Today Google announced a new service, App Engine.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

From Google Official Blog:
With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow.

A similar service is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

It seems that computing is turning into a utility. And this is what Nicholas Carr new book “The Big Switch Our New Digital Destiny” is about.
A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electricity providers not only changed how businesses operated but also brought the modern world into existence. Today a similar revolution is under way as companies dismantle their private computer systems and tap into rich services delivered over the Internet.