5 Things You Need to Know About Where Google Is Going Next

On the last day of the Google I/O developers conference, we sat down with engineering director Peter Magnusson to digest the introduction of Compute Engine, which adds Google-scale processing power to the company’s list of cloud offerings designed to take on Amazon Web Services. Here are the announcement’s five key implications:

1. Forget Web vs. Native. There’s Only One Cloud

According to Magnusson, all the hand-wringing over Web versus native apps is really nothing to worry about. It’s a short-term problem. “We’ll have both for now,” he said, “and small teams will have to prioritize” based on what they learn from their customers. But eventually, Google intends to make so much possible from the cloud that the particular interface to an application won’t matter.

We’re almost at the inflection point, in fact. Magnusson points out that high-profile exits of small apps such as Instagram wouldn’t be possible without a managed cloud infrastructure. The new pieces of Google’s cloud offerings are trying to expand that flexibility to broader kinds of applications. “We’re trying to build the future cloud global computer,” Magnusson said.

2. The Trend Over Time Is Toward Managed Services

The early offerings in Google App Engine – the forerunner to Compute Engine – solved certain kinds of computing problems for developers, but many App Engine apps handle their traffic capacity on infrastructure elsewhere. That’s costly and confusing, and Google thinks that era is nearly over. What comes next, in Google’s view, is an era in which developers have to worry about