If you haven't heard of it yet, Google launched something called "Google App Engine", a complete stack for deploying and hosting web applications that leverages Google infrastucture for scalability and reliability. It "sorta" competes against Amazon's EC2.

The "infrastructure as a service" trend is fascinating. In general,  I've been studying the best ways to host and deploy services in a web environment - Amazon EC2 has come up in my mind many times. And of course, Google App Engine certainly caught my attention.

It also caught the attention of our friends at Techcrunch. They built a fairly simple app, deployed it to Google, and blogged about it. I enjoyed their blog. And then I went to check out the application. Here is what I got:



What? Well, maybe it's just alpha, but it certainly doesn't look like high availability at this moment.

Update: just saw a posting that reported Google AppEngine has been hacked, via a relatively simply cross-site scripting.