Google Launches Compute Engine To Take On Amazon Web Services

Google has spent the last decade building a huge amount of infrastructure to support its own services and applications. Now anyone will be able to take advantage of all that investment, as Google is rolling out a set of infrastructure-as-a-service products that could compete with industry heavyweight, Amazon Web Services.

Google has already built one of the largest data centers and networks to connect those data centers. And in 2008, Google created App Engine, which Urs Holzle, VP of Engineering and one of first 10 employees at Google, said now supports over 1 million active apps and 7.5 billion hits per day. It’s the largest public NoSQL data store in the world.

Holzle showed off the new product, called Google Compute Engine, which will provide Linux virtual machines at Google scale. The goal is to provide application developers the ability to turn up virtual machines, along with high-performance storage and connectivity to their users through Google’s networks.