A new cloud storage service for web apps

May 20, 2010 14:23 GMT  ·  By

As recently rumored, Google has unveiled a cloud storage solution for developers at this year’s Google I/O conference. Most of the details were spot-on, but considering that the rumor came just hours before the official announcement, it’s no surprise. The service will use a RESTful API and will be launched in a private beta at first.

“As businesses move to the cloud, there’s a growing demand for core services such as storage that power cloud applications. Today we are introducing a preview of Google Storage for Developers, a RESTful cloud service built on Google’s storage and networking infrastructure,” Jessie Jiang, from the Google Storage for Developers Team, wrote.

“Using this RESTful API, developers can easily connect their applications to fast, reliable storage replicated across several US data centers. It is highly scalable - supporting read-after-write data consistency, objects of hundreds of gigabytes in size per request, and a domain-scoped namespace. In addition, developers can manage their storage from a web-based interface and use GSUtil, an open-source command-line tool and library,” the announcement added.

Google Storage for Developers wants to be a simple and flexible cloud storage solution. It’s aimed, obviously, at developers who need to host big amounts of data for their applications. Its main advantages come from the cloud infrastructure, data is replicated and available from several data centers and developers don’t have to worry about maxing out their storage space or bandwidth.

Because the service is intended mainly for web apps, a lot of emphasis was laid on authenticated access. Developers will be able to set different access levels for different data sets and users. For now, only Google accounts are supported. Google says Apps accounts will be supported at some point in the future. The service will only be available as a preview, for the moment, for a small number of developers. They will get access to 100 GB of storage space and 300 GB of traffic per month for free during this preview period.

Google I/O 2010

- Chrome Web Store
 - WebM, Google’s Open Video Format for HTML5  - WebM - A Technical Overview and Possible Legal Issues  - 

Google Wave is Now Open to Everyone

 - Google Wave for Apps and New APIs  - Google Buzz API  - Google App Engine for Business and VMWare Partnership  - Android 2.2 Froyo Is Lightning Fast  - Google TV Set to Conquer the Living Room    - Music May be Coming to the Android Marketplace    - YouTube Leanback for Google TV    - Presenting the New Fonts API