SAN FRANCISCO — Google took another shot at its competitors in the public cloud space with a smorgasbord of new announcements at its Cloud Platform Live conference in San Francisco today.
The company launched a new Compute Engine Local SSD product that gives companies access to local solid state storage in GOOGLE’S infrastructure-as-a-service product for high-performance operations.
In its highest end configuration, the Local SSD product can support 680,000 read operations 360,000 write operations a second, at a cost of 28.8 cents per gigabyte of data per month. The service is a direct competitor with Microsoft Azure’s just-announced G Series compute instances, which offers similar high-performance local SSD services.
Google Container Engine is designed to help consolidate cloud applications into portable Docker containers that run on top of Google Compute Engine virtual machines. It’s a hosted version of Google’s Kubernetes open-source container management product. Using the tools, developers will be able to spin up virtual machine clusters that are purpose-built for containers. Users will be able to migrate their applications using containers between local machines, on-premise infrastructure and the public cloud.
Echoing the company’s constant refrain about its cloud services, Google Vice President of Cloud Platforms Brian Stevens pointed out that the company runs its entire business on containers, which is why he thinks users should choose the company’s container services over the offerings of its competitors.
Developers who want to directly hook their apps up to Google’s infrastructure will get a lot of mileage out of the Google Cloud Interconnect service. The service includes support for VPN-based connectivity that gives users a secure connection from their infrastructure into Google’s. People who want a dedicated connection can also pick up Carrier Interconnect services that let firms connect to Google through carriers like Level 3, and Direct Peering that gives them a dedicated link to Google.
Those two direct connections are available over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world. It’s a big advantage over Amazon Web Services, which offers 13 points of presence, and Microsoft Azure, which offers 11 points of presence.
Fans of Ubuntu Linux will be able to get access to the popular distro in Google Compute Engine thanks to a new partnership between Google and Canonical as well.
In addition, Google opened beta testing of its Managed VM service. The service, which was introduced in March, allows developers to build web services using AppEngine, but also run virtual machines that allows them to have finer control and access to more tools.
Google also introduced the beta of its Cloud Debugger service, which will allow developers to more easily test their applications in the cloud with tools that they are used to when building desktop applications. Cloud Debugger was first introduced at Google’s I/O developer conference this summer, but today’s announcement brings the service to the masses.
Today’s event comes six months after Google’s first Cloud Platform Live event, which saw the introduction of the company’s aggressive pricing plans, along with other programs like minute-to-minute pricing. True to form, the company launched a new set of discounts, cutting prices across a number of services, including steep discounts on Persistent Disk Snapshots and Persistent Disk SSD.
All of these features are an attempt to draw more users to the Google Cloud Platform, which is still locked in a war with other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. People who watch the cloud space still have some more news to look forward to, since Amazon is slated to announce its own cloud news at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas next week.
