Google is giving 10,000 developers the chance to create and run their Web applications on its infrastructure with the launch Tuesday of a preview release of Google App Engine.

"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," said Google product manager, Paul McDonald in a blog post.

"Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data."

The preview is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, with plans to increase that number in near future. It is open to developers from around the globe, and the preview release, at present, is just in English.

In the preview phase, "applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day", said McDonald.

He said the development environment includes features such as dynamic Web serving that supports common web technologies; persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS); automatic scaling and load balancing; Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email; and fully featured local development environment.