Google Compute Engine Draws Early Praise, and Some Skepticism

At the Google I/O conference, company officials announced a big next step for the company--the public availability of the Google Compute Engine public cloud service (following much beta testing). It puts the company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is a step squarely into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. Now third parties are popping up with services surrounding the platform,  much as third parties provide services for AWS. How will Compute Engine fare against other offerings in the cloud?
According to an insightful essay from Jakiram + Associates:

"Amazon Web Services is ahead of any Cloud offering by leaps and bounds. The sheer breadth of services that AWS offers is mindboggling. The API that AWS designed for each of its service is considered to be an industry standard so much so that even the competition is left with no choice but to endorse it."

A number of stories appearing about Google's platform also ask why it took Google so long to deliver a viable platform.
Despite naysayers, though, Google Compute Engine has a lot going for it. Its Cloud Storage API is fully compatible with the Amazon S3 API. Google App Engine, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that can help organizations develop cloud-based applications, is also a good complement. And, most importantly, partners are expressing support for Compute Engine.
 Compute Engine is also a good Linux story. Google is leveraging huge number of Linux virtual machines to keep its platform persistently available. Information Week already has a hands-on review that attests to its speed and availability:

"In real-world benchmarks, using full copies of my company's production database and replicas of our application servers, we found that VMs on GCE--in this private beta period--had more consistent performance than comparable servers on AWS. Of note, the GCE hardware is used for many of Google's internal applications, so it wasn't just GCE testers hitting the servers; the underlying hardware was under significant load."

Obviously, Google Compute Engine will draw comparisons to AWS for some time to come. In all likelihood, both of these platforms will remain interesting and competitition between them will be good for the cloud. A complete breakdown of Google Compute Engine's capabilities is available here.