The public cloud is becoming a crowded cloud-mess of who’s-who in technology. The incumbent is Amazon Web Services (AWS), going up against the likes of Microsoft Windows Azure, OpenStack-based providers RackSpace, HP and others…and now Google with the Google Compute Engine (GCE). GCE has all of the makings to be one of Amazon AWS’s strongest competitor in the future, but they have a long way to go before they catch up.  According to Wikibon Co-Founder and CTO David Floyer, AWS has a very helpful customer service setup for hearing and fixing problems. “The biggest challenge for Google, is…offering a throat to choke. Virtual throats aren’t very choke-able,” Floyer says in a recent appearance on our Live NewsDesk Show (full video below).

Amazon AWS has a 40-lap lead on everyone else, having launched in 2006, and a projected revenue of $3 billion in 2013 — but in this race, laps can be made up almost overnight. Make no mistake: every telecom and infrastructure player imaginable — Microsoft Azure, IBM and Hewlett-Packard for example, are jockeying for position to gain a sliver of market share in the public cloud sector.

Let’s size up the field:

Google announces general availability to its Google Compute Engine

Google has spent the last 14 years building one of the largest networks and most scalable architectures in the world. You might have heard of them. But what you probably haven’t heard of yet is Google Compute Engine (GCE). Google announced GCE at Google I/O this week. GCE is a public cloud, that is generally available to bring Google’s architecture to the masses. While it is undeniable that Google has immense resources (having spent over $2.9B on infrastructure), it’s also a late entrant into a crowded cloud marketplace.

So what does Google bring to the cloud?

• Sub hour billing with a minimum of 10 minutes. While Amazon bills by the hour, there are alternatives (such as ProfitBricks) that offer this billing option.
• Shared core instances – small and micro instances are now available for low-intensity workloads.
• Persistent disk with support up to 10TB per volume; compared to Amazon and Rackspace which only support 1TB volumes.

Google focuses on its updates, and it doesn’t take a data scientist to figure out why. In its short twelve months of beta, GCE has impressively rolled out 163 improvements. “One of the more interesting things is they have their Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine and find ways to be able to take that ingested process and take it over to the compute side,” says Wikibon Senior Analyst StuMiniman in a recent appearance on NewsDesk (full video below).

One can conclude that Google is dead set on not only keeping pace with Amazon AWS updates, but finding proprietary ways to differentiate.  In comparison to everyone outside of GCE and AWS… here is where OpenStack takes a bit of a knock. OpenStack recently had to switch from three- to six-month release cycles, and this could hamper its ability to be competitive in the growing public cloud space.

AWS: current king of the public cloud jungle.

Amazon’s AWS strategy has been clear from day one, back in 2006: disrupt the current order of Enterprise IT, and bring Amazon’s low margin retail mentality front and center. IT organizations are seeing a continued stream of pressure from CEO’s and “Shadow IT” to improve agility, simplify IT operations, and cut costs. While less gun-shy CIOs will focus on data governance, privacy, and security, (a.k.a. all of the risks associated with the public cloud,) the reality is this: partnerships with cloud service providers and/or outright moving to the cloud could be in the very near future.

In late November 2012, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy laid out the AWS value proposition and cited six key values for the service:

1. Shifting CAPEX to OPEX
2. Lower costs
3. Elastic – no guesswork
4. Speed and agility
5. Avoiding non-differentiated heavy lifting (aka infrastructure plumbing)
6. Go global in minutes

Amazon’s strategy is a virtuous circle, and it’s proven it can be quite profitable. The more customers Amazon adds, the more infrastructure it purchases. As it adds infrastructure, Amazon retains better economies, which decreases its costs. As its costs drop, Amazon lowers prices, which attracts more customers.

The decision to outsource infrastructure to the public cloud is not necessarily a slam dunk for mid-sized or larger companies, and Amazon continues to refine and improve its service offering to try and onboard businesses. One ancillary housekeeping item worth noting: Amazon AWS was the catalyst for the aptly-named “private cloud”, and forcing organizations to become more agile and efficient.

Everybody Else

Everybody else is for another post. There are too many smaller players (related to Google’s sheer size, and Amazon AWS’s market-lead) to include in Part 1. We will tackle Microsoft Windows Azure, RackSpace, HP, IBM and all of the other notable players in Part 2 next week.

Clearly right now the market is approaching a two-horse race: Amazon AWS (expected winner) and Google GCE (biggest kid on the block). However, the public cloud reminds me a lot of the land-grab of social networking websites of the early 2000’s. As with any industry, there is a land-grab rush. Unlike the social networking example, all of the sprinters here are established technology companies, some giants, that are either expanding service offerings, or entering a completely new vertical.