Google is dipping into the cloud computing market.  They are claiming to have solved the issue of scalability for web applications, a direct hit against Amazon Web Services.  It doesn't matter whether your application gets 10 hits per day or 1 million hits per day. 

Picture taken from internetnews

One inconvenience of App Engine is that it is restricted to the Python language.  Python is a good language, but it would be nice to see multiple platforms allowed.  Another problem is that data is not relational, people are saying that it uses Bigtable, a distributed storage system.

There were only 10,000 initial free accounts offered and guess what they are gone.  Each account has a 500MB storage limit and is allowed 5 million hits per month.  Hopefully more accounts will become available soon, I am on a waitlist that is probably a mile long :).

If you are interested, Google I/O is from May 28th - 29th.  They will be discussing App Engine and different APIs such as Google Gears, Google Web Toolkit, Google Data APIs, and more.

There are already a bunch of applications popping up.  Hopefully Google will continue to provide this as a free service when as it goes live.