Google finally got into the cloud infrastructure game, announcing their Google AppEngine. As rumored, AppEngine opens parts of Google's legendary scalable infrastructure for hosted applications.

AppEngine is in beta, with only 10,000 accounts available. They're already long gone, but you can download the SDK and run a local container.

Here are some quick pros and cons:

Pro

• Dynamically scalable
• Good lifecycle management
• Quota-based management for cost containment

Con

• Python apps only
• You deploy code, not virtual machines
• Web apps only

At this point, I'm a bit underwhelmed. Essentially, they're providing a virtual scalable app runtime, but not a generalized computing platform. (Similar to Sun's Project Caroline.) Access to the really cool Google features, like GFS, is through Python APIs that Google provides.

If you fit Google's profile of a Python-based Web application developer, this could be a very fast path to market with dynamic scalability.  Still, I think I'm going to stick with Amazon Web Services, instead.