Today Google has revealed, through its developers’ blog, its plans to launch an Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) in competition with Amazon’s Elastic Compute (EC2) service.
Google Compute Engine will be focused on distributed computing power, in fact, according to Om Malik, Google is planning to show off a genomic app that runs on 600,00 cores and another that will use 10,000 virtual machines.
Following this marketing placement Google is going to initially offer a limited preview and then sell the service to customers that are looking for 100 or more cores.
Quoting from Google’s original blog post:
Google Compute Engine offers:
- Scale. At Google we tackle huge computing tasks all the time, like indexing the web, or handling billions of search queries a day. Using Google’s data centers, Google Compute Engine reduces the time to scale up for tasks that require large amounts of computing power. You can launch enormous compute clusters – tens of thousands of cores or more.
- Performance. Many of you have learned to live with erratic performance in the cloud. We have built our systems to offer strong and consistent performance even at massive scale. For example, we have sophisticated network connections that ensure consistency. Even in a shared cloud you don’t see interruptions; you can tune your app and rely on it not degrading.
- Value. Computing in the cloud is getting even more appealing from a cost perspective. The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers. You can see pricing details here.
The capabilities of Google Compute Engine include:
- Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.
- Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.
- Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the internet with configurable firewalls.
- Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.
At launch, we have worked with a number of partners — such as RightScale, Puppet Labs, OpsCode, Numerate, Cliqr and MapR – to integrate their products with Google Compute Engine. These partners offer management services that make it easy for you to move your applications to the cloud and between different cloud environments.