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Google Cloud Now on Tap for Web Developers
Google, with its new Application Engine product, has taken aim squarely at the web services market — and companies from Amazon.com to Bungee Labs should be running scared. The search giant’s Application Engine allows developers to build a web application “in their garage” and then host it for free on Google’s existing infrastructure. Take that, Jeff Bezos!
The App Engine will run in the same Google data centers that host GMail, Google Docs and other online programs. Initially up to 10,000 developers will have access to the preview edition of App Engine. Every developer will be able build up to three applications, each of which will have 500 MB of storage and the CPU cycles and bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month. All of this will be free, and when the service is out of preview Google will announce the ability to buy more storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles.
For some developers, a service like this eliminates the need for Amazon Web Services. It could also cause problems for startups such as online storage company Elephant Drive and platform-as-service vendors such as Bungee Labs. However, the App Engine does have its limits, some of which will be addressed as time goes on. For now, no files larger than 1MB can be uploaded to the site and Python is the only language supported by App Engine. Other limits include the inability to buy extra time and a focus only on web applications.
Even with limits, this is exactly the type of service Dave Winer last week, after a conversation with a pig, predicted. This type of loss-leader service gets startups in the door with Google, giving the company access to the freshest ideas and an entrepreneurial talent pool that it can tap. Kevin Kelleher called it the way Google can eat Amazon’s lunch.
He’s right, but it will come at a cost to Google in terms of its margins. Providing that kind of infrastructure isn’t free. It also will have a ways to go before it can compete with the 330,000 developers Amazon says are using its Web Services as of January.
Still, it’s a start. And it puts the competition on notice. There’s also the potential for Google to use this as an home base for its other development platforms, such as Open Social for social networks or Android for the mobile phone. A place where developers could build applications that could work anywhere would be the holy grail.
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Another GDrive “Platypus” Leak
Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped received and attempted to install a leaked copy of the GDrive client being used by Google employees. He was unable to login after installing (our belief is it must be used from an approved IP address) it but posted some interesting information.
Platypus syncs an online copy of selected files with a downloaded local version. Users can share by individual or project and can provide view or edit permission for individual users. GDrive shows up as a separate drive icon on users’ computers and can be accessed via a static URL. Internal users by default get a mere 500 MB of storage each. Philipp posted the Platypus Help file for Windows and Linux as well.
There’s no evidence that the program is set for public launch any time soon, but hints supporting such speculation have been popping up now and again for some time. Here’s a quick timeline of previous TechCrunch coverage of the illusive GDrive product:
- In March Google held an analyst day that included documentation of a future offering called Google Drive, emphasizing security, cross application, platform and device access. The information was quickly taken offline but Michael Arrington wrote a summary of “what we know” about Google Drive to date.
- In an April post about Microsoft’s forthcoming Live Drive, Michael Arrington wrote the following. “From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously).”
- In July Corsin Camichel discovered a brief description of GDrive on the newly acquired Writely servers, which was quickly mirrored before Google took it down. Not a whole lot of details but it was seen as some level of confirmation of the project’s existence.
- If we needed any proof that Platypus at least exists, today’s leak might be it. Some people say (Paul Graham for example) that the best way to predict what Google will develop well for commercial release is to watch what they use internally.
A lot has changed since we wrote our overview of online storage in January. Watch for the release of ZohoDrive soon as well.
Does this leak mean anything in particular? It’s hard to know, but there’s at least some information available to chew on. In all likelihood GDrive is only a matter of time.
One note on the leak: As we pointed out in a post earlier this week about the new Google Docs and Spreadsheets product, Google is going to focus on convincing small and medium sized businesses that their internal Office documents will be secure on Google’s servers. Google needs to control its own leaks if they hope to do this - this is the second major Platypus leak this year.
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GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers
Another hint at a coming online storage service from Google has been discovered by bloggers and quickly taken down. Corsin Camichel took the smart if logical step of adding index.html to the end of Google’s Writely.com URL and found a page allegedly detailing a Google storage service, codenamed Platypus. Since being blogged about, the page is offline (the link is to a mirror). Since the entire story is based solely on this one screen shot, this is little more than a highly speculative rumor at this point.
We wrote about GDrive in March when information about the product was released by Google in an analyst presentation. Nothing seems to have come of it yet. There are any number of Google services under development and many bloggers complain (myself included) once they are released that they fail to meet expectations. Why then all the hype today over a single page on another domain about possible service features? Apparently Vista uses perpetual delay announcements to secure mindshare pre-launch and Google gets to reap the benefits from playing whack-a-mole with bloggers eager to chase after any whiff of a service that could launch some day. Wake me up when there is reason to believe that launch is coming.