Google cloud open for business – includes cover charge

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google earlier this month made a significant cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service. One catch is that customers who sign up for the service need to buy a "gold-level" support package — which costs $400 per month. But while it may cost a pretty penny to get access to the same hardware that Google uses to power the world’s most popular search engine, it’s at least no longer an invite-only beta service.

Some say that Google is one of the companies that could give Amazon Web Services — seen by many as the market-leading IaaS provider — its biggest competition. There are a variety of opinions on that topic, though. Others believe Azure — the cloud platform Microsoft recently made generally available — could be a fierce competitor to AWS as well. Network World recently sat down with the Brian Goldfarb, the marketing executive in charge of Google’s cloud platform, to get the skinny on the company’s latest plans…

What’s Google’s play in the cloud?

It’s helpful to think about Google’s cloud offerings in the context of the company’s larger strategy, says Goldfarb, who heads cloud platform marketing for Google. The company, he says, is taking its 13 years of experience running advanced infrastructure and making it available as a cloud-based service accessible anywhere in the world…

Read more from the source @ http://news.techworld.com/virtualisation/3442960/google-cloud-open-for-business–includes-400-cover-charge/