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Cloud Computing Service: Amazon EC2 vs Google GAE

Though different cloud service providers are following different strategies, these are the two uniquely different approaches
By Udayan Banerjee
Article Rating:
November 26, 2009 11:30 AM EST
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 1,917

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!

    Read the original blog entry...

    Published November 26, 2009 – Reads 1,917
    Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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    More Stories By Udayan Banerjee

    Udayan Banerjee an IT industry veteran who started his career in 1977. In his posts he mainly concentrates on looking at the IT scene and changing trends from an Indian perspective - and has a special interest in collective intelligence arising out of self-organizing complex systems.