Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud competitor at Google I/O 2012

http://gigaom.com/2012/06/22/google-to-launch-amazon-microsoft-cloud-competitor-at-google-io-2012/

by iProject • 14 years ago

130 128 14 years ago

100k• 14 years ago

I wonder how App Engine fits into this? Maybe it will be an extension of the Backend instances you can use now.

I've always though App Engine is kind of a half-assed version of AWS, so maybe this time they're announcing something worthy of Google's brand. With all all the infrastructure knowledge they have I always felt App Engine was way too poor a service.

myko2• 14 years ago

Would you mind elaborating on why GAE isn't very good relative to AWS?

aswanson• 14 years ago

App engine is a stepchild pos product. It should be deprecated and they should allow socket access, etc so that real web apps can be built on Google services.

twog• 14 years ago

Competition is always healthy, but its going to be pretty tough for Google to launch something that makes our startup move away from AWS or Rackspace. EBS would be the main service to attack of Amazons.

notatoad3• 14 years ago

They don't need to make me move away from AWS, as long as they're competitive I'll use them in parallel. As we've seen lately, having live fail-over is always a good plan when you're hosting with cloud providers.

dllthomas• 14 years ago

> [H]aving live fail-over is always a good plan when you're hosting with cloud providers.

Also, the rest of the time.

fizx• 14 years ago

How about cost? If Google was 20% cheaper, would you switch?

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

In my case, Google wouldn't be competing with AWS on cost, but rather, Linode.

That's a tall-order. $40/mo for a 1gb VPS is attractive.

glimcat• 14 years ago

I strongly prefer not to deal with Google in a business context. It's great when everything is running smoothly. But if things break down, there's usually not a damn thing you can do about it besides post to your blog and pray.

davidedicillo• 14 years ago

It will be free, but it will have targeted ads in your source code :)

Rastafarian4• 14 years ago

Hah put ads on 404, 500 and other errors pages :D

notatoad3• 14 years ago

>Not to be outdone, other sources have confirmed Microsoft is also building an Infrastructure as a Service platform

Do they mean azure? That's IaaS, right?

wmf3• 14 years ago

Yes, Azure announced IaaS two weeks ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/06/06/anno...

Rastafarian4• 14 years ago

Azure started and still is mostly used as PaaS for .NET apps.

ridruejo2• 14 years ago

Not any more, they are now a full IaaS provider, complete with multiple fully-supported Linux flavors

edwinnathaniel3• 14 years ago

Azude does both.

buster6• 14 years ago

Makes me wonder.. if an internet shop can build a cloud platform, what does Google come up with? They must have sooo much experience, own tools, people, knowledge in that area, it's hard to imagine how far this can go.

Hopefully it will not be just a half-assed experiment again.

arkitaip• 14 years ago

Unfortunately they also have tons of bureaucracy and a serious lack of understanding and execution of great design, making it difficult for them to compete with startups and other, more flexible ventures.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Why "unfortunately"? I'm glad big incubents can't roll over all startups. :-)

omfg• 14 years ago

Amazon is quite a bit more than 'an internet shop'.

buster6• 14 years ago

Nowadays. How would you describe Amazon before the rise of AWS? The fact that i didn't say Amazon and you recognized it says a lot, too :P

beagle32• 14 years ago

> if an internet shop can build a cloud platform,

That's like saying that the Wii was produced by a card-game company, or that a wood pulp paper making company makes the Lumia 900.

Companies evolve; Amazon were experienced in managing a lot of servers, and where looking for ways to make money on that expertise (and on the less than 100% used server capacity, although I remember hearing somewhere that within 3 months of introduction, AWS required more server capacity than Amazon-the-store had at the time)

mburns• 14 years ago

Specifically, Amazon was early to the party on cloud computing because Amazons usage trends vary so widely, their off-peak hours would leave them with thousands of idle servers.

Google has plenty of horsepower to spare, sure, but their usage pattern is much more planned for and expected, so launching a cloud required carving out resources for it, while Amazon just had to make use of excess resources it couldn't find a better use for.

buster6• 14 years ago

Not sure why you need to criticize it. All the companies just did a great job, innovated, evolved, succeeded, that's great :)

I think you cannot deny that Amazon had "less to work with" when they started then Google has today. In terms of experience.

