Google Launches an IaaS Offering

Google has unveiled a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering called Compute Engine that will compete with similar cloud computing services from Amazon and Microsoft. At the Google I/O event, the company showed off the highly scalable service running a single application across 600,000 processor cores. Google Compute will offer Linux-based virtual machines with one, two, four or eight cores each. Pricing will start at $0.145 per hour for a single core.

"We've heard from many of our customers that not having an IaaS was a barrier to adopting many of our other cloud services," said Google's Urs Hölzle. Google Compute could attract developers to Google's other cloud computing offerings, like the Google App Engine platform as a service.