Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I've been saying that these large web giants who are capable of creating scalable infrastructures need to utilize their infrastructure as a shared system.  Amazon has been slowly doing this and Yahoo has bits and pieces.  But my vision of the future is what Google has done.  Announced over at Techcrunch, we see one of the first truly scalable hosting providers around that doesn't seem to, at the moment, have a cost associated with it.

Of course, Google isn't the only company getting into this.  Sun had long ago announced their N1 Grid platform (but I think that mutated into something else since it seemed that not many customers got on to it).  And of course hosting companies already offer more expensive versions of this.  But the one thing you can say about Google doing this is that you're practically guaranteed 100% uptime.

At the moment, it seems Google is utilizing this platform for start ups and hobbyists.  And the initial round will force people into using Python (and BigTable for people's backend database needs).  It is mentioned that more languages will eventually be supported.  Hopefully, they'll support a few other databases too (Mysql and Postgres for those of us who would like to migrate our stuff over).  Also, you get the neat little benefit of integrating your applications with Google's various APIs.

Basically, this is what I said that Yahoo should've been doing long ago to make themselves competitive against Google.  With the whole Microsoft bid, Yahoo and Microsoft will simply war with each other as Google slowly becomes THE platform for the internet.  This is simply a brilliant tactic on Google's behalf to get more people to utilize the Google platform.

That all said, I do have a few complaints.  One is that Google really needs to start investigating options for enterprise support.  Google is a great benefactor for smaller groups and even mid sized companies.  For enterprise companies though, there's really no benefit at the moment to using Google.    Sadly enough, I think it's the enterprise customers who probably need such an infrastructure more than anyone because a lot of the big boys get these wannabe IT people who can't setup a lick of servers properly.  Not all companies are like this of course, but when I see some of the internals in these large companies, it's quite disgusting.  It seems these companies have so much money that they spend it on Dogbert Consulting companies who end up ripping them off and providing a solution that looks like an F-14 crashing into a house.

Also, as I mentioned the need to increase the support for languages and some backend platforms also is key.  I'd love to migrate my stuff over as I'm sure to get a nice boost in performance.  While PHP might be supported in the future, I'm not so certain about normal databases.  I already written up my own little framework for handling DB stuff and I don't think it's going to be that easy to switch over.

Regardless, this was an excellent move on Google's part.  Of course, reading my mind is always an excellent move :p, but this is what's going to continue allowing Google to become the OS/engine of the internet.  Hopefully, Yahoo drops their deal and plays catch up, otherwise Microsoft is simply going to be holding a lot of air.  The deal is bad guys, get used to it!