Since its announcement Google Compute Engine is in the spotlight as a potential competitor of Amazon AWS.
Up to now Compute Engine has been based on customized versions of Ubuntu and CentOS but after the release of Debian 7.0 “wheezy” on May 4th, Google has officially chosen Debian as the default OS, a reasonable move, from a technical point of view, as wrote Jimmy Kaplowitz (Site Reliability Engineer and Debian developer) on Google App Engine Blog.
From a business perspective the choice of Debian is more complex to understand.
It was logical to assume that the first target of Google Compute were the most profitable: enterprises.
Knowing, however, that the default (Linux Based) OS in the enterprises is RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) becomes unclear what kind of audience Google is aiming to attract.
On May 15 will take place in San Francisco the Google I/O 2013 where are expected to be announcements about Google’s cloud computing strategy that should clear up a scenario that now shows Google more counterposed to Microsoft (versus Windows Azure) than to Amazon.