Google Offers Cloud Storage For Developers

Google on May 20 launched a new cloud storage service specifically for software developers that will provide another option alongside several similar online services, including Amazon’s well-established Simple Storage Service, or S3.

The announcement was made at the Google I/O 2010 developers’ conference at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Amazon might have anticipated this new competition, announcing May 19 that it is trimming its storage rates for S3 by 33 percent.

RESTful API enables cloud storage

Google Storage for Developers utilises the RESTful application programming interface (API) and Google’s vast existing storage and networking infrastructure to store data and code from cloud-computing projects while they are being built.

In the web services world, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is a key design idiom that embraces a stateless client/server architecture in which the web services are viewed as resources and can be identified by their URLs.

Using this API, it becomes much easier for developers to connect their applications to Google’s storage, which is replicated across several of its US data centres.

The new Google service offers multiple authentication methods, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support, and access controls for sharing with individuals and groups, Jessie Jiang of the Google Storage for Developers Team wrote in a blog.

“It is highly scalable—supporting read-after-write data consistency, objects of hundreds of gigabytes in size per request, and a domain-scoped namespace. In addition, developers can manage their storage from a web-based interface and use GSUtil, an open-source command-line tool and library,” Jiang wrote.

Jiang said that Google Storage for Developers is being opened “to a limited number of developers at this time. During the preview, each developer will receive up to 100GB of data storage and 300Gbit monthly bandwidth at no charge.”

To learn more and sign up for the waiting list, visit the Google Storage for Developers site.

Jiang said that the team will be demonstrating the service at Google I/O 2010 in a session and in the Developer Sandbox.