Google has launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a tool that will enable developers to run their Web applications on Google's infrastructure. According the the Google App Engine weblog, "the goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users."

The offering gives developers access to the same tools that Google users for its own applications.

The development environment includes:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Hurry and sign up for access though - the preview is available only to the first 10,000 who sign up. Applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day and 10GB  bandwidth per day. Download the SDK to get started and head on over to the discussion group to offer your feedback.