News: Google announces Amazon Web Services competitor
Date Published: April 8th, 2008
Google announced their intention to compete head to head with Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) with their latest service offering Google App Engine (GAE).
GAE essentially allows new startups to use Google’s infrastructure to serve their web pages up to approximately 5,000,000 infact and of course it is free to a point too.
Mathew Ingram considers the possibility that it may be a knock-off service of Amazon which although possible is unlikely or at least overly sensational at this point since most technical luminaries on the web have raised the fact that it is not innovative over Amazon’s offering and uses a much more challenging development language Perl.
Regardless the software industry has a long history of copying each other and this hardly be the last time or the most significant event in recent history.
Luke Hoersten of Humani.st (great name for a blog, no?) posted a great article late last night on GAE and how it may effect startups
Luke just simply refers to this new Google application/service as simply ‘..a scalable web application back-end with a nice API’.
Also Luke makes an excellent point by openly considering whether Google did this all just so it was easier to integrate the startups that complimented their service since as Google says;
‘(GAE )…gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.
Source: Google Blog
Video Google put up on YouTube demonstrating GAE at Campfire.
About Google’s New Service
This offering has two notable advantages for Google one is they are the largest consumer of web startups as Luke pointed out and using their platform would definitely improve the possibility of being purchased over a competitor since Google would know a great deal more about your back-end and you ability to scale to meet their needs.
Also Google is free to a point which means you can just prototype until your heart is content which means the barrier to becoming a viable prototype is now lower, so any software student regardless of talent and importantly money can try their hand at becoming the next Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.
For some screen shots of what the new service looks like Jalaj has some for those keen to see too.
GAE Documentation, SDK, FAQ, and Discussion Group
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Your article definitely touched on something I haven't: like you said, Google App Engine "is not innovative over Amazon’s offering." Amazon offers not only a scalable database (SDB) but also the elastic computing cloud (EC2). Google App Engine is really only just a scalable database. You can't do large scale computation on it like you can with EC2. So it should be noted that GAE is only competing with Amazon's SDB, not EC2 or S3.
Good point Luke. Sorry it took me so long to reply, I published just before I went to sleep. :)
I am glad you think it touched on something different though as that was my intention.
I will think this is Google's approach to enter into market. Google knows for sure that Amazon is ahead in Cloud computing, however to create new customer base and build solution for them based on their need is a better strategy than jumping into cloud computing overnight.
Google always creates a massive buzz when they do something and makes competitor wonder "is Google coming to my industry?"
I sense this is a one step a time approach; with Google's proven infrastructure, nano clustering capabilities, they will enter into Cloud computing one day.