Google announced its cloud computing solution for developers April 7 and gave out an initial 10,000 accounts to developers for this service. The company then gave out another 10,000 accounts over the course of the week due to demand.

Meanwhile, to help people develop locally—and if they didn't get one of the 20,000 accounts—Google made its Development Web Server, also known as "Dev Web Server," available. The Google App Engine SDK (software development kit) includes a Web server application for developing and testing App Engine applications. The Web server reproduces the App Engine Python run-time environment, including sandbox restrictions, and emulates the App Engine services such as the data store.

As Patrick Kerpan, chief technology officer of Chicago-based Cohesive Flexible Technologies, one of the companies extending Google App Engine, put it: "Dev Web Server is something you can use to develop applications for deploying to the Google cloud—Google App Engine—if you have an account, or friend, or when it opens up for general use. Dev Web Server doesn't provide all the services of the Google cloud but has some 'stubs'—proper API calls that go to a flat file rather than the real cloud database, for example."