The Google I/O event is currently underway at San Francisco and I would have loved to be there. However, the event tickets sold out very fast and was not quick enough .
In any case several interesting announcements have been made so far like the availability chrome browser for Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad, the Nexus 7 tablet, the Nexus Q Media Player and the latest and greatest update to the Android OS code named Jelly Bean (Android 4.1). However, the most interesting announcement for me was that of the Google Compute Engine. You can read more about it here. Its not public yet and is still in a preview stage.
Up until the announcement of the compute engine, the only Google based cloud platform that allowed running custom applications on the cloud was the Google App Engine. But the App Engine was a black box. It allowed you to build “business applications”and websites using Java and Python but did not give access to the underlying software or hardware infrastructure that executed these applications. Google promised that you don’t have to worry about issues like scaling or other infrastructure issues you encounter typically for web based or network based applications. If you were OK with this lack of control, the GAE was an ideal platform for development.
With Google Compute Engine, Google tries to please the control freaks among us who pray at the alter of cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. With the compute engine Google promises greater control on scaling, performance and access to large compute clusters on Google’s Infratructure. It mainly offers access to Linux based operating systems. It also offers command-line tool as well as a rich REST based API to manage this compute infrastructure. If you have not done so already, I would suggest that you sign up for access to the limited preview of the Google Compute Engine.
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