Google’s third developer conference, and the first to be called Google I/O, kicks off on Wednesday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with a keynote presentation by Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering.
Here’s what to expect:
- A focus on the ecosystem comprised of the browser as an operating system + ubiquitous connectivity + emerging cloud computing.
- Lifting of the restrictions around Google App Engine, their hosted computing environment.
- News about Google Gears
- Android Application Demos
- Minor news about Google Open Social
The big announcement will be around Google App Engine - expect the 160,000 or so developers on the waiting list to be let in tomorrow (75,000 have been given access already). Google will also lift the hard ceiling on resource usage. Currently applications are cut off when resource usage goes over a certain point (the cap equates to about 5 million page views per month for an average app). That cap will continue to apply until later this year, but they will announce the following usage fees tomorrow:
Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
This pricing puts Google App Engine storage and bandwidth costs competitive with Amazon S3 (plus Google doesn’t have a per-request fee).
Google is also announcing two new tools for Google App Engine developers: an image-manipulation API and memcache. The image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server. The memcache API gives developers access to a distributed, high-performance in-memory key-value caching system. Memcache would have been useful for our own App Engine app (see it live here) to help us unload common queries from Google’s datastore. Also to note: no additional languages will be supported.
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