Google App Engine unveiled: Scoble and Arrington on scene

Google has officially launched their Google App Engine for full-stack, automatically scalable, hosted web application platform as of 9pm PST last night. The architecture offered consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access, and GFS distributed data file servers.

Obviously, this service is intended to go toe-to-toe with the Amazon suite of web services; more specifically S3 for data storage, EC2 for virtual servers, and their SimpleDB for database access.

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington were at the event last night. Scoble posted several videos from the event. Arrington, as always, expatiates on the functionality, usage and monitoring of the service. Google also posted their official video from their announcement as well as a demonstration video.

From Google:

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

• No assembly required.
  Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.
• It’s easy to scale.
  Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It’s free to get started.
  Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

The real question for me is whether this will truly be for business and enterprise level applications or for the small, supplemental apps developed on a tight deadline.