[chuhnk]

Having beta tested the Google Compute Engine while working at Google, I have only good things to say about it. They've come along way in an extremely short space of time and knowing what they have internally, this is just the beginning. They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost.

[threeseed]

> They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost.

Most likely. But those aren't the only things developers care about when looking for PAAS.

There is that whole "Platform" aspect. And AWS destroys Google in this respect. It has far more offerings and more importantly it has a very large ecosystem of companies who will be in the same data centre who you can leverage e.g. Iron.io.

[toomuchtodo]

Don't forget support. I know I can get decent AWS support if I pay Amazon. Google? HAH!

[bgoldy]

We actually have come a long way in Support and now offer affordable paid support options and some very high end packages for mission critical operations. Check out https://cloud.google.com/support/packages where we have the details.

-Brian Head of Marketing, Google Cloud Platform

[tracker1]

I know these are entirely different departments, and likely have little correlation to reality.. but google has a worse track record than microsoft for supporting some of their most popular products (iGoogle, Reader, free apps account levels)... it's hard for me to trust services to be around in the long run (this is probably more of an emotional bias here).

I know that there are api compatible systems out there, and one could roll your own (so to speak), it will get very interesting over time. I'm also curious what happens in the application space for docker.io based cloud offerings in the next year.

[chuhnk]

Thanks for mentioning that. Google will probably do something unique with support as the demand increases. To the other comments above; yes aws has a wider range of services available at the moment but they've been at this publicly since 2006. There are services within Google used by devs, managers, etc that blow away anything amazon has. There's a projected timeline for the release of a great deal additions to GCE. 2014-2016 will be game changing in the cloud industry.