InclinedPlane6• 14 years ago

Amazon's experience was a natural fit for PaaS systems. Amazon moved to a service oriented architecture years ago. And that meant that individual teams were responsible for the deployment of their services on hardware. That led to the creation of automation that made that sort of thing easy. Being able to add or remove servers from a deployment group, being able to press a button and push out a build to an entire cluster of machines simultaneously, that sort of thing. Amazon took their experience building those internal tools and built a similar set of systems and tools (AWS) that would be suitable for both internal use and for selling as a service to the public. And it's done well on both of those fronts, AWS has been successful and amazon internally has migrated a significant amount of their back-end services and website front-end hosting to AWS.

digeridoo3• 14 years ago

Google sure is great at technology, but I think they're not nearly as great at doing business as Apple or Amazon are.

Cloud computing is all about creating a good blend of technology and business. If you don't get the business off the ground, you won't have the stamina to seriously invest in the technology, particularly in terms of building lean, scalable operations. Building scalable systems is perhaps 1% inspiration (distributed algorithms), and 99% transpiration (cost-effective operations). If you don't get it right, you'll be looking at this big red number below the line and will have to kill it. The fact that Google is already huge does not matter that much, it's not being big that's hard, it's growing fast and staying afloat.

Indeed, Amazon is an Internet shop. They'll sell anything to anyone, anywhere, and they do so for ridiculously low margins. That's a mighty competitor to be up against. Google on the other hand has never been very successful outside of advertising, and have only been a high margin business.

Not saying that Google won't be successful in this space. If they're willing to lose money on it they could achieve a sizeable market share comparable to Microsoft's. They lack Microsoft's gigantic sales network, but make up for in developer goodwill. However, catching up with the lean operations machine of Amazon seems infeasible at this point. What they could do is focus on their core strengths and open up their massive data sets and tools for all to use. So far they have been very reluctant to do so however, afraid to harm their core business.

dannyr3• 14 years ago

"Google on the other hand has never been very successful outside of advertising"

Android is the most widely-used mobile OS in the world. Shouldn't that count as a success?

ajross5• 14 years ago

I don't think that's the right analysis. Amazon and Google both offered cloud products at about the same time. Amazon had based their business on building out and provisioning tons of "plain vanilla" linux boxes, and then layered a virtualization interface on top. So that's what they offered.

Google had build a highly customized, scaling environment based on their own software layer instead of mere "linux boxes". And clearly it worked great for them. So that's basically what they offered with GAE.

But the problem in the market was that GAE was this weird custom thing, while Amazon was selling a "cloudy" version of the same environment all the developers were already using. So Amazon won -- the market wants linux boxes, even if they aren't as scalable or efficient uses of hardware as Google's stuff.

The point is: Amazon won by circumstance. They happened to have an internal product already that they could sell, and they did. Google had an internal product too, but for reasons beyond the control of its designers, it wasn't a good fit for the market. I don't think either of these has anything to do with being "great at doing business".

donavanm• 14 years ago

> They'll sell anything to anyone, anywhere, and they do so for ridiculously low margins.

+1, no one ever seems to realize how important this aspect is. "Cloud" providers aren't competing with some fat margin software corp. AWS is a billion dollar business who's used to 1% margin, sinks 100s of millions in infrastructure, and is insulated from a lot of business pressures. Oh, and they control the vast majority of your market. That sounds like a pretty scary competitor.

dneb7• 14 years ago

> Hopefully it will not be just a half-assed experiment again

And that sentiment is _exactly_ why I won't trust my business to whatever they come up with. There's no knowing how seriously and committed they are. Sure, Amazon could do an about face, but they don't have that history, so I'm more comfortable trusting them.

zitterbewegung• 14 years ago

Does anyone else think that they missed the boat? 3-4 years ago there was little competition. Now basically EC2 has most of the market. If they want to be successful they have to be not just cool but noticeably better than EC2 and it doesn't seem like google wins that way.

gfodor• 14 years ago

New startups will always be in a position to evaluate where to host their products. I think if Google can offer good service at a competitive price it might make sense for new startups to consider them.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

I don't know, EC2 isn't that great to begin with and it's pricing is really not impressive at all. The I/O absolutely awful. There probably is room for biggest companies to compete Amazon, especially Google if they take the business seriously.

akoumjian• 14 years ago

It is a huge market, there is plenty of room for even mediocre competition.

enjo• 14 years ago

Are people going to no longer releasing stuff on cloud platforms? I have some loyalty to AWS mainly because I've already figured out how to make stuff work nicely on it. However, for whatever I release next I'd certainly consider a competitor. Particularly if they can provide better i/o performance than EBS.

huggyface• 14 years ago

I honestly don't understand comments like this (this is hardly the only one). You know absolutely nothing about their service. You know nothing about what they are offering, what their pricing will be, etc.

