Google today announced public availability of Google Compute Engine, a part of the Google Cloud Platform unveiled last year at Google I/O developer’s conference. The company has also completed ISO 27001:2005 international security certification for Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage.
Public Availability of Compute Engine
In a move supposedly made to compete with Amazon Web Services and its Elastic Compute Cloud in the cloud infrastructure market, Google has also added new features and significant upgrades to Compute Engine, including by-the-minute charges and a new NoSQL database service. Developers can start using Compute Engine by visiting cloud.google.com.
Some of the new features are:
- Now customers won’t have to pay for compute minutes they don’t use as Compute Engine will have Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum.
- Shared-core instances, which will provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.
- Customers can now create gateways, VPN servers and build applications spanning their local network and Google’s cloud with newly introduced Advanced Routing features.
- Large persistent disks, which will support up to 10 terabytes per volume as compared to 1.25 terabytes yesterday.
Upgrades to Google App Engine
Google has also added PHP support in App Engine — a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for hosting web apps, which has until now supported only Java, Python, and Google’s own language Go. Access to PHP support is currently in limited preview. Users can now run open source apps like WordPress on App Engine and partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.
Credit: The Verge
Newly Launched Google Cloud Datastore
Google has also launched Google Cloud Datastore, a solution somewhere on the lines of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3.)
Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Google Cloud Datastore is a fully managed solution for storing non-relational data and features automatic scalability along with:
- Support for ACID transactions.
- High availability of reads and writes.
- Strong consistency for SQL-like queries, indexes and more.
- Replication across Google’s multiple datacenters.
- No planned downtime.
While AWS is still a clear front-runner in the cloud infrastructure market by miles, it has received severe criticism for the way it handles enterprises; which will make Google Compute Engine’s journey very interesting and worth a worth. Google too, hasn’t been able to “get” enterprises yet, but given the massive infrastructure it has in place to support it’s computing needs, it remains a solid competitor.
