Google To Launch Its Amazon Cloud Killer Next Week

AP

Rumors have been circulating for months that Google was going to launch its own cloud and compete head-to-head with Amazon.

The cloud will be launched next week at its I/O conference, Om Malik of GigaOM reports.

This will be a full on infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that lets users manage their own virtual servers (called "instances") and upload their applications on top of that.

Cloud isn't new for Google.  For years it offered a popular "platform as a service" cloud, called App Engine. This hosts applications and users don't mess with servers. Recently, it launched Google Cloud Storage, to compete head-to-head with Amazon S3.

Plus, Google has been launching some big data cloud apps like a service called Google Prediction API and another called BigQuery.

Still, IaaS is really stepping it up a notch for Google.

Amazon has been the 800-pound IaaS gorilla and has plenty of competition already -- Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, HP, Verizon, AT&T and others. But Google has the name and the Silicon Valley clout to become some major competition for Amazon,  particularly among Amazon's sweet spot, Web startups, and especially when Amazon suffers from very public outages, like the one last week. It took down services like Quora, Pinterest, HipChat, Heroku.

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