Google Elbows Into the Cloud

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Claire Miller and Quentin Hardy.

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard. Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.

It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services — renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet. In cloud computing, dozens or even thousands of computer servers are joined to create a giant machine capable of handling many tasks at once, from storing data to running Web sites and mobile apps to tackling complicated analytical problems…

Individual software developers, large companies and governments rent these services to run their operations often at a fraction of the cost of buying and managing their own machines. Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., is far and away the leader in this area. Amazon expects that this business will eventually be as big as its retail operation. A.W.S. is followed by Microsoft’s Windows Azure and offerings from other companies including Rackspace, Verizon, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard. Google says the cloud business is a new source of profit and a way to improve the Internet by providing other companies access to its sophisticated computing services…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-takes-on-amazon-and-microsoft-for-cloud-computing-services.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0