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TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson posted that Google has purportedly been in press pre-briefings related to the launch of the BigTable non-relational database system developed and used by Google to back such projects as Search, Earth, Blogger, and more. The release would emerge as a direct competitor to the Amazon SimpleDB Web Service. Hendrickson mentioned that it should be expected that Google will follow up with Cloud Storage and processing solutions as well.
I think that having a bit of competition in the Cloud services market will be great for continued development of the technologies and hopefully create better services overall. Hendrickson believes Google will most likely follow the Amazon Web Services model where customers pay for the services that are used only, and nothing more. However, it might also stand to reason that Google could make some ‘beta’ services freely available with ‘pro’ service upgrades. One of the issues that I see with the current Amazon model, and if Google were to follow suit, is that entry into the cloud is targeted toward the technically savvy. I would like to see improvements in usability, apart from FireFox plugins were a greater market of users could be tapped.
All-in-all, I hope to see the rumored release come to fruition. I believe improvements to the Cloud services will only improve as a result.