Google joins enterprise cloud battle with additions to its cloud platform

Google has announced enhancements to the networking stack, a partnership with Bitnami, support for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution from Canonical and storage price drops at its Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco.

Google hosted its second cloud event under the GCP Live brand to announce new features, services, partnerships and customer wins.

The announcements came just a few days before AWS re:Invent, where its closest rival Amazon is expected to make a splash.

Earlier in October, another cloud giant, Microsoft, revealed its enterprise cloud strategy and new features on its Azure platform.

Though Google has a superior technology stack to its two rivals, it lacks the sales and marketing muscle of Amazon and Microsoft. Microsoft has a decade-long engagement with fortune 500 companies, while Amazon is aggressively moving in to win the enterprise customers. Googles focus has always been on the developers.

Google App Engine, one of the first cloud platforms announced in 2008 attracted many developers and startups. But with solid investments in Google Compute Engine, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) component, and BigQuery, a scalable database engine optimised for big data and aggressive hiring, Google is getting ready for the enterprise battle.

Todays announcements underscore the enterprise focus of Google Cloud Platform.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) became generally available in December 2013. Since then, Google has been constantly adding features to bring it on par with the competition. When compared with Amazon EC2, GCE delivers better performance. Scalr, the popular multi-cloud management platform, has published a series of benchmark reports that prove the point.

Todays announcements widen the choice of operating system (OS) supported on GCE. With the availability of Ubuntu, Google customers can now launch the most popular Linux distribution on the cloud. Canonical, the company that ships Ubuntu, claims that 85% of Linux workloads run on its distribution.

Though GCE supported Debian Linux, which is compatible with Ubuntu, getting the official distribution makes more sense. This makes GCE one of the complete IaaS offerings, with support for CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse, Ubuntu and Microsoft Windows Server.

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Google joins enterprise cloud battle with additions to its cloud platform