Just like what War of the Titans would have been like, about gods and deities showing their power, speed, and might, Google unleashed a force in the form of Google Compute Engine to battle it out in the cloud services industry. The cloud compute project of the search engine giant ended its beta period and formally entered general availability promising 99.95 percent service levels, 24x7 customer support, and a host of new features.
Google will battle it out with companies such as Amazon in attracting corporations and governments to utilize its Compute Engine as the paradigm shifts from owning hardware and software to cloud computing where most of data-crunching will happen in the future. It will be one big fight for cloud computing companies as they try to outmaneuver each other in providing services that will help companies achieve their goals without having to build their own network of computers.
Google announced the Compute Engine in 2012, but it was only on Tuesday that Google that it was ready for the big arena.
"Google Cloud Platform gives developers the flexibility to architect applications with both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google's infrastructure. We've been working to improve the developer experience across our services to meet the standards our own engineers would expect here at Google," said Google Cloud Platform Vice President Ari Balogh, through an official blog post.
At the moment, Compute Engine is being used by customers such as Snapchat, Wix, and Evite.
While Amazon entered cloud computing industry way back in 2006 with its Elastic Cloud Compute, Google boasts of improved operating system support, transparent maintenance, live migration technology, and better computational power. Amazon might have long established itself as the leader of the pack when it comes to cloud computing in terms of market share, besting IBM's Soft Layer and Microsoft's Azure but Google plans to knock Amazon out of the top spot by offering better pricing options and features.
"Today we're lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so that you get a predictable, low price for your block storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability. We're also lowering prices on our most popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10% in all regions," Balogh added.
Aside from Centos and Debian, the Compute Engine has expanded its OS support to run any Linux distribution, SUSE, and Red Hat. The transparent maintenance also solves issues with regard to long maintenance periods. Interested? Find out more here.
