Beyond the Edge
Beyond the Edge
The eyes of the tech world are all on Google with the announcement that Google's Compute Engine cloud service is now open to the public. The new service is Google's answer to Amazon's AWS cloud system and is poised to capture some of the same customers. Many are predicting Compute Engine will be a game changer, as the sports addicts would say: a historic move that will change the whole landscape – and they might be right. If anyone has the power and personnel to take on Amazon, it is definitely Google, although it is worth remembering that, after striking it rich with search, Google's later attempts to swallow whole industries have not always been as successful as the experts predicted. (Anyone remember when Google Wave was supposed to take down Facebook?)
The eyes of the tech world are all on Google with the announcement that Google's Compute Engine cloud service is now open to the public. The new service is Google's answer to Amazon's AWS cloud system and is poised to capture some of the same customers. Many are predicting Compute Engine will be a game changer, as the sports addicts would say: a historic move that will change the whole landscape – and they might be right. If anyone has the power and personnel to take on Amazon, it is definitely Google, although it is worth remembering that, after striking it rich with search, Google's later attempts to swallow whole industries have not always been as successful as the experts predicted. (Anyone remember when Google Wave was supposed to take down Facebook?)
We will all be interested to see what comes of the great showdown between Google and Amazon, plus Oracle, HP, Amazon, and a host of other tech titans who have entered the IT cloud thunderdome. But I'm also interested in another project at Google that might change a different game.
Googlers Jan Monsch and Harald Wagener gave a presentation at the recent Usenix LISA 2013 conference on a Google project called Beyond Corp. According to the talk, the mission of the Beyond Corp project is to "re-architect corporate services to remove any privilege associated with having a corporate address." This simple 13-word description might seem arcane, but the implications are enormous.
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