Been following the Google appengine release via FriendFeed and Twitter (with thanks to @mndoci, @rvidal). A few resources:
- O’Reilly Radar writeup – explains what it’s all about
- Article at SmoothSpan Blog
- Technorati search – slowly picking up
- FriendFeed public stream discussions
- Update: official Google blog announcement
- Update: Deepak’s thoughts
In brief: appengine provides infrastructure for developers to host web applications using the same tools that Google uses (notably GFS and a scalable data store termed BigTable). What’s more – there is a free service and anyone with a Google account can sign up for the beta test. Any downsides? It’s Python-only for now, but that’s expected to change.
This is exciting news. I would really like to see some bioinformatics developers try it out and report back with their experiences.