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Three important things. Here's the third:
3) It uses Google's custom-built data storage mechanism, called 'BigTable', instead of a conventional SQL-driven database.
Google has a detailed description here: http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
That's good The bad news is that you have to re-write any existing applications that use SQL.
The good news is that the Google 'BigTable' is really easy to use, so it doesn't take long to write software to access your data.
Three important things. Here's the first:
1) Currently, the only language supported is Python.
That's good news and bad news:
The bad news is, of course, that a lot fewer people can write Python programs, and there aren't many existing financial applications written in Python. There are, however, a lot of non-financial applications in Python, in sophisticated areas such as language processing, computer games, and even computer animation. "Every CG image we create has involved Python somewhere in the process," said Philip Peterson, Principal Engineer, Research & Development, Industrial Light & Magic. (as quoted on the Python website) The good news is that Python is a really nice language. Try it: you'll like it. The Google development team tried it, and they like it enough that they use it extensively in-house. They liked it enough that they hired the person who created Python, Guido Van Rossum. See his his personal web page, with a brief bio, on http://www.python.org/~guido/.
I wrote another blog article about Python here.
In essence, they are offering to be the 'operations department' for anyone's web-based application. They currently have a "beta" release, free, for developers to try out. So ... here I am, trying it out.