Google borrows Microsoft tactics as it ramps up Amazon cloud battle
Summary: Google and Microsoft's cloud
revamps look set to dramatically change the competitive marketplace for
infrastructure-as-a-service, but people are sceptical of their ability
to dethrone Amazon
Google was once a revolutionary company, but its revamped cloud offering, Google Compute Engine, shows it has fallen prey to the same type of proprietary thinking that has afflicted Microsoft in its fight to take on Amazon.
Both Google and Microsoft began their clouds with
platform-as-a-service systems - closed technologies that forced
developers to write their applications in a small set of languages, with
little ability to control the underlying infrastructure.
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This was a blunder for both companies as, contrary to the wisdom of
the time, it was the low-end infrastructure-as-a-service model that came
to take the lion's share of cloud spending.
Now, Google and Microsoft have
re-jigged their clouds to better fit that model, but having spent four
years working on technologies in the wrong area of the market, cloud
integrators and competitors are sceptical of Google and Microsoft's
ability to convince customers that their clouds are better than
Amazon's.
"For them to focus on [IaaS] says to me that those behemoths, those
organisations are going where the money is in the initial adoption which
is in the IaaS layer," Robin Meehan, chief technology officer of cloud
consultancy of Smart421, says. But "Amazon win both ways... they have a
market-leading infrastructure-as-a-service offering".
Of the two, Azure is a more capable competitor, but only since it was
re-engineered to include an infrastructure-as-a-service capability,
according to Kevin Reid, chief technology officer of Virtustream, an
enterprise-focused cloud company.
"It's very difficult to think of [Azure] as a pure deployment engine
when you don't have an IaaS that goes side-by-side with it," he says. "A
lot of legacy applications have a lot of interdependencies... where
Microsoft had to change their tune was in realising those dependencies
they had to... take care of."
And, given both Google and Microsoft have PaaS services that they
have poured significant R&D into, they have an interest in making
sure their technology encourages users to climb up the stack, when they
are ready. This contrasts with Amazon's approach, which has been, as
chief technology officer Werner Vogels puts it, to encourage services
like Heroku and EngineYard to live on top of its cloud to "let a thousand platforms bloom".
Proprietary attitudes
Google's attempt to take on Amazon in IaaS could also be hobbled by its commitment to proprietary technology, and its secrecy around it:
as the company's cloud sits on the same technology used to power the
rest of its services, the company has been loath to disclose the precise
technical details of its architecture.
"Google have wrapped it all up in a completely managed thing," James
Monico, technical director of consultancy Cloudreach, says. "Amazon have
gone infrastructure plus open source."
It's a similar story for Microsoft, meaning both companies may not be
able to share as much information with developers about their clouds as
Amazon can, given Google has an interest in protecting the technologies
that power its mainstay web advertising business.
On a side note, the most noticeable effect of Microsoft and Google's
entrance will probably be further price reductions by Amazon, according
to Meehan, who expects the three companies to "slug it out for quite a
while at very low [profit] margins to do a landgrab", and, after this
has played out, they will ultimately differentiate themselves through
SLAs pegged to availability.
All in all, the picture that emerges from Google and Microsoft's
moves is of two rich businesses that have been caught on the backfoot by
a scrappy young start-up. In this cloudy world, Microsoft has become
IBM, Google has become Microsoft and Amazon has become the new Google.
The way this triumvirate competes will have a huge impact on the
industry.
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