I have to guess that it's that people are comfortable with EC2 (I am -- great service) and almost want to hope-away anything that degrades the value of the thing that they do know.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

I think that, for a lot of uses, switching away from EC2 would not be terribly difficult if Google could provide superior service or even just a lower price. If you're just using the basic EC2 services, I don't think there is even any lock-in.

ridruejo2• 14 years ago

Google and Microsoft have one advantage : they are already successfully selling to the enterprise(Google apps, Windows platform). Amazon is still in the process of figuring that one out. Google and Microsoft are also not afraid to compete in price, combined with the above it makes them the first credible competitors to Amazon dominance. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

InclinedPlane6• 14 years ago

When Gates and Allen launched Microsoft they thought they were too late, that there were too many other established companies in the market to be able to find a niche for themselves. When google launched web search was half a decade old and dozens of companies were in the market. When apple launched the ipod mp3 players had already been around for years and gone through many generations.

An absence of competition is a near certain way to gain market share, but the easy way is not the only way. If you have a good enough product you can steal business from the competion and even grow the size of the total market (as was the case with the ipod and iphone).

bztzt• 14 years ago

Gates and Allen thought there were too many other established companies in the microcomputer software market?

sopooneo• 14 years ago

I feel like most often an absence of competition means there's no market to begin with.

mrslx• 14 years ago

Google for support and services ... Right, don't waste your time.

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

That was my first thought. What kind of customer service experience are they willing or able to provide?

jrockway3• 14 years ago

Google offers Apps customers 24/7 phone and email support.

sherwin• 14 years ago

This really makes me wonder what took Google so long. Google practically defined large scale commodity cluster computing with mapreduce (2004). Amazon EC2 was launched in 2006. The closest thing Google has done was app engine, and my understanding is that was not a tremendous success. Does anyone have any explanations why Google didn't move into this space earlier?

edwinnathaniel3• 14 years ago

Perhaps they viewed AWS to be closer to the classic hosting company as opposed to Cloud vendor and their selling point was "scale like us, Google" vs typical RoR+MySQL.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Google doesn't use VMs internally and they probably don't have a scalable SAN (EBS competitor) either, so they don't have as much of an advantage as you might think. Google bet big on a "legacy-free" stack (GFS, MapReduce, BigTable, etc.) and that has worked out great for their internal services but external customers just aren't willing to adopt it (see App Engine).

regularfry2• 14 years ago

They've got Ganeti, but I don't know exactly what they use it for.

Rastafarian4• 14 years ago

The hosting wars are just starting. There are so many features no one is offering right now. E.g. I want to host my app and data in my own data center, but have an automatic fail over to a cloud provider.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

Can you elaborate on that? What do you see as missing?

purephase3• 14 years ago

With round-robin DNS you have that now. It is fairly easy to setup. The data may be a bit more challenging, but certainly not impossible.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

Round robin DNS wouldn't solve that. Your DNS servers will happily keep serving out the defunct IPs of your failed datacenter.

rdl4• 14 years ago

A few issues/questions with that: 1) Local traffic: if this were an enterprise app hosted on premise, with cloud backup, but with some remote users, you'd need to be careful in network configuration. With firewalls, people also access local apps on different IPs than from outside. This may not apply, and certainly can be resolved, but would require some visibility for the provider into your network configuration. 2) Failover: To do this really easily as a service, you'd ideally run 100% of traffic through a third party service. Some of it would get directed into EC2/cloud provider of choice, and some into your colo datacenter. If you're willing to use something like CloudFlare for DDoS/etc. prevention now, this would be the same compromise. 3) Database: Dealing with all the replication issues. If it's static content, this is trivial. Otherwise, you have a consistency problem for databases, etc., and most cloud providers (especially Amazon) want to lock you into weird onsite proprietary data solutions which don't

The best system today is probably to host at a facility with great transport to Amazon Direct Connect nodes (e.g. SV1/SV5 in Silicon Valley -- I'm setting this up now), so you've got fast cheap ways to keep your databases replicated between AWS and the free world/your own colo.

