There’s big news for web developers this week with Google unveiling its App Engine, an invite-only service that will enable developers to run web applications on the search giant’s infrastructure and purportedly help them start and scale their applications faster. Initially, the service will be available for free featuring 500MB of storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views – no word on how Google will price the service in the future.

The new service will compete against Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud services, which consists of several independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers. Google’s offering, however, is designed for developers who want to run their entire application on Google resources. App Engine will initially support applications written in Python only, but Google is looking to add support for other languages as well.