As expected, Google made a set of announcements related to the Cloud at last week’s I/O conference. These announcements pushed Google into the mainstream making it a viable alternative to Amazon and Microsoft Cloud offerings.Undoubtedly, Amazon is the most mature and proven Cloud platform followed by Windows Azure. Both AWS and Windows Azure have a comprehensive set of services bringing more value to the platform. Customers can start small and tap into additional capabilities as they grow. Services like RDBMS, NoSQL, Messaging, Virtual Networking, Big Data and Analytics appeal to startups and enterprises equally.
Google is now adopting the same strategy as AWS and Windows Azure by bringing all the services under one roof labeled as the Google Cloud Platform. Google’s biggest differentiator is that it’s Cloud services are used internally by many teams over a period of time. Services like CloudSQL, Cloud DataStore and BigQuery have been used by Google for many years before they are offered to the customers. That makes the platform proven and rock solid.
Google’s game changer comes in the form of Compute Engine. Announced at last year’s I/O conference, GCE was positioned as the IaaS for enterprise workloads. Unlike AWS, which started as the Cloud for startups and now struggling to capture the enterprise market, Google is targeting enterprises from day one. Based on initial performance benchmarks, GCE offers better IO capabilities than Amazon EC2. This makes it ideal for running Big Data processing and IO intensive workloads like ERP on the Cloud. GCE’s sub-hour billing with a one minute increment challenges every IaaS provider in the market. This might even force other vendors to follow the same billing pattern changing the economics of the Cloud forever. Google has also managed to support up to 10TB of persistent disks, which is 10 times of what Amazon EC2 supports. These features place Google in the big league on the day it entered the market. While most of the IaaS offerings start with the features of Amazon EC2 in 2009 and then attempt to fill the gap, GCE has leapfrogged to meet (and in some cases exceed) the features and performance of Amazon.
Google’s PaaS offering App Engine, finally supports PHP. This was the single most demanded feature by App Engine developers for ages. While Cloud Foundry, Engine Yard, AppFog and Windows Azure have been supporting PHP effortlessly, Google has been adamant in bringing the same to GAE. Despite the lack of frequent updates and investments into GAE, there is a loyal community of developers out there to support App Engine. With PHP, there will be more developers willing to bet on App Engine because of the stability of the platform and the brand value of Google. This will certainly impact the PaaS market which is already struggling to make money. Google also talked about the Mobile Companion powered by App Engine, which makes it easy for the mobile developers to deal with the Cloud. This marks the official entry of Google into the crowded Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) market. I expect that Google will continue to add features and capabilities to the mobile backend service to bring it on par with mature MBaaS offerings like Parse, StackMob and Kinvey.
Services like Google Cloud Storage for storing static content, Google App Engine Cloud DataStore for storing schema-less data, CloudSQL for storing structured data and BigQuery for processing and analyzing large data sets make Google Cloud Platform complete and mature.
Finally, Amazon gets the real competitor and the customers get the real alternative!
