Google Said to Launch Virtual Server Cloud at I/O

Google is said to be introducing its very own cloud platform during the Google I/O developer conference to compete with similar offerings from Amazon and Microsoft.

That may sound strange at first since Google already has a cloud platform, App Engine. The difference is that Google will start offering virtual servers as opposed to an app platform, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) as opposed to Paas (platform as a service).

Amazon's Web Services for example allows developers to spun up virtual servers to suit their needs.

They don't actually get to run bare metal, though they can do that if they're willing to pay for it, but they get a machine or several to play with, for all intents and purposes.

They can choose from a number of available operating systems, several Linux distributions or Windows, and have complete freedom in the software configuration and what they're able to do with the servers.

Google's current cloud, on the other hand, enables developers to run applications, written in several programming languages though Python is prefered, and get all the resources they need, but they don't get access to the actual servers.

That's about to change, according to the rumor, Google will start renting virtual servers as well. It's going to interesting to watch as Google goes head to head with Amazon.

The latter has the IaaS market pretty nicely wrapped up and is a favorite of startups and companies or researchers on a budget. Google will also be able to compete with Amazon's storage service, S3, with its Cloud Storage service.

It remains to be seen what Google will announce, if anything, rumors don't always turn out to be accurate. But Google has usually reserved big announcements about its cloud platform for Google I/O so if the announcement is coming it's going to be there.