We all
thought that Amazon Web Services was the King of the hill referring to IaaS,
and, a long distance behind, you could find Azure from Microsoft and other
cloud giants.
AWS was
launched in 2006 and it left everyone astonished with very innovative and
advanced solutions. It has managed to be the major provider of cloud services
in the world until now. Its policy based on “pay per use”, its flexibility to
generate instances, or having offered five times the compute capacity of the other
fourteen providers in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant are responsible for its well earned fame.
Meanwhile
we could see Google distracted designing robots, as Andy Rubin commented in an
interview to the NY Times but they have made a move.
The Compute
Engine by Google, its IaaS public cloud platform, is already available. Its
main characteristics are:
- -
Support
for almost all the linux and kernels distributions.
- -
24/7
support
- -
Live
migration
- -
Persistent
Disk Storage
- -
It is 10% cheaper than its nearest
competitor:AWS
- -
SLA
with 99.95% availability
Beta has
been a synonym of Google for years (do not forget that Google Mail was in Beta
from 2004 to 2009). But, in order to consolidate this new platform, it must
change the way in which it is seen by the business world.
Talking
about technology, one of the key characteristics it must offer is being the first provider of non-VMware cloud which
adds live migration. This may convince some clients who will consider Google
better than its competition. But this functionality must be handled carefully because
having instances in more than one region can generate additional costs.
Live
migration corners its competitor as Amazon’s system of load balancing between
regions has not avoided service failures. Even Netflix, highly concerned about
it, had to ask its engineers to think of a layer that could run over AWS
offering a maximum cloud uptime.
As
Gartner’s analyst Lydia Leong comments in its blog , Compute Engine may not be an
attempt to block light to Amazon Web Services, it just wants to be there as a
previous step to develop other technologies or services and start to gain the
enterprise customers trust that used to be an important part of Google’s
business till now.
It is clear
that Google can add the technology needed to establish an interesting roadmap
but being able to gain the enterprise trust is another matter, besides, it must
impress the developer community by listening to their needs and making them
come true.
It is
always useful to have options; AWS has a predominant position so it is good
that some competition appears. This way, everyone will be forced to improve and
develop new products.
Anyway,
when facing the challenge to chose a Cloud provider, the systems from AWS,
Google… all “pay per use”, can be useful in the short term, but in the mid-term
it can be more interesting to hire a cloud by the number of cores or RAM and,
this way, you could distribute them in different VM according to your needs.
