Report: Google, Microsoft to directly compete with Amazon’s EC2 cloud

Google and Microsoft are directly targeting Amazon with their new clouds that are allegedly in-development.

According to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris, who cited unnamed sources familiar with the plans, Google is developing a cloud computing offering that will give Amazon’s EC2 cloud a run for its money. More sources claimed Microsoft is even working on an IaaS platform that will either release or announce before Google’s offering. The sources further elaborated and said Google should lunch its service for renting virtual server instances by the latter half of 2012, while Microsoft scheduled its announcement for June 7 in San Francisco.

GigaOm explained:

• Although Google declined to comment on whether the offering is indeed on the way, an IaaS cloud would make a lot of sense for the company. It already has a popular platform-as-a-service offering in App Engine that is essentially a cloud-based application runtime, but renting virtual servers in an IaaS model is still where the money is in cloud-based computing. Google also has an API-accessible storage offering — the aptly named Google Cloud Storage — that would make for a nice complement to an IaaS cloud, like Amazon’s ridiculously popular S3 storage service is for EC2.
• Microsoft clearly got the message on where developers are spending in the cloud, too, which is why it’s reportedly expanding its Windows Azure cloud to compete with Amazon more directly than it already does. That means the ability to rent Windows and Linux virtual servers by the hour as well as, it has been reported, support for Java on the PaaS side of Azure. The speculation that Microsoft will make these moves at some point is nothing new, and tweets last week  from a Microsoft analyst saying “Infrastructure as a Service is on the roadmap” only stoked the flames.

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