GoogleGazer

While the air is thinner up in the clouds, airspace in the Internet Cloud is definitely getting more crowded. As cloud computing races towards becoming mainstream (if it’s not already), and more and more folks want to become the Levi’s of Cloud Computing, supplying Cloud Computing infrastructure to all the would-be enterprises and entrepreneurs prospectors staking claims for their piece of this new land grab, the big guys are all buying chips at the high-stakes Poker table.

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was the first to realize the potential for offering rent-a-cloud service on the massive Cloud that Amazon maintains. Its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, provides scalability within minutes on a pay-as-you-go basis, as addition to its Amazon Simple Storage Service for renting storage space in the Cloud. Recently, In a series of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon’s one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.

Amazon’s rent-a-cloud service was quickly followed, as we reported earlier, by Google. Then, in October 2007, Google and IBM announced a collaberation with major universities UW (the University of Washington), Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland to further the development of cloud computing technology. Not to be outdone, HP, Intel and Yahoo jumped on the band wagon and are are teaming up with some lesser ranked groups, the most prominent of whom are the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, according to a report in eWeek and its related Google Watch blog.

Earlier, we reported that Adobe’s AIR may pose competition to Google in this space. VMware too is now focusing on virtualization in the Cloud.

Cloud Computing, as powerful as it is, is still very young and immature. It presents development challenges not present with classical software development. We, the consumers can therefore expect to be the ultimate beneficiaries of the research coming out of these competing development efforts. May the best team win!

A word to wise would-be developers of Cloud Computing infrastructure (not applicable to software tool developers supporting Cloud Computing): When the GoogleGazer observes all the big players converging at the high-stakes Poker table, he heads off to the $2 Blackjack tables, where he can hope to compete. You have been duly warned.

Filed under: Adobe AIR, Amazon, Cloud Computing, Google, Microsoft, VMware, Yahoo Tagged: | Adobe AIR, AEC2. Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Blackjack, Carnegie-Mellon University, Cloud Computing, GoogleGazer, high stakes Poker, IDA, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one-click, rent-a-cloud, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, University of Washington, VMware