High Marks for Google Compute Engine

Google has been in the cloud business for so long I could have sworn they already had an IaaS offering -- you know, pure raw computers with a simple version of some kind of Linux or something you can rent and process to your heart's content.

Google may be late to the game that Amazon and Rackspace basically own, but according to one Infoworld reviewer, Google done good.

The Google service comes with Ubuntu, but they'll give you CentOS upon request. Many of the features are in lockstep with Rackspace and Amazon and here Google touts lower price, which may or may not be true depending on where all your users are and how much ingress and egress you need.

Now for the differences. The pricing is interesting where ingress is free and egress pricing is weighed in favor of teams sharing racks in the same local zones, perhaps encouraging the creation of cloud-based supercomputers used by local teams, the review surmises.

The compute engine has no storage, so if you don't want your data to go "poof!", you'll have to look at Google Cloud SQL or some other storage plan. Another option is to get an SLA and simply trust the 99.95 uptime. Do you feel lucky?

The most unique feature is being able to tap into Google services such as Maps, Places, or Books.

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/29/2012 at 12:47 PM