Google Cloud Platform

People have a tendency to forget that Google has always been in the public cloud space. Google App Engine was one of the first PaaS technologies to meet enterprises expectations in the marketplace, and I was building applications with that technology in 2009.

Google made the same mistake as Microsoft, in approaching public cloud as a PaaS player. Enterprises were looking for products that fall under the IaaS umbrella, and AWS had the best offerings in that space. In many respects, AWS still dominates IaaS offerings today. Thus, AWS grew like crazy.

Like Microsoft, Google saw the IaaS light and launched their own IaaS service a few years ago. What’s more, they shored up their PaaS and IaaS offerings over the last two years, and made impressive strides in a market where most believed they were just catching up.

Google has some advantages that the other public cloud providers lack, namely:

• Massive amounts of resources, including developers who know how to do web-scale development, deployment, and operations.
• Massive amounts of cash to do acquisitions, as well as invest in new technology innovations. Certainly more than both Microsoft and AWS.
• The ability to work fast, as well as work agile. They have a culture of having an idea, and moving it quickly into production. AWS has a similar culture, to be fair.
• A desire to eventually own this market. Keep in mind that Google is accustomed to focusing on engineering and innovation to drive their market forward. They build things that already exist, such as IaaS, but focus on perfecting the technology and making it more appealing to the market.
• They are willing to give things away, even open-source their technology, using unique business models to provide the revenue.

While this has been a slow, systemic change over the last few years, Google recently hit the accelerator. Google Cloud Platform Live was a small event held in San Francisco last week. However, it was another coming out party for Google, in terms of it being a serious public cloud provider. I attended the session, and sat down for a few minutes with Google’s Brian Goldfarb. Here are a few of the major new technologies that Google announced at the event.

Google Container Engine is a service that leverages its Kubernetes project that run on Google Compute Engine. This is an alpha release, which is so Google. However, this is a fully managed service for building and hosting applications using Docker Containers. Think, traditional containers with a better architecture and deployment engine. There is plenty of press out there about the benefits of Docker, so I won’t get into it here. However, figure AWS will have some container stuff up their sleeve at Re:Invent, unless I miss my guess.

Also, a new and interesting feature is Google Cloud Interconnect. This service allows customers to connect directly to Google without having to leverage an unsecure open Internet connection. This is something that enterprise customers have been screaming for as a condition of moving to the public cloud. AWS provides a similar service, as does Microsoft.

Google Cloud Interconnect offers three options:

• Direct Peering, which is a private network pipe directly to Google in over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world.
• Carrier Interconnect, which connects to Google through 7 new carrier partners, including Verizon, Equinix, IX Reach, Level 3, TATA Communications, Telx, and Zayo.
• VPN Connectivity, which is coming soon, allows customers to create a secure line directly to Google over the public Internet.

The new Firebase stuff, including Firebase Mobile Solution, which was added to provide richer Realtime Queries that allow developers to sort and filter data by arbitrary fields to provide performance benefits. Firebase Mobile Solution also uses Trigger (forthcoming), which allows developers to define webhooks that are sent to external APIs upon specific events.

Of course, no cloud computing conference would be complete without price cuts, and Google has those as well. They announced price reductions on Network egress (47%), BigQuery storage (23%), Persistent Disk Snapshots (79%), Persistent Disk SSD (48%), and Cloud SQL (25%).

On the App Engine side of things, Google now supports managed VM, which provides developers with access to raw VMs. App Engine does not put developers in a “sand box,” which is a common complaint around using PaaS from developers.

So, what does this all mean? Google is in a rapid expansion mode right now, and its core resources continue to play a bit of catch up. However, they are innovating in their own right as well.

The comparison to both AWS and Microsoft is not the way to look at Google. It’s an innovative cloud technology that’s on its own path, and will be engineered to support specific types of workloads that are beginning to emerge. Container-based applications come to mind, but also I/O intensive workloads, considering their use of SSD technology, as well as tight integration with their existing management infrastructure.

Unlike AWS, that seems to constantly toss new services into its stack, Google seems to be on a more methodical journey to its public cloud service. The features that are added seem to be well thought out and part of a much larger strategy. Microsoft takes a similar approach, to be fair.

Don’t get me wrong; Google has a ways to go. Google’s relatively late entry into the market was no secret to most who track the public IaaS and PaaS spaces. However, where Google was once on the public cloud radar with dozens of others, it’s now clearly in the top three, biting at the heels of both Microsoft and AWS. It’s leaving the major enterprise cloud players in the dust, including HP, Oracle, and IBM, who can’t toss as many resources and dollars at the cloud as Google can. Clearly, it’s a three horse race in the public cloud space for 2015.

The wild card here is the innovative nature and history of Google. Now that its sites are set on the public cloud market, Google could easily pass up Microsoft and gain quickly on, or even catch up to, AWS. We won’t know if that’s the case for a few years, but, for now, Google is clearly on the public cloud radar for most enterprises that are considering public cloud providers.

The rise of multi-cloud could spell opportunity for Google. Once upon a time, everyone picked AWS-only cloud solutions. These days, most enterprises leverage multiple brands of public clouds. Google is another set of cloud services in the service catalog to choose from, and many of those who build and deploy cloud-based applications may find Google’s services easier to leverage, and more cost effective.

The battle for the public cloud market may not be fought in the bakeoffs that happen in IT shops looking for IaaS and PaaS public cloud providers, but within the emerging cloud service directories that are becoming commonplace. The public cloud wars could be won and lost by the number of services that are selected and placed into production from now until 2020. Google excels at building APIs and services that developers like to use, and that could make all of the difference, in terms of what public clouds grab the market.

I suspect that the recent momentum behind Google is worrisome for both Microsoft and AWS. With tens of billions of dollars at stake, along with domination of the new emerging consumption model for IT, everything is at stake right now. The gloves are off, and we know the names of the combatants.