Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O

Btw, Google already has a BlobStore API which is in beta. Maybe they're releasing it at the conf. If so, not big news. It's the exact same price as Amazon and has a clunkier API (IMHO).<p>Competition is sorely needed in this space. I hope Google undercuts Amazon pricing. IIRC, Amazon has maintained the 15c per GB-Month pricing for 4+ years. I would have expected them to pass along at least some of the price reductions of bare HDDs.<p>I'm hoping for something like the $5 for 20 gig they offer for photos. I'll keep dreaming. :)

This can only be good. More competition will probably mean better prices, more features, higher reliability and more innovation. And if someone can compete with Amazon on this, it's certainly Google.

I hope the bit about easy migration from S3 means a compatible API, just change the base URL. Would that make the S3 API the de facto standard for cloud storage APIs?

"Google To Buy Dropbox For An Undisclosed Amount" does not sound far-fetched to me given this announcement. From a strategic viewpoint it makes perfect sense.<p>It would provide their new storage service with the necessary intial momentum at the expense of S3.

Now what needs to happen is Heroku seamlessly using Google Storage concurrently with S3.

I hope they get the interface right this time. App Engine has an awkward interface that's not nearly as flexible and powerful as EC2.

From a business WHY are they doing this?<p>The vast majority of their revenue comes from selling advertising on Google OWNED sites eg google.com:<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-had-any-doubts-about-where-googles-revenue-comes-from-2010-2" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...</a><p>Google is the industry leader at monetizing search, but nothing else they do comes close.<p>I am truly curious - is the reason that Google keeps investing time and money in "line-extension" businesses to distract competitors, keep the antitrust police away, what?

Interesting! It had just occurred to me that I could write a competitor to s3 using app engine and blobstore. I guess someone at Google realized that too.

I'm excited about this, especially the possibility of including other services (like video encoding).

That is great. I'll alternate backups between S3 and GS.

This reminds me of "Googlezon": <a href="http://robinsloan.com/epic/" rel="nofollow">http://robinsloan.com/epic/</a>

The previous time there were rumours about Google Storage, we've got AppEngine instead. Hm, what we've get how?...