This chapter discusses the basics of Cloud Computing and its various incarnations: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. After a quick presentation of the Google platform (Part 2 is entirely devoted to this subject) the main hosting solutions are presented together with the various categories of application architecture. The chapter concludes with an impact analysis of Cloud Computing on the future of the IS. A short description of Google's enterprise services is provided as well.
Google is a relatively recent player in the IT world. The company was founded in 1998 by two students from Stanford: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is obviously best known for its ubiquitous search engine that left nearly all its competitors far behind (who remembers Infoseek or Altavista today?), which allowed for an exponential growth of the company through online advertising. Google is also recognized for its extremely strong innovation policy, which allows the company to continuously offer new features.
Here are a few figures that give an idea of the weight of Google in today's IT world:
- 25,000 employees, half of whom perform R&D activities; this is one of the largest in the IT world
- More than 3 million servers (estimation from Gartner)
- 1 billion search requests every day.
- 1.7 billion users of its search engine around the world
- The amount of information contained in the Library of the Congress is indexed every 4 hours
The unique position of Google in the search engine market is what makes the company a giant, regarding both the number of its users as well as the size of its data center infrastructure which, at this point, is already the largest in the world. The obvious question is: why should a player in mainstream computing like Google invest so heavily in the market of enterprise computing?
The answer to the previous question is actually quite simple: considering the huge infrastructure that Google has set up for its search engine, you quickly realize that its hardware and software resources are extremely well consolidated and that this allows Google to offer the lowest costs for processing and storing data. This particular position, combined with an aggressive innovation policy, makes it possible for Google to enter new markets with both extremely low prices and original solutions that their competitors will have a hard time matching in the foreseeable future.