One of Google’s data centers.
Cloud computing just got a lot bigger.
On Thursday Google announced that it would offer computing as a service accessible over the Internet, much like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. Google said its prices would be about 50 percent below those of current market rates.
Urs Hölzle, the Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said Google was drawing off its own long history of managing millions of servers around the world. “We’ve solved a lot of the problems, and are passing on the savings,” he said. “It’s a natural step for us.”
As a demonstration of what the product, Google Compute Engine, could do, Mr. Hölzle announced a genetic mapping project that would use 600,000 computing cores, which are the processing units on a semiconductor.
Mr. Hölzle was speaking at Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for software developers, which this year drew 5,500 people. Google is hoping the developers will build applications on its public cloud, and help persuade corporations to move resources there.
Google’s move is not surprising, given the success Amazon and others have had in persuading corporations to ditch much of their on-site data storage and computing resources in favor of a publicly shared “cloud” of computing.
If anything, Google is somewhat late to the game. Google pioneered many of the techniques in cloud computing, but for years kept its technology proprietary. Over the past few years Google has entered parts of the business like online storage, application deployment, and pattern-finding algorithms for rent.
On Thursday Google also announced that its Application Engine had over one million applications in use, and was serving applications to customers up to 7.5 billion times daily.
With Google Compute Engine, Mr. Hölzle said, “there is a piece in every part of the value chain.” While for many years Google considered its cheap technology an important proprietary secret, he added, “many of the things we did under wraps are now commonplace. It enables us to have a strong offering on infrastructure.” He noted that much of Google’s technology and methods would still remain secret.
While Google will have a full-service offering comparable to Amazon’s, which is known as A.W.S., it intends to start with a relatively small number of relatively high-demand customers, then offer the service more broadly.
That may be a strategic choice. A.W.S. has occasionally suffered very public service failures. Google may have decided that while large computing problems are relatively easy to manage, handling a diverse number of customers may take some learning. Mr. Hölzle said Google Compute Engine would not have service guarantees, but he said, “Products survive by the customer experience.”
“We don’t have the simplest solution yet,” he said. “Three to five years from now we will be further along. We’re early in this.”
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