{"id":650049,"date":"2013-04-02T09:23:57","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T13:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=625853"},"modified":"2013-04-02T09:23:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T13:23:57","slug":"amazon-is-the-cloud-to-beat-but-google-has-the-cloud-to-watch-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/650049","title":{"rendered":"Amazon is the cloud to beat, but Google has the cloud to watch. Here\u2019s why."},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon Web Services is by far the biggest and most experienced public cloud provider<\/a>. Accepting that, the next question is: what cloud vendor can give AWS a run for its money? Increasingly the money is on Google \u00a0\u2013 at least in compute capacity where Google Compute Engine<\/a> is becoming a force to be reckoned with even though it only launched (in beta of course) just last June.<\/p>\n

Scalr<\/a> is clearly a big fan, but even if you don\u2019t buy its\u00a0rather impressive report card\u00a0<\/a>, there are other reasons that Google Compute Engine<\/a>\u00a0should be considered the biggest potential rival to AWS.<\/p>\n

\"Google<\/a><\/p>\n

Google knows from scale<\/h2>\n

Even Google bashers will concede that the company understands massive scale. It has the data center fire power; it has the software tools to harness that power; and it has a deep engineering bench that includes several key hires from \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 AWS. A quick LinkedIn search <\/a>shows some of these hires, but omits many. One of those is\u00a0Sunhil James<\/a>,\u00a0who worked on\u00a0the AWS Virtual Private Cloud and Direct Connect and who now heads up networking services and technologies for the Google Cloud Platform.<\/p>\n

Multi-cloud strategies demand a back-up cloud<\/h2>\n

As big and great as AWS is, most existing and potential business customers will not lock into a single cloud provider. They are still bruised from the current generation of vendor lock in. On the other hand, they can\u2019t afford to support too many. \u201cYou can only make so many bets, and it\u2019s clear that Google is in this public cloud game to stay,\u201d said one vendor exec who would not be named because his company does business with Amazon.<\/p>\n

Companies who made early bets on GCE are Cloudscaling, the OpenStack player which said last fall it will support both the AWS and GCE APIs<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0RightScale, a pioneer in cloud management and monitoring that\u00a0signed up as GCE\u2019s first reseller<\/a>\u00a0in February.<\/p>\n

Google is serious about GCE<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s face it: Google does have a bit of a credibility problem for launching, then deep-sixing services. (Hello, er, goodbye Google Reader.) But no one can seriously doubt that GCE is a priority.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is no skunkworks. This is not some little company they acquired. There\u2019s a big team on the engineering side and if you look at the data center footprint, the fiber, the tech expertise, the internal platform and tools, they are serious about this,\u201d said the vendor exec.<\/p>\n

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver<\/a>, a Boston startup, said the time is ripe for an AWS contender to surface. The industry, he said, appears to be waiting for someone \u2014 Google? Rackspace? Someone else? to challenge AWS.<\/p>\n

\u201cClearly, Google\u2019s strategy is to differentiate on performance (overall and consistency thereof,)\u201d he said via email. \u201cOur first test suggests that they are delivering on that promise \u2026 so far,\u201d he noted. He also pointed out that GCE\u2019s admin console UI needs work and that less than a year in, there are limited services and features compared to AWS.\u00a0A\u00a0new Stackdriver blog<\/a>\u00a0details its first impressions of GCE.<\/p>\n

The big question is how performance will hold up when the service actually leaves beta and opens up to the real world. There are reportedly tens of thousands of users queued up and ready to jump in when that happens. \u201cSure it feels fast with my six instances in limited preview. How will it feel when I am sharing with the rest of the world? And what has Google done to limit the host, network and API contention that plague large AWS customers?\u201d Belcher asked.<\/p>\n

Lack of legacy baggage helps GCE<\/h2>\n

Microsoft Windows Azure is paying the price now for Microsoft\u2019s huge installed base of Windows and .NET legacy applications. While it\u2019s done a good job incorporating support for open-source technologies under the Azure umbrella, that support is not on par with Windows, at least when you ask developers outside the .NET world. \u201cThey are still waited down by their Windows and Office mentality,\u201d said one vendor who weighed supporting Azure but decided against it. \u201cThere are aspects of Azure that are technically superior but then their APIs are attrocious,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On the other hand \u2026<\/h2>\n

\"AWS:<\/a>Skeptics will always wonder if Google\u2019s heart is in anything other than internet search and advertising. And, Google, like AWS is not particularly known for working well with others in the partner community.<\/p>\n

The other issue is that while Google Apps has gained traction in business accounts \u2014 largely because it\u2019s so much cheaper than Microsoft Office \u2014 \u00a0one long-time Google watcher wonders if it will ever \u201cget its enterprise act together.\u201d \u00a0In his view, Google Enterprise Search appliance never got traction so Google has to prove its credibility outside internet search.<\/p>\n

Going forward, Google will also have to offer a more comprehensive menu of services. And, most importantly, it will have to bring more enterprise workloads on board so all of those companies looking for an AWS backup (or alternative) can really put GCE through its paces.<\/p>\n

We will be talking about public and private cloud adoption, gating factors to that adoption, and other hot-button topics at GigaOM Structure <\/a>in San Francisco in June.<\/p>\n

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