Cloud Computing: Why Google is freaking out Amazon

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As announced at Google I/O last week in San Francisco, Google Compute Engine is now available to everyone. This means you, not just the customers who pay $400 per month for Google Gold support. This is Google’s answer to IaaS compute services — Amazon Web Services in particular.

As revealed by Google, the features include:

• Subhour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.
• Advanced routing features to help create gateways and VPN servers that let you build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud…

• Large persistent disks that support as many as 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10 times the industry standard.
• Google also announced PHP support for Google App Engine (GAE), the Google PaaS offering that has been available for half a decade.

Is Google scaring the likes of multi-billion-dollar IaaS cloud provider Amazon Web Services? Or Microsoft, Rackspace, IBM, or Hewlett-Packard? Yes, even if they say it doesn’t. For example, an ex-Amazon Web Services engineer recently participated in an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, where he stated was just how much of a threat Google’s cloud computing service is to Amazon…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/why-google-freaking-out-amazon-218939