Google has unveiled a service akin to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, letting developers and businesses hoist applications atop virtual machines running on the same sweeping infrastructure that underpins Google's own applications and web services.
Unveiled on Thursday morning by Urs Hölzle -- the man who oversees Google's infrastructure -- at the company's annual developer conference, the new service is known as Google Compute Engine. The company already offers a service for building and running applications atop its infrastructure -- Google App Engine -- but this service does not offer access to raw virtual machines. With App Engine, you must code applications for specific APIs, or application programming interfaces, that place certain restrictions on what programming languages, libraries, and frameworks can be used.
With raw virtual machines, developers can pretty much run whatever software they want, just as they can with Amazon EC2, the undisputed king of the cloud computing game.
Google's new service is currently in the beta testing stage, and it's available to only a limited number of users. Hölzle claimed that next to competitors -- presumably Amazon -- the service would offer 50 percent more compute power per dollar. During his keynote, the Google man said that the service lets applications scale to hundreds of thousands of processors cores, showing one genetics-related application running on about 600,000 cores.
The move had been rumored since mid-May, with GigaOM reporting that Google was preparing to release a service akin to Amazon EC2. Google's service will compete not only with EC2, but with a similar service Microsoft added to its Windows Azure cloud last month and services offered by the Texas-based Rackspace.
Like these competitors, Google Compute Engine is essentially a way of building and hosting applications without setting up computing hardware in your own data center. Amazon pioneered the idea of a public service that would provide businesses and developers with instant access to virtual servers and other computing resources, such as storage, and according to one estimate, its services now run as much as 1 percent of the internet. In response to the popularity of Amazon service, myriad companies have introduced similar services.
Meanwhile, many others have built software that lets you mimic Amazon in your own data center. In some ways, this "private cloud" idea defeats the purpose of a service like Amazon's, but the thinking is that some companies prefer to keep their data and software on their own machines.
Google introduced Google App Engine in 2008 as an alternative to Amazon. But it never had the same success.
When building applications for App Engine, you can't just build anything you like. You're restricted to certain programming languages: Java, Python, and Google's own Go language. Even within these languages, you must stick to certain software libraries and frameworks. And though Google has loosened other restrictions over the years, there are case where you must structure your application in certain ways in order to run on the service.
These rules were in place because Google wants to ensure that applications can readily scale to a large number of users but also, Google says, for reasons of security. The company places similar restrictions on the applications that its engineers build atop its infrastructure, which spans about 40 data centers across the globe.
But these restrictions seemed to hamper the adoption of the service, and with Google Compute Engine, the company aims to make life easier for the average developer -- and win some business away from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
In addition to App Engine, Google already offers a service for storing large amounts of data. Known as Google Cloud Storage, this is similar to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Rackspace's Cloud Files service. Conpute Engine, App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage are now grouped under the moniker "Google Cloud Platforms," in much the same way Amazon's myriad web services are known as, well, Amazon Web Services.
The Google Cloud platform also includes a service called BigQuery, a means of analyzing large amounts of data using MapReduce, Google's distributed number-crunching platform.
