Google announced on Monday the release of Google App Engine, which allows outside developers to build and run their applications on top of Google’s infrastructure, making it easier for them to focus on the applications, rather than on system administration and maintenance, the company said.

Pete Koomen, product manager at Google, said in a statement: “Google has spent years developing infrastructure for scalable web applications. We’ve brought Gmail and Google search to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and we’ve built out a powerful network of datacenters to support those applications. Today we’re taking the first step in making this infrastructure available to all developers.”

For the time being, Google App Engine will only be available to a maximum of 10,000 sign ups, the company said, giving each developer a restriction to the free quota of 500MB of storage and the necessary CPU and network bandwidth to sustain approximately 5 million page views per month for a typical app.

“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 Paul McDonald, Product Manager for Google.

Google Apps Engine will give access to the same building block Google uses for its own applications, offering dynamic webserving with full support of common web technologies, persistent storage with Bigtable and GFS, automatic scaling and load balancing, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email and fully featured local development environment.

The “launch is a preview release – we’re by no means feature-complete, and we’re giving you early access because we really want your feedback,” said McDonald in his statement. For those who want to try it out they can sign up here and then download the SDK to get started.