Last night, Google made one of the more significant product announcements in company history, entering the realm of “cloud computing” – essentially allowing any developer to utilize the infrastructure that Google has spent billions of dollars building over the past decade.
Of course, the immediate reaction of many was that this is a direct threat to Amazon, who through its S3 service, is offering a similar service based on the economies of scale they have acquired through building out their own global infrastructure. However, as Mark pointed out, there are significant differences between S3 and Google App Engine – namely, that the latter wants you to run your Web service completely on Google while S3 lets you choose what pieces of it you want to put “in the cloud.”
