Google Announces Its Compute Engine

Google announced a service to compete with Amazon’s web services. At Google I/O 2012 keynote day 2, Google announced  Google Compute Engine, allowing developers, businesses, and research to (in simple terems) start-up virtual machines in the cloud. Google said that it will provide all the access to its computing power to companies. Although companies like Amazon has this service for a while, Google has said that they will compete with raw performance. Urs Holzle, senior vice president at Google, outlined the service as a service effort to users.

During day 2 of Google I/O’s keynote, Urs Holzle showed how easily it is to add 10,000 cores to a gene project to quickly analyze a gene. The demo then showed the results of the analyzation of the gene into a giant circle.

Google said that Google’s compute service includes:

• Compute with on-demand Linux virtual machines in 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual cores with 3.75GB RAM/virtual core.
• Storage: Store data on local disk/persistent block device/or Google Cloud Storage.
• Network: Connect virtual machines into clusters with configurable firewalls.
• Tooling: Configure and control via a scriptable command line tool or web UI.

As of right now, the service is in the beta testing stage and limited to a number of users and information is limited. Urs said that Google’s Compute Engine can offer “50 percent more compute per dollar” than other services like Amazon. Google announced the pricing on their website.

Hopefully, we will get more information will surface in the following weeks and Google will make it more open to use. Google just brief on the service and showed a demo of what it can do.