For inbound traffic, for $20/mo, I'd just do Cloudflare; for higher end, you'd have a lot of choices to make. (I haven't tried the higher end cloudflare offerings yet; they do seem to address most of the shortcomings, and are still pretty cheap).

fpp• 14 years ago

Been told at a Google meeting recently that there will be a new GDrive SDK introduced during the Google I/O

If they are expanding their offerings it might go more towards Box(.net) than vs Amazon

By that also the App Engine etc fit into the picture - we'll know next week

wavephorm• 14 years ago

Shouldn't Google have done this before everyone started migrating off of GAE due to the price hikes, and before AWS pretty much cornered the cloud platform market, and before Dropbox cornered the cloud data storage/sync market, and before Heroku cornered the auto-scaling web services market?

justinsb• 14 years ago

And they probably should have launched GMail before Hotmail, Search before Altavista, and Adwords before Overture ;-)

tlogan• 14 years ago

Hey even Nokia was not first in phone market, they raise to the top, and look were they are now.

I think the parent post has a valid point. It is harder to enter market now than it was 4 years ago. Not impossible but much much harder.

valuegram• 14 years ago

Waiting for a market to mature before entering isn't the end of the world. As far as "cornering" a market goes, Wikipedia's example is perfect: "Large companies, such as Wal-Mart or Microsoft, are considered to have cornered their markets." Sure, those companies have a substantial base, but that doesn't mean their isn't plenty of room for competitors who can do very well (Target & Apple).

Google has enough resources to enter a market like this and have some instant credibility. We've seen it with Gmail, Google Maps, and many of their other services.

dannyr3• 14 years ago

None of companies you mentioned have cornered any market.

Dropbox may be popular but it's still not mainstream.

Heroku's market is still very young.

AWS is probably used by just half of the startups I know. But Linode & Rackspace are pretty big too.

taligent4• 14 years ago

Linode and Rackspace are nothing more than commodity Linux box providers with some related services.

AWS is morphing very quickly into a true end to end PaaS. Big difference. And it's hard to see who can compete with them.

ajross5• 14 years ago

I don't see that AWS has really "cornered" the market. They're leading because they're better, which is a different thing entirely.

Cloud services like EC2/EBS and (to a lesser extent) S3 are really fungible. It's comparatively easy to move between providers, or even to your own hardware if you want. If someone were to come along and offer a comparably performant and reliable service to AWS at half the price, Amazon's customers would flee like rats. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it seems to me like Google is better positioned to offer that kind of value proposition (c.f. Google Drive, whose retail price is already cheaper than S3) than Microsoft or Rackspace.

Basically: linux boxes are a commodity. You can't compete in this market on features. That makes Amazon's (admittedly) dominant position more precarious than it looks.

InclinedPlane6• 14 years ago

Something I think would make a good business is someone selling every "tier" of hosting and making transitions push button simple.

For example, press a button and get dedicated vps hosting for your cloud images, press another button and get dedicated physical hosting, press another button and you buy the hardware and switch to a colo relationship, press another button and you get your physical hardware overnighted to anywhere.

taligent4• 14 years ago

I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't.

AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are proprietary with very Amazon specific APIs. As each new developer starts to use these it "locks" them into the platform as a whole. And since many of these are core services I just don't see customers moving to a competitor unless there is a massive difference in price/features.

Also don't forget: NOBODY offers the complete range of unified services that AWS does right now AFAIK.

InclinedPlane6• 14 years ago

Right, just a trivial matter of engineering right? ;)

Amazon has a unique advantage here because the systems and technologies needed to run the retail website are very much identical to what's needed to serve up a commercially viable PaaS offering to the public. So much so that amazon is moving rapidly toward self-hosting the web store on aws (a lot of it is already on aws today).

In contrast the way google runs their own services is very different (though in some ways more advanced) and not generally suitable to morphing into commercial cloud services, so they don't have that self-hosting advantage. They certainly have the know how to put out a decent offering though, especially now that the market has spoken so clearly on exactly what it wants.

