Rackspace Wants To Take On Amazon's Cloud Computing Efforts

from the interesting-battles dept

Over the past couple of years, Amazon has successfully built up quite a business in commoditizing and renting out its server and process power through its Amazon Web Services efforts, such as S3 and EC2. These days, a lot of startups don't even bother getting servers in a hosting facility, knowing they can just scale up on Amazon's machines. That, of course, could represent a threat to the big hosting facilities, such as Rackspace. And while many thought the eventual competitors against Amazon in this space would come from the likes of Google or Microsoft, it looks like Rackspace is trying to be a bit proactive here. It just bought two companies and announced a competing web services platform. The two companies are Slicehost, which does virtualization, and JungleDisk, an online backup service that is built on Amazon's S3 storage system.

The JungleDisk deal is particularly interesting, as Rackspace knows that JungleDisk users (myself included) are effectively all Amazon S3 customers. If it can offer an easy and convenient way to switch over, then it can take a bunch of customers away from Amazon and move them right over to its own platform. If you're unfamiliar with JungleDisk, it creates a virtual mounted drive on your computer that connects to Amazon's S3 platform. So, as long as you have internet access, you have an unlimited size hard drive that you can reach, where you pay based only on what you use. On top of that, it includes backup software (or you can use other backup software) so that you can regularly back up anything on your computer onto this network drive regularly. JungleDisk customers pay for the software, but the ongoing costs are all paid to Amazon. It's actually quite useful (and crazy cheap compared to some other backup services). It would be interesting to see if Rackspace also allows a service to let you back up to both Rackspace and Amazon, so if one goes down, you still have access to the other. Either way, it looks like the competition in the so-called "cloud computing" space is about to heat up.

Filed Under: cloud computing, online storage, web services
Companies: jungledisk, rackspace, slicehost

Google Finally Realizes It Needs To Be The Web Platform

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Way back in 2004, we started asking when Google was going to become "the web platform," finally opening up its infrastructure to build out new and useful applications. It seemed obvious at the time that the next real battle was going to be in that space, but time and time again, Google has missed opportunities to do so, opening up a window of opportunity for other players. Surprisingly, the closest to realizing the vision has been Amazon.com with its Amazon Web Services offerings -- which was something no one would have expected back in 2004. Back then, the questions were more about Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Microsoft, however, can't seem to get past its desktop software DNA (though, it talks a good game) and Yahoo! (typical Yahoo!) has bits and pieces here and there but can't seem to pull together a comprehensive web platform strategy. For a brief period of time, it looked like Facebook might become a true web platform, but it's been too focused on locking apps in rather than enabling outbound efforts.

So, now, finally, nearly four years later, Google has come to its senses and announced its entrance into the web platform space with its aptly named AppEngine offering. In many ways, it's similar to Amazon's offering (which is a good thing!), though much more integrated, which could prove to be either a problem or a benefit depending on what you want to do. Amazon allows for a much more a la carte setup, which could appeal to many, while you have to really embrace Google to enjoy the benefits of its setup. A big open question is pricing. A huge part of the appeal to Amazon's Web Services platform is that it's crazy cheap. You really have to be working it quite hard to build up any sort of significant charges. Google hasn't released info on pricing yet, offering AppEngine up for free to the first 10,000 developers (who appear to have snapped up all the open slots in less than two hours). That free service has some limitations: initially 500 MBs of storage and enough bandwidth to serve approximately 5 million pages per month. There's some suggestion that the final service will always be free up to that level, with charges starting if you go beyond that. If so, that could certainly appeal to people who just want to try some stuff out for free.

While this may seem like something that will only appeal to serious techheads, this could be a really big deal. A lot is going to depend on how well AppEngine really works, and how open it really turns out to be. However, if it really does provide another super cheap (or even free at low levels) full service, highly scalable platform for all different kinds of applications, things could start to get very interesting pretty quickly. Between this and Amazon's Web Services, the very concept of developing online applications may finally start to change in significant ways for the better. The easier it is to develop and deploy highly scalable web applications, the more innovative and creative solutions we're going to start to see.

Filed Under: apis, appengine, application development, hosting, web platform, web services
Companies: amazon, google