Google’s Compute Engine, its interpretation of Amazon Web Services’ EC2, is here, 11 months after it was announced and a little late to the party with Amazon.
It’s now available for anybody who’s interested, not just the chosen few.
To differentiate itself from AWS, Google’s widgetry will be sold by the minute, not the hour, with 10 minutes being the minimum. Figure less than two cents an hour.
Google says it’s also got:
Shared-core instances to provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads;
Advanced routing features to help users create gateways and VPN servers that enable them to build applications spanning their local network and Google’s cloud; and
Large persistent disks that support up to 10TB per volume, which, it chortles, translates into 10x the industry standard. It used to just support 1.25TB.
Google has been working on adding a PHP runtime and the new App Engine 1.8.0 includes a limited preview of the popular web programming widgetry. Google says it offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. App Engine already supports Java, Python and Google’s own Go language.
To make building modular application on App Engine easier, developers can now partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.
Google is also rolling out a Cloud Datastore, a fully managed and schema-less solution for storing non-relational data based on App Engine High Replication Datastore, which reportedly serves 4.5 trillion transactions a month. It says it’s a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability as well as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries and indexes. It’s a direct competitor to Amazon’s S3.
Senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle blogged that with all the feature enhancements that have been made lately, Google Cloud Platform is seeing increased use, with “over three million applications and over 300,000 unique developers,” using it in a given month.
Apparently Google is counting on expanding its partnerships with Oracle, SAP and Red Hat to attract the enterprise folk.