Google cloud architect Urs Holzle has a plan for more robust cloud services to compete with Amazon Web Services. But Google’s cloud to-do list remains long.

Google plans to make a primary announcement Tuesday on the way it will expand its cloud services to compete more aggressively with Amazon Web Services. But when Google is desirous about this strategy, the corporate must change a variety of things about its way to cloud computing.

Google’s chief cloud architect and senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle will give a keynote at Google’s Cloud Platform meetup in San Francisco Tuesday morning, and he’ll discuss Google’s introduction of latest features to its App Engine and Compute Cloud. Relating to customer choice and services, Google isn’t yet within the same league as AWS.

If anyone can convince onlookers that Google is fascinated with becoming a massive cloud contender, it’s Holzle. A former University of California Santa Barbara computer science professor who enlisted in Google’s early search engine days to create a more cloud-oriented infrastructure, Holzle redesigned Google’s option to computing from the bottom up, bobbing up with a leaner server design, more efficient ventilation cooling, and more accessible, maintainable motherboards and server parts. Under his leadership, Google evolved from a cluster of 100 servers in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to dozens of knowledge centers around the globe.

When Steve Ballmer declared last July that Microsoft was running one million servers in its infrastructure, he also acknowledged that Google was running much more than that. Google search and Google cloud services are powered from an identical infrastructure.

[Desire to learn more about Google’s consistent cloud performance? Read Google Cloud Performance Stability: a better Look.]

Cloud service providers ought to stop taking into account server clusters, server farms, and other large aggregations of computers as oddities or exceptions to the overall pattern of computing. Inside the cloud, Holzle said, the datacenter is the pc, and cloud software runs across all its servers to maintain them up and running — even if a bit of hardware fails underneath it.

Google launched App Engine, its platform as a service (PaaS) in 2008. It introduced its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in beta form in June 2012, making it generally available last December.

In comparison, Amazon’s beta IaaS launched in 2006, six years prior to Google, and because then the corporate has become host to such independent PaaS suppliers as Engine Yard, Heroku, and Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry.

In order for Google to meet up with Amazon at the general-purpose cloud computing front, it must escape the bounds it set on its App Engine PaaS, which came out of the gate running Google’s favorite language — Python — and never much else. Google later added Java and the languages that run inside the Java Virtual Machine. Google must broaden App Engine’s capabilities without sacrificing what the corporate has described as its inherent performance advantage.

A recent Wired magazine article indicated that Google will apply the appropriate of either one of its existing worlds — App Engine PaaS and Compute Engine IaaS — in its new service offerings. Does that mean it’ll make PaaS a feature of a brand new and aggressively positioned infrastructure as a service rather then offering two separate services?

To try this, Google must branch out beyond the limited language support it’s offered to this point. To compete with Amazon, Google must add Ruby, Node.js, Microsoft .Net, and even perhaps TypeScript, Microsoft’s JavaScript equivalent. Google holds an ace up its sleeve relating to JavaScript developers thanks to its Web Toolkit, which converts Java to JavaScript to be used in mobile and Web applications. Amazon, then again, has fully supported Node.js for greater than a year, including in Elastic Beanstalk operations.

When it involves asking Google for something new, however, we should always watch out what we would like for. If Google attempts to mix IaaS and a more broadly conceived PaaS, it can risk losing one of the vital factors that currently distinguishes its platform: The power to deliver consistent performance. A more complex PaaS, especially as a feature of IaaS, might make performance levels harder to keep up. To maintain performance a component of differentiation, Google must do both.

Google has done a majestic job of creating some services into its basic service. Compute Engine will automatically scale a spike in traffic across a customer’s total server set without requiring a request from the client to organize for load balancing. Amazon customers have complained some time past that Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, while effective, requires advance notice and time to fireplace up, therefore reacting belatedly to demand in place of being on top of it. On other fronts, however, Google simply lacks Amazon’s wide breadth of services.

For example, Amazon’s deeper management interfaces include Cloud Formation for provisioning a broad set of services at one time, OpsWorks for application management, and Elastic Beanstalk for deployment management. Google must provide you with a richer management interface and examine into running workloads.

Both Amazon and Google offer services to regulate relational databases and large data. But Amazon understands the rapidly evolving nature of knowledge management inside the cloud, and likewise offers the RedShift data warehouse service, the EMR Hadoop hosted framework, Data Pipeline for orchestrating data-driven workflows, and Kinesis for real-time data stream processing. With the web of factors poised to extend the will for such services exponentially, Google must demonstrate more data-handling skills than it has shown thus far.

On a broader front, Google has authored and developed several key cloud technologies utilized by most service providers today, including the specially designed cloud hardware MapReduce parallel data distribution and the BigTable NoSQL big data handling system. But it’s never quite mastered the scaled-back view of the area sometimes had to connect to enterprise IT. While the corporate offers features that entice IT, together with automated encryption of information at rest, it still must determine learn how to build more services with a view to help it gain traction within the enterprise.

Amazon has enough insight into the issues of traditional IT to innovate on that front with Amazon Advisor, for assist in configuring cloud virtual machines; Virtual Private Cloud, for more isolated operations inside the multi-tenant cloud; and Direct Connect, for personal-line access to Amazon cloud data centers. Microsoft could also be learning to chat to enterprise cloud customers, offering services similar to compatible SQL Server in Azure rather than only Azure SQL Services.

Can Google convince enterprise IT that it’s curious about supplying IaaS that serves its needs? That is the key question Holzle must address. A technique he might do that is to emphasise a Google strength in enterprise terms: Google had the foresight to amass dark fiber when it was available, and its data centers at the moment are believed to be linked by surplus fiber capacity. If Google could introduce an easy, automated data backup and recovery service that enables customers to designate where they need the info recovered, that could provide a competitive advantage for enterprise users.

However Holzle plays his cards, cloud computing users are inclined to see a spokesman for a robust new service with a more generalized, accessible infrastructure than the Google we have seen to date. Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine could be solid individual services, but a single unified Google Cloud Platform can be easier to know and use — and it may be the service that Holzle unveils on Tuesday.

Engage with Oracle president Mark Hurd, NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle, General Motors CIO Randy Mott, Box founder Aaron Levie, UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh, GE Power CIO Jim Fowler, and other leaders of the Digital Business movement on the InformationWeek Conference and Elite 100 Awards Ceremony, to be held along with Interop in Las Vegas, March 31 to April 1, 2014. See the total agenda here.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

More Insights