Google puts Amazon on notice with new Cloud Platform features

Google wants you to know that cloud computing will not be a one-horse race. Today’s announcements at the Google Cloud Platform Live event hammered that notion home and seemed designed to put Amazon and other cloud vendors on notice.

The broad spectrum of changes announced for Google Cloud Platform revolved around a few basic sentiments: simplify the pricing structure of cloud computing; make it easier for developers to use the tools they’re familiar and comfortable with; allow for easier (and cheaper) work with large amounts of data; and give developers the freedom to run their App Engine apps in IaaS-style VMs without sacrificing manageability.

Many of these changes were presented as how Google could help its users avoid making painful choices — that is, you shouldn’t have to choose between either flexibility of deployment or manageability, or between having an up-to-date infrastructure and having long-running VMs for the sake of your users.

Developers, developers, developers Never stand between a developer and his (or her) chosen toolset. Google seems to have heard the message, as the latest set of developer-centered features for Cloud Platform revolve around tools and workflow rather than support for new languages.

Chief among those changes is integration with both Git and GitHub, so projects can be synchronized with either a local repository or one hosted on GitHub (public or private). Changes committed with Git are automatically built and tested, and logs generated across all instances are aggregated in one place for easy searching. Stack traces generated by errors link directly to the line of code responsible, which can be edited in-browser.

Another major new feature for developers helps them avoid another uncomfortable dilemma: Should a developer pick App Engine for the sake of getting something running now, or go with a full VM for flexibility? Managed VMs purport to offer the best of both worlds: A developer can take an existing App Engine app and deploy it to a managed VM with only a few changes to the app manifest. Cloud Platform also is expanding support for Compute Engine machine instance types to include Windows Server 2008 R2 (in limited preview for now), Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Google also introduced the ability to live-migrate running VMs to different hardware with no noticeable interruption of service. Unfortunately, there was a stroke of inadvertent irony in the presentation: Just as Google’s team finished demonstrating the live migration of an app streaming 1080p video, the YouTube video stream hosting the presentation went offline for minutes on end. (Speculation ran rampant in the comments section for the stream if YouTube was itself being live-migrated.)

A cheaper cloud for all Throughout the announcement, it wasn’t hard to detect veiled jabs at Amazon’s cloud services. Complexity of pricing was the biggest and most obvious one, with the presenters (among them Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Google) noting how confusion over prepayments, or using on-demand instances versus flexible ones, have made cloud pricing more of a headache than it should be.

Google’s idea is that  cloud computing should track the cost of physical computing more closely. Moore’s Law has caused the cost of hardware to drop year over year, but cloud computing’s dip in pricing hasn’t tracked the hardware cost curve as closely. To that end, Google has cut costs 30 to 85 percent across the board for Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. The cost of a single-core U.S.-hosted instance type has dropped from 10.4 cents to 7.0 cents per hour, with the high end (16 cores) down from $1.659 to $1.120.

Google introduced Sustained-Use Discounts as a cost-cutting measure. Any VM used for more than a certain percentage of the month is billed at an incrementally discounted rate, with the price cut ranging from 40 to 80 percent of the base rate — a net monthly discount of 20 percent, according to Google’s math. “No upfront payments, no lock-in, and no need to predict future use,” says Google in its announcement post — easily read as direct pokes at Amazon’s maze of purchasing options, including spot and reserved instances. The next move is clearly Amazon’s, as it has cut prices many times in response to competition.

Big data? Yes, and fast data, too Back when Amazon introduced Kinesis, its platform for real-time streamed data acquisition, it was clearly Amazon’s way of horning in on the market for big data by way of the burgeoning Internet of things.

Now Google has taken a step of its own in that direction, with an addition to its BigQuery data analytics platform, named BigQuery Streaming. It’s designed to ingest up to 100,000 records per second per table, with a cost of $20,000 per month for reserved queries and $5 per terabyte for 5GBps on-demand queries.

Google’s demonstration of BigQuery Streaming involved running live queries on a simulation of incoming live data — 400,000 power meters, each generating one event per minute, to simulate the city of Seattle. Among the BigQuery Streaming features touted by Google was that it eliminated the need for ingestion processing, warehousing, or sharding of the data; one could simply pipe it right in and begin analyzing.

The big competition here is not just from Amazon, but also from dedicated hardware vendors who insist that big iron is what’s needed for big data, as well as software makers looking to turn batch-oriented, distributed data processing solutions like Hadoop into streaming data processing systems.

Google’s been doing its best to put Amazon on notice for some time, not merely by offering a cheaper product, but also a more flexible and genuinely useful one. App Engine was the main vehicle for those changes, at least as far as developers were concerned. But now Google’s interested in making the whole of its cloud offering — not select pieces of it that appeal to a select audience (say, only PHP developers, or only those running hosted apps) — into a force to be reckoned with.

This story, “Google puts Amazon on notice with new Cloud Platform features,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.