Google App Engine Changes Everything

Two days ago, Google announced something called App Engine. I have read the announcement page about five times now and I still cannot believe what I am reading.

Google is letting regular people run their code on Google's servers. The same servers that run Google Search. The same infrastructure that handles billions of requests. And for small applications, it is free.

Free. As in, you do not pay anything.

What Even Is This

Let me try to explain this because I have been trying to explain it to my friends in the hostel and most of them look at me like I have lost my mind.

Right now, if you want to put a web application on the internet, you have a few options. You can pay for shared hosting, which is cheap but limited. You can rent a dedicated server, which costs real money that a student does not have. Or you can beg someone who already has a server to let you use a corner of it.

Google App Engine changes all of that. You write your application in Python, upload it to Google, and they handle everything else. The server, the database, the scaling, the uptime, all of it. If one person visits your app or one million people visit your app, Google takes care of it.

I do not have to worry about my little server falling over if something I build gets popular. Not that anything I build is going to get popular anytime soon, but still. The possibility is there.

Python, Though

There is one thing that makes this even more interesting for me. The language they chose is Python.

I have been hearing about Python for a while now. Some of the programming blogs I read talk about it constantly. They say it is clean, readable, and perfect for web development. I have been meaning to learn it but kept putting it off because C and C++ take up all my time.

Now I have a real reason. If I learn Python, I can build web applications and deploy them for free on Google's infrastructure. That is the most compelling reason to learn a programming language I have ever heard.

I downloaded Python yesterday and wrote a hello world program. It took one line. One. In C, that same program takes about five lines if you count the includes and the main function and the return statement. I think I am going to like this language.

The Bigger Picture

I have been thinking about what this means beyond just "free hosting for students." This feels like the beginning of something much bigger.

Think about it. Until now, if you had an idea for a web application, you needed infrastructure. You needed hardware, or at least access to hardware. That costs money, and money is a barrier. A lot of great ideas probably died because the person who had them could not afford a server.

Google just removed that barrier. And if Google is doing this, other companies will follow. Amazon already has something called EC2 that lets you rent virtual servers by the hour. Microsoft will probably build something similar.

We might be heading toward a world where the infrastructure does not matter anymore. Where you just write your code and somebody else worries about running it. Where a student sitting in a college hostel has access to the same computing power as a startup in Silicon Valley.

That thought gives me chills.

What I Want to Build

I do not have a specific idea yet, but I have been thinking about a few things. Maybe a simple web application that helps students in my college share notes and resources. Our college has no good system for this. People pass around photocopies and USB drives. A web application could make that so much easier.

Or maybe something simpler to start with. A personal page, a small tool, anything really. The point is to learn by doing. Reading about Python and App Engine is one thing. Actually building something and putting it on the internet is completely different.

I have signed up for the waitlist. Google is letting people in gradually, and I have no idea how long it will take before I get access. But in the meantime, I am going to learn Python. By the time I get in, I want to be ready to build something real.

The Wait

The hardest part right now is waiting. I keep refreshing my email hoping for an invite. I know it is silly. There are probably thousands of people on that waitlist, many of them experienced developers who actually know what they are doing. Why would Google pick some random student halfway across the world?

But that is exactly what makes this exciting. It does not matter who you are or where you are. If you can write Python code, you can build on Google App Engine. Your application runs on the same infrastructure as everyone else's. There is no "student tier" or "professional tier." Just one platform, available to anyone.

I keep saying this word but it really does feel like everything is about to change. The internet was already incredible. Now it is becoming accessible in a way it never was before. Not just to use, but to build on.

I am going to learn Python this week. I will post about how it goes. Wish me luck.