The 10 Biggest Google Stories Of 2012

2. Google Competes As Cloud Infrastructure Provider

Google in June unveiled its Compute Engine, a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service that places it in competition with Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and other service providers that help businesses migrate their IT resources to the cloud.

The move was a natural play for Google, with data centers in place all over the world and a portfolio of cloud-based applications.

A key part of the cloud-based model is Google App Engine, a platform as a service to develop and host Web applications, which came out of preview in September 2011. Google Compute Engine is an extension of App Engine, he said.

Google partners have used other public cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace, but some said they would begin to shift workloads to Google Compute Engine.