Estragon2• 14 years ago

It goes deeper than that. They've been working on Service-Oriented Architecture for over a decade. I think I heard that Monkeybagel was a satire of Amazon's SOA push.

http://monkeybagel.com/monkeybagel.html

purephase3• 14 years ago

The GAE and Maps price hikes were an odd decision. I'm not sure why they decided to do that.

mikemoka• 14 years ago

In my opinion a digital market is never "cornered", Google simply doesn't know how to improve over those competitors, and how to provide users with a good enough reason to switch. If Google knows its clear that its current organization doesn't allow to pursue the right choices in some areas, and you can notice by looking at several recent "flops" (boutiques.com, g+,...) .

You can have all the money in the world and all the world class runners you want, but your team will still lose if you run even just on a slightly wrong track.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

This is good news. We'll have cheaper prices all around! And with that article on Google having their own hardware manufactured, it may end up better than we think.

da_n• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who read this headline thinking Google is going to launch a cloud rival to Microsoft called Amazon?

dsirijus• 14 years ago

Isn't this all about who can get cheaper electricity?

Hikari• 14 years ago

for more about the subject here is an interesting read from a google insider talking about their lack of understanding platforms and service oriented architecture. http://steverant.pen.io/

harryh• 14 years ago

If this includes some sort of public access to borg it could be extremely interesting. No more borg is one of the top 3 things I miss from my days at Google.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Those of us who didn't work at Google have no idea what you're talking about.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

And those of us who did, well... there are some words you say, and some words you don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

jrockway3• 14 years ago

It's some Linux boxes, essentially.

dsl• 14 years ago

Borg gives you access to Google's compute resources.

flyt• 14 years ago

http://www.quora.com/What-is-Borg-at-Google

"It's the system that manages machines. If you want to run a program that uses x CPU and y memory on 100 machines, you don't specify which machines to run it on. Instead, you request 100 machines using a Borg library."

grandalf• 14 years ago

As someone who has dealt with customer service from the companies Google is competing with in this arena, Google is either going to have to come in at about 25% of the price or seriously up its game in the customer service department.

waleedka• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've been using App Engine for a while and bad customer service is my main issue with it. I can tolerate poor support for free products, but not for business products that I pay a lot for.

jbarham• 14 years ago

If Google can deliver a semi-decent IaaS offering that works well with App Engine IMO they will have a uniquely powerful platform.

App Engine is often criticized for being expensive compared to AWS, but putting together a production ready setup (i.e., automatic failover in the case of data center failure) on AWS isn't cheap since you need at least two of everything: multiple EC2 instances sitting behind a load balancer (ELB) and redundant databases (i.e., RDS Multi-AZ). I know because I'm setting up exactly this configuration right now for my DNS hosting service (http://slickdns.com).

But if Google's IaaS offering could fix all the fiddly bits that App Engine currently doesn't do (e.g., custom SSL, native binaries) it would surpass AWS in terms of functionality.

Selling bandwidth and white-label servers is easy. Building a production ready arbitrarily scalable web platform is much harder.

cpunks• 14 years ago

I have an extremely, extremely, extremely healthy level of skepticism. We do substantial business with AWS. When they went down and came back up, some of our data was damaged. I called my Amazon rep, who put me in contact with Amazon engineers, who helped us recover. Amazon can do that -- they're a service organization, and they're used to working with customers and making them happy.

Google's customer service, in contrast, has a raison d'etre of avoiding customers. As a customer, the feeling you get is mild disdain. This is necessary -- one support call for Google.com can wipe out the profits from thousands of people. This translate into how they handle the enterprise market. I use Google Apps for my organization. I needed to enable Google+ for a social presence. This required applying into a black hole which, for a long time, did nothing. Support e-mails went to someone who clearly was in the business of neither having nor giving out information.

Here's an experiment for you: Pretend you want to try Google App Engine, but your cell is not on one of the providers Google supports (I've been there). You just a credit card, and a willingness to spend a bit of cash. Try to buy some service. See how far you get.

I use Google internal to my organization for things like Google Apps; if it has issues, employees will deal, and it saves a big chunk of work and cash. For anything customer-facing, I really do want a partner whom I can talk to if there are issues, not a black box designed to reject support requests.

Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud competitor at Google I/O 2012

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