Huge...this is my first reaction when I first saw it a few days ago. Yes, I missed the release day so I wasn't able to enroll in to the first 10,000 candidate to get the first hand experience. That's ok, because I have no experience of using Python either.
Hosting web apps in Google would really hurts those small web hosting companies or whoever doing this type of business. Who wants to run their critical websites on higher downtime percentage while there is a better one out there like Google? Google manages the uptime, backups, and more, it hosts your sites virtually across hundreds of servers so you don't need to care if one of them are down. How often do you see this offered by many other web hosting companies? You either have to share the resources with many others for lower cost or exclusively use one dedicated server but without back-up standby.
However, in order to gain all these benefits you will need to over a few gotchas, as Bex Huff pointed out.
- It only supports apps written in Python. No Java, no C, no .NET. Although, Python rocks...
- The best web application framework option is Django... which is an awesomely elegant framework, similar in philosophy to Ruby On Rails. Existing Django apps can be ported in minutes.
- You cannot write to the file system, you have to use the Google Datastore API
- If your web request takes more than a few seconds to respond, Google will kill the process, and send back an error... so I don't know how they do batch processes...
- Google owns your ass even more.
I am a .Net guy so it would be quite a bit of work to switch around. And first of first, I need to pick up Python if I want to go this direction. It's still in Preview Release right now and I am in the waiting list at the moment but will see how it goes later.