Dark side of the force: why Google – the only competitor of Amazon

In our cloud spaces now so many interesting stories that are more than enough for a decent sized novel trilogy. Here and evil Raja monopolist, and horses, which do not spoil the furrow, on the contrary, trying to construct a new. And confrontation brave new world and the old, but not wanting to lose ground. The main thing – there is a conflict, and thus will and related passions. Has a gun – and so you will hear the shot. The question, as usual, is who will make this shot. And today, your humble servant will explain why the shooter may well be Google.

We have already talked about the fact that almost all the significant technological world corporations try to soar to the clouds. Someone chooses flight economy, finding his narrow niche somewhere in SaaS. Others (eg, IBM or SAP) can afford business class, spending billions on a cloud infrastructure. Of course, they are counting on the maximum coverage. But the tragedy of our cloud-based novels that war has already been lost in the clouds. At least for public clouds because here the ball is ruled unchallenged Amazon.

Most recently, yours truly wrote that IBM and SAP on the market today look like the very old dog trying to learn new tricks to the glory of the corporation and their own financial well-being. However, their position is not that too stable, so they are still rocking the boat corporate stability, breaking into the competitive cloud market:

“In a public statement SAP says that the rapidly growing cloud business generates more profit and in the future will be a stable source of income. But if the business is so profitable cloud, why the company publishes a negative financial reports for two years in a row?

IBM has also not all sweet: the business associated with the supply of components, still generates a good profit, but the software and service segments visibly sagged. While IBM is also investing heavily in the cloud infrastructure: we recently reported that the company has invested $ 1.2 billion to build 15 data centers in key economic areas of the world. “

Of course, the big vendors are counting not only on the public cloud, where Amazon is hard to fight, but also to other types of infrastructure. Here, of course, the plot should be reminded of catchy evaluating public cloud market by Gartner. Not rule out that a respectable audience sick of magic quadrants, but Gartner argues that Amazon accumulates computing power exceeding five times the scale capacity remaining 14 providers in the “quadrant” of the research report.

And only one cloud provider to make such a shocking prevents loud statement capacities Amazon. And this, of course, Google. The company has not yet launched its public cloud, but is about to do it. And if Amazon can not be good. Because Google is rapidly acquires the same benefits that are at Amazon, but it has another property, inaccessible AWS. Namely – emergency, a giant bandwidth own (this is important) networks.

Also networks from Amazon really has it all. Despite the fact that the company enjoys a monopoly status, it does not stand still. That is not to introduce new services stops and lifts prices. Moreover, AWS does what monopoly altogether unusual – reduces price! And it certainly puts competitors in a very awkward position.

Gartner analyst Lydia Leong (Lydia Leong) says that most competitors AWS was not ready to invest in the competition – and they just could not understand that (clouds) is software business, where speed matters.

But Google, definitely not one of those unlucky competitors playing a completely different game. The search giant has already signed more than 75 API for developers of cloud solutions: it is even more than the Amazon. In addition, Google – is a recognized master of fast development cycles. So the problem for Amazon is not to pull the rope to service the interest of developers. The problem is that Amazon no networks.

Generally, the Achilles’ heel Amazon trying to find every single company’s competitors, because it directly butting with colossus they have no power. First, they have focused on security and performance, but over time AWS has addressed these issues. Then began the attack with other parties.

For example, recently one of the top managers of the company Pivotal James Watters (James Watters) suggested in his “Twitter” that even though Amazon and monstrous now, it is an excessive commitment to public clouds can play a cruel joke. In the sense that the technological world is evolving much faster than anyone can imagine, so multioblachny approach is likely to be optimal.

Of course, Mr. Watters may be right, since all attempts to cut, including corporate clients, under the comb public clouds can be sustained before the hybrid approach the same Pivotal. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as a colleague Barb Darrow (Barb Darrow) of Gigaom generally offers a list of 8 things that will help Google to select significant market share from Amazon. Among them and start redundant instances, and improved search capabilities and a global distribution services, and offer export / import virtual machine images.

However, I see a more adequate version of another expert , CEO and co-founder Randy Cloudscaling Bayasa (Randy Bias). He believes that the network of Google is plugged all the other competitive advantages for the belt. And this view is not unreasonable. If we trace the Google network initiatives over the past few years, it becomes clear that, in its decision of cloud search giant will use the “dark force” inaccessible Amazon. This, of course, talking about the “dark fiber” – what in English is called «dark fiber» and, in fact, is untapped channels of fiber optic communication.

During the last ten years Google (as well as Microsoft and Yahoo) to build huge network of dark fiber, which usually was leased to other service providers. But if you use all these channels for their own benefit, then Google can get terabit connection between their data centers. Than it threatens Amazon? Randy Bayas gives a great explanation:

“What Google can do with all this? Imagine being able to use the cloud, geographically distributed storage Google, without paying for links. With such a huge movement of channels of virtual machines across the network no longer seems crazy. What if your coverage area can grow to the scale of the country? All this is possible because Google has a large, quick cheap network, which is not at Amazon”.

Since such channels quickly deploy dark fiber, which has Google, it is not possible, Amazon will not be able to eliminate competition, just invest in the network infrastructure. AWS now purely structurally unable to compete with Google on the speed of data transfer between data centers. And for the cloud provider is very critical. Will the dark fiber Google compelling argument against Amazon? Find out very soon.