Forget disease-seeking nanoparticles and smart contact lenses: Google’s putting its real efforts into catching Amazon in cloud computing. Amazon has been the leader in the cloud space for years. Cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft let other companies save money on hardware by charging them to use their servers, storage, and database resources.
In 2013, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had more revenue than Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform combined, according to analysts from equity research firm Evercore. Google is hosting an event today to talk about its cloud services. At Google’s Cloud Platform Live conference it announced new offerings to make it easier for customers to set up cloud services and, it hopes, help make it a more attractive option than Amazon, Alistair Barr at The Wall Street Journal reports.
Amazon launched AWS in 2006. Google has always focused on building incredibly powerful data centers, but it didn’t start renting out computing power until two years later, in 2008. When Google did finally unveil its services, the company required customers to write software similar to the way that it does, and the lack of flexibility pushed people towards working with Amazon.