Amazon’s and Google’s Cloud Services Compared

Cloud Services - On Monday, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is expected to announce a new product that allows iPhone owners to stream music from their personal iTunes collections to their phones.

Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home.

Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player that connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone.

Google Music is the more impressive of the two: It will automatically upload your personal iTunes collection, including any playlists you’ve created, and keep it in sync. It offers free storage for 20,000 songs, about twenty times Amazon’s free capacity. It stores your recently-played songs on your phone, so you don’t have to stream them again. You can also tell it which tracks from your collection to keep permanently cached on your phone. Next >

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30+ Google Cloud Computing Services for You

Google Cloud Computing - Although I am a Microsoft.Net developer, I am also a Google fan - one who is amazed at Google’s grand vision for cloud computing! Interestingly, starting from the most fundamental layer of web, i.e., domain name system (DNS) look-up, to more sophisticated search and productivity apps, it has a significant presence everywhere. Ten years back, even savvy computer users would have found it difficult to believe that Google could offer such a wide array of efficient services to millions of consumers so cheaply, or, in some cases, even for free.

Below is a list and brief description of the Google Cloud Services that can be consumed by an individual, small office home office (SOHO), or a micro business to achieve the desired efficiency in day to day activities. I am a consumer of most of the services mentioned here.

What exactly is Google's cloud?

I borrowed the following paragraph (in olive, italics) from BusinessWeek

“It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.”

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