Will Google Enter The Cloud?
This weekend, TechCrunch reported that Google may release it’s BigTable data storage setup (it’s not really a database, but we can call it that for now.) Here’s a quick snip from the article:
BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.
I’m interested in the thought that Google may start to take advantage of its immense computing power and sell access to developers and companies, just like Amazon does with it’s Amazon Web Services. I personally don’t have a lot of use for another storage system, but something at the bottom of the article caught me eye:
If Google does indeed announce public access to BigTable next week, expect the company to follow up with cloud storage and processing solutions as well, since there are substantial synergies between the three.
Whoa.
Can you imagine if Google entered this market? Talk about your game-changer. For institutions already outsourcing their email to Gmail, I would think this type of service could complement that. Imagine if IHE’s could leverage this platform and host everything in the cloud - and while there are definite pros and cons to this, the upsides are pretty thought-provoking — scale services like your learning management system to handle demand cost-efficiently, your web servers to handle demand during both good times and bad, and on and on.
I use Amazon’s S3 right now for delivering media like podcasts and videos quickly. My guess is Google’s network and datacenters could possibly serve this content even faster.
While keeping in mind that this is mostly a rumor, I’ve been thinking of what this type of offering could potentially cost developers like me. If you use Google’s other services as a model, then potentially Google could make the cost of using these potential services zero, right?
But how would Google make money on this if it was indeed free? They are able to monetize other applications of theirs like Gmail and YouTube/Google Video, but free would certainly make developers think twice about what platform to use to build their applications.
If I had to bet, I’d say that Google has the resources and infrastructure to price this very, very aggressively. I’ll be watching this very closely.
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