Google is going after Amazon, the largest cloud computing company in the world, and offering a service it says will help customers set up cloud capability much more easily.
The search company says it's shifting its cloud strategy focus from technology to the user experience.
"Five years ago, when we were starting, Google's service didn't really exist and Amazon was the only complete option," said Adam D'Amico, director of technical operations at Okta Inc., an identity-management startup that primarily uses Amazon's offerings and is considering Google as a backup. "Google is the second-place contender now."
The changes will start with Google Cloud Interconnect, which Google touts as a high-performance and secure network aimed at serving as the foundation for Internet-scale apps and enterprise IT architectures. Cloud Interconnect will also increase the number of connectivity options.
The Google Cloud Platform will also get Container Engine, which will link app components that run on individual virtual machines in order to launch Docker containers.
"Google is no stranger to containers," said Google VP Brian Stevens. "Today, everything they do is spun inside containers. Up to two billion containers are started at Google every week."
Amazon launched its now-massive Amazon Web Services in 2006 and while Google has built extremely powerful data centers, it didn't start renting computer power until 2008. When Google took the wraps off its services, its lack of flexibility caused many users to flock to Amazon's offerings.
In 2013, 37 percent of the $9 billion infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market was accounted for by Amazon Web Services, with a Gartner report suggesting the market will grow by 35 percent per year, bringing it to a massive $42 billion market in 2018.
Amazon and Google are competing in a number of different markets. For example, the two large companies are battling to offer same-day delivery and a better way to search for things to buy. While Google has traditionally been the go-to for anything related to search, as Amazon has grown it has begun being the place for users to search for things to buy.
Early in Google's lifetime, cloud computing was not considered a priority by the company and its data centers were built to be able to process search queries quickly and efficiently.
