Google Cloud Services Update Has Amazon In Its Sights

a revamped suite of Google cloud services

The updated Google cloud services portfolio targets the 200,000 developers who have already created apps on Google's cloud services, and now businesses that are looking to build apps in the cloud, wrote Google Group Product Manager Jessie Jiang in a blog post. The retooled Google cloud services suite features the official launch of Google Cloud Storage; updates to Google App Engine, Google's Platform-as-a-Service and AWS rival; the availability of Cloud SQL, a cloud database Google teased earlier this week; and the latest release of Prediction API, cloud-based machine learning tools to help analyze data and add other features to applications.

"Google's cloud services allow you to host your applications in the cloud and leverage the same infrastructure that power Google's own applications," Jiang wrote. "There are more than 200,000 developers who have created apps on Google's cloud services. Today, we are announcing several enhancements to our services targeted at businesses looking to build applications in the cloud."

An updated suite of Google cloud services also comes on the heels of Google's launch of the Google Cloud Transformation Program, a new program for a select number of partners and resellers that lets them offer more cloud services to augment their Google Apps and Google product sales.

"We are enabling our enterprise customers to build business solutions that take advantage of the computing power and scalability of Google's cloud services without all the hassles of deployment of applications," Jiang wrote.

First, Google revealed that Google Cloud Storage for Developers, the cloud storage offering Google launched last year, is out of Code Labs and is now just called Google Cloud Storage. The storage service also has a host of new features, including the ability to read and write files to Google Cloud Storage via the App Engine Files API. Google is also making detailed usage of information, including access analytics and storage use data, available to all customers. Meanwhile, Google is chopping the price for storage and bandwidth costs for Google Cloud Storage, revealing that it is not charging for ingress and adding new volume discounts for bigger users, which could save users more than 40 percent per month. Storage costs start at $0.13 for up to 1 TB and decrease as more capacity is added; and bandwidth costs start at $0.12 for up to 1 TB and decrease as more is used.

Google also updated Google App Engine, adding a new account level that offers uptime guarantees and more support. Google App Engine Premier Accounts give users premier support, an SLA of 99.95 percent uptime and the ability to create an unlimited number of apps on their premier account domain for $500 per month, Google said.

Jiang wrote that Google Cloud SQL, which launched into a limited preview just last week to power App Engine applications with a relational database in a managed cloud environment, is now available for free.

And Google Prediction API has also graduated from Google Code Labs. Google also has launched a new version of Prediction API, v1.4. The latest edition of Prediction API boasts two new features: support for PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) v4.01, an XML-based markup language, and data anomaly detection.

Jiang wrote that Prediction API has a variety of use cases, including helping companies increase fuel economy or for creating movie recommendation services.

"It is one of the services which provides a clean and simple API to machine learning that anybody can understand," Jiang wrote. "At the same time, it is hosted in the cloud and ideally situated for integration with your Web application."