What the escalating war among cloud computing rivals means for you

Grazed from GCN. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

This week, IBM took out several ads trumpeting its cloud market share. Following quickly on the heels of IBM’s announcement, Google announced the “general availability” of the Google Compute Engine, a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud. Along with the upgrade of its service from beta to general availability, Google also announced three new features of its infrastructure-as-a-service offering: lower price, greater Linux support and the Docker “container-as-a-service” platform. What’s going on? Let’s examine each of these developments and then consider the ramifications.

Google dropped its prices by 10 percent for the most popular IaaS compute instances and 60 percent for disk storage. Price competition for IaaS services is continuing to heat up, with many sites calling it a “cloud price war.” In fact, 12 hours after Google’s announcement, AWS announced a 26 percent drop in prices for its Windows virtual machines…

The second leg of Google’s cloud platform announcements introduced increased Linux support for any “out-of-the-box Linux distribution” to include SELinux, CoreOS, SUSE, FreeBSD and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. At the same time it should be noted that Linux Virtual Machines are cheaper and therefore more popular in the cloud than Microsoft virtual machines…

Read more from the source @ http://gcn.com/blogs/reality-check/2013/12/cloud-price-wars.aspx