Cloud Computing Service: Amazon EC2 vs Google GAE

Amazon Cloud on Ulitzer

Their economy of scale will be difficult to match.

What about Microsoft - they are constrained by the fact that they have to defend their desktop business - which will prevent them from following optimal cloud strategy!

Cloud Computing Service

Service provider with large number of networked computer systems

Allowing you to use a slice of that processing power and storage

Shielding your program and data from others sharing the same service, and

Charging you for your actual usage

Value Proposition of Cloud Computing

Elastic Capacity - Pay for what you actually use

Economy of Scale - Of hardware, Infrastructure and Management

Comparison between Amazon EC2 and Google GAE
Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches. Others either are similar to one of these or fall somewhere in between.

I have excluded SaaS from this discussion - you can see the comparison between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on this post on Cloud Strategy.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud)

Google GAE (Google App Engine)

Base Technology

Virtualization

Existing Google infrastructure

Unit of Scalability

Dynamically instantiated virtual machines

Every transactions initiated by user

Every scheduled or queued task

Persistence

Reserved Virtual Machine using standard RDBMS

By directly persisting objects on to Google BigTable

No need for any object-relational mapping

Software License

All software license required

OS, RDBMS, Web Server, App Server ...

Behaves like a Service Bus of infinite capacity

Application code can be directly deployed

Readiness

Reasonably mature

Can be viewed as an extension to existing hosting services

Very much in Beta

Will take couple of years to mature

Best for ...

Application requiring heavy processing power for short duration

Startups wanting to start free and have the ability to scale when the venture succeed

Economics

Saving potential of 30-70% for the right type of application

Not clear

However, it can be an order of magnitude improvement

Innovativeness

Incremental

Potentially Disruptive

Why is GAE potentially disruptive?

Over the last decade, Google has build a huge cloud infrastructure for its search and other services

The infrastructure has been build using very cost effective hardware

Fault tolerance is designed into the architecture

They have perfected technologies and algorithms like MapReduce and BigTable created for such infrastructure

It is highly scalable

Google is following a strategy of opening up their infrastructure for developers to use - for example Closure JavaScript Toolset

They will optimize cloud access through Chrome OS and Android Mobile OS

Their economy of scale will be difficult to match.

What about Microsoft - they are constrained by the fact that they have to defend their desktop business - which will prevent them from following optimal cloud strategy!