Last week, Google hosted their inaugural cloud conference called Google Cloud Platform Next in San Francisco. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Bluemix and Microsoft Azure. If you were to rattle off the names of Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, and ask any non-technical person to pick who is winning the cloud war…I imagine no one would pick Amazon.
Yet, Amazon is the correct answer. AWS is the gold standard when it comes to cloud computing and they have a large lead since they essentially created the market around 10 years ago. The reality is it didn’t have to be that way. Google has the intellectual knowledge and the technical ability, when you think of Big Data processing you can thank Google. The technology behind Hadoop – Google File System and MapReduce both originated at Google. However, Google didn’t realize the full market potential for cloud computing services like Amazon did.
Now Google is playing catch-up, last year it hired Diane Green to lead the GCP team. Diane Green was the co-founder of VMware, whose software allowed corporate data centers to create “virtual machines”, which is really the heart of any cloud computing platform.
The GCP Next conference was to let the world know that Google has arrived and are a force to be reckoned with. It’s clear Google is going after large enterprise customers which is a very different sales strategy then how AWS grew. AWS initially focused on developers and startups to grow their business and added features as their core audience requested them.
I believe Google has a shot at being #2 but they really need to start rolling out features on an hourly basis! That’s no exaggeration, there are days where AWS will launch 10-15 features which is just unheard of for the scale at which AWS operates.
Anyways, to prove my technical street cred, below is a tutorial I put together to show how to install WordPress on GCP:
celestri - virtual home of manish jain 