14 DAY TRIAL // There’s no shortage of rumors in the buildup to the Google I/O 2010 conference, set to debut later today. The latest is that Google will be launching an Amazon S3 competitor, offering on-demand storage services to developers. The company is said to position its service, which will be called Google Storage for Developers, ‘GS’ for short, directly against Amazon’s offering.
TechCrunch reports that the Google storage service may launch in private beta at first and that the announcement will be made at the I/O conference. Developers who need large amounts of cloud-hosted storage will be able to use Google’s extensive infrastructure in their applications or websites.
Google Storage for Developers will feature a REST API for easy access to the stored data. Users will also be able to require authentication through a Google Account for accessing the data, it is said, if they don’t want to make it publicly available. Customers will be able to manage their data through a web-based interface, but also by using command-line tools.
The service should be of particular interest for developers wanting to deploy apps that require big amounts of data. By using a cloud service, developers have the flexibility of paying just for what they use in terms of storage space and bandwidth consumption, as opposed to paying a fixed rate like they would when opting for dedicated data hosting.
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has proven quite successful and has opened the door to cloud storage being seen as a viable solution. Small developers enjoy the flexibility and cost benefits it brings, but the service has some big-name clients as well. Google’s internal infrastructure is already designed to handle massive amounts of data efficiently. Opening it up to the outside world shouldn’t require much of an investment on Google’s part. The company has traditionally provided higher level services, but it has been offering the Google App Engine for the past couple of years.