. The other is the memcache API, a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.

In addition, Google said it will make its Google Web Toolkit release candidate 1.5 available during the Google I/O conference.