Google Taking on AWS, Launching Further Cloud Services at Developer Conference

There’s a talk around town. Google is allegedly set to launch a cloud service at its I/O conference, finally marking Google’s foray into the cloud computing industry, and putting them in direct competition with current market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Google’s offering will be a complete IaaS cloud, which will give users their own virtual servers (which they refer to as “instances”), which they can use to upload their own applications.

Google is no stranger to cloud computing. After all, they’ve already had a PaaS cloud called the App Engine for years. Their App Engine hosts apps so that the users don’t have to deal with the servers directly. Additionally, they have also launched Google Cloud Storage. That is going to compete directly with Amazon’s S3. The search engine giant is also launching big data cloud apps recently, such as the BigQuery and the aptly named Google Prediction API.

However, Google’s previous experiences with cloud are all based on Platform-as-a-Service, so they are going to be entering new territory once they enter the IaaS arena, which has always been Amazon’s territory, and is also home to quite a few competitors, such as Rackspace, IBM, Verizon, HP, AT&T, and even Microsoft.

Currently, the best that Google can do is use their name and the massive Silicon Valley clout that they have accumulated throughout the years, which is probably enough to get them off the ground and catch up with the more established cloud providers. Additionally, Google has the advantage over Amazon when it comes to Web Startups, which is one of the retail giant’s current weaknesses. There’s also Amazon’s recent problems with public outages, including a huge one last week that took down popular social media sites such as Pinterest, HipChat, Quora, and Heroku.