Google’s entry into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market with the Google Compute Engine (GCE) is an immediate challenge to Amazon’s dominance. Certainly Amazon sees it that way, as evidenced by the price war that has immediately broken out between the two Internet giants, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman in his latest Wikibon Alert, “Sizing Up Google Compute Engine, Amazon AWS and the Cloud Field”.

While GCE is a late entry into a field that already is crowded with both Internet-based contenders such as Rackspace and major IT vendors including IBM and HP, as well as the OpenStack consortium, all trying to expand their share of the growing pie at the expense of AWS, it has to be considered a major contender. For one thing, Google has spent 14 years building one of the largest networks and most scalable architectures in the world. It spent more than $2.9B on infrastructure and in the last 12 months of the GCE beta brought out 163 improvements. That is a pace that competes with the constant stream of improvements and new features Amazon creates for AWS, and Google’s past performance gives every reason to expect that it will maintain that level of development.

It also enters the market with at least three features – sub-hour billing, shared core instances, and support for 10TB per volume – that make it attractive compared to AWS, although some other competitors also offer these features. And Google knows how to integrate its other services to GCE, from sensor support through BigQuery to data visualization, to build complete packages for users.

The IaaS market is not a two-horse race. OpenStack, however, has had to cut back from 3- month to 6-month release cycles, which will hamper it in the competition with Google and AWS. The best use cases for GCE, Miniman writes, are Web-scale workloads, including many Big Data applications, that can be spun up fast, used, and then turned off. Other services will excel at other use cases. However, Google’s entry into this market means that now all the other players have two rather than one fast-moving Internet giants to compete against. GCE may be a late entrant, but it is not just another small fish in a pond dominated by the AWS shark.