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

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.

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

> 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)

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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).

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

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

Azude does both.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.