Google has been getting a load of press attention about the pricing challenge it has leveled against the cloud services industry, especially versus the world’s largest cloud services provider, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft.
When asked if Google and Amazon were in effect waging a price war, Google communications director Danielle Aronstam told eWEEK that “the announcements we made are not in response to pricing updates that are competitive. We really look at the concept of Moore’s law. We’re basing pricing on the costs that we’re seeing, and what costs that we should be passing through to our customers.”
AWS immediately announced its 42nd price reduction since it started in the cloud services business in 2006. Google had announced several price cuts – ranging from 32 percent to 85 percent – in some of its services.
Pricing aside, the announcement from Google was also about the near-completion of the Google Cloud Platform, which has been put together piece by piece during the last four or five years. We say “near-completion” because platforms such as these are never completed; they’re constantly morphing into new and improved versions. At least that’s the story cloud service providers tell, and they’re sticking to it.
The cloud-building platform now includes developer-friendly features such as a new Google APIs Client Library for .NET and improved documentation for using third-party Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible configuration-management tools.
Google offered evidence as to how it is building itself into a more instrumental player in cloud services for developers. It is bringing much of the work done inside of Google for internal use to the outside in order to improve developers’ productivity.
Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for Google Cloud Platform, told attendees at an invitation-only launch event in San Francisco that all the updates are designed to enable developers to easily build applications without having to worry about trade-offs — most of which involve scale versus performance.
Perhaps the most important news of the day was that Google Compute Engine will soon be offering new virtual machine-making options that include three industry mainstays: Red Hat Enterprise, SUSE Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008. The expanded offerings not only open a world of new options for developers, but they also make it a more attractive competitor to Amazon Web Services, which has ruled the roost since 2006.
In the VM world, Google still has a way to go before obtaining parity with AWS, which already offers a slew of virtual machine-making options — including several older versions of Windows Server.
Here are the highlights added to Google Cloud Platform:
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Originally published on eWeek.
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Google still has a lot to catch up with regards to pricing and the technology. It will only be a matter of time though when Google's cloud platform becomes a huge force in the cloud industry. Until that time happens, we as consumers can enjoy the price cutting because we all know that competition is good for the consumer.