Published on the 09/12/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Google is pushing further into the cloud with the announcement that its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product, Compute Engine, is now generally available on the Google Cloud Platform…
The ‘general availability’ announcement for Google Compute Engine means the technology giant is officially joining other large enterprise public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. Google’s IaaS, which has been in beta since 2012, is designed to allow users to run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
According to a blog post by Google, Compute Engine offers virtual machines that are “performant, scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at rest”. Compute Engine is now offering expanded OS support, transparent maintenance, and lower prices for customers.
Asked if this is a move to intentionally go up against the likes of AWS a Google spokesperson told iStart: “What we’ve been focused on is improving the developer experience across our services to meet the standards our own engineers would expect here at Google. The move to make Google Cloud Platform generally availability is a sign of our commitment to the space. We’re in this for the long haul.”
Google has three data centres in Asia – in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan – due to come online thorough out 2013, but currently has no plans to establish any in Australasia.
The spokesperson added “it’s early days for Cloud Platform in Australia and New Zealand and we do have some local Google App Engine customers,” suggesting that it does not have any Cloud Engine customers yet. News Limited uses Apps Engine and Big Query for its self-service, classified advertisement booking and billing system site called Traderoo and the online retailer Shoes of Prey uses Big Query and Cloud Platform.
“They say it would have been impossible to run a company like Shoes of Prey before the era of infrastructure-as-a-service, cloud and big data technology as it gives them a deep understanding of seasonal trends. They can now manage things like leather types on a season-to-season basis. Cloud Platform has allowed them to scale. For example if they’re running TV ads and suddenly have 500,000 new visitors to their site they don’t need to manage any of it and it just happen automatically, ” the spokesperson for Google said.
Gartner’s Lydia Leong, research vice president in the technology and service providers group, commented on Google’s announcement saying that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the king of this space and is unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon and Google Cloud Engine still lags AWS tremendously in terms of breadth and depth of feature set, “it’s now at the point where it’s a viable alternative to AWS for organisations who are looking to do cloud-native applications, whether they’re start-ups or long-established companies.”
She also noted that Microsoft Windows Azure is an up-and-coming competitor to Amazon due to its deep established relationships with business customers, while Google Cloud Engine is more likely to target the cloud-natives that are going to AWS right now.
Leong sees the general availability of Google Cloud Engine as a demarcation of market eras. “I think that Google is likely to push the market forward in terms of innovation in a way that Azure will not; AWS and Google will hopefully goad each other into one-upmanship, creating a virtuous cycle of introducing things that customers discover they love, thus creating user demand that pushes the market forward.”
