Here’s something to ponder for those who don’t see Google Compute Engine as ready for primetime: RightScale will start reselling and providing first-line support of the Google public cloud infrastructure. This is big news. RightScale prides itself on providing cross-cloud monitoring, alerts and management — for Amazon Web Services, for Rackspace, for HP Cloud and now Google Compute Engine or GCE. RightScale also works across private and hybrid cloud environments — an important consideration for financial services and other companies still wary of deploying in shared public cloud environments.
RightScale CEO Michael Crandell
“People can come to us for onboarding and for full 24 /7 support to add to [support options] that Google just offered,” RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in an interview. In fact, Google last week announced its first formalized tiered support offerings for GCE. RightScale can also help companies design and architect their applications.
“That means a company can come to us as a one stop shop and buy Google compute time as well as RightScale in one package,” Crandell said. The news comes a week after Amazon announced its own OpsWorks cloud configuration and management tool that competes with some of what RightScale offers, but Crandell said the GCE deal just continues RightScale’s strategy of supporting all the major cloud platforms.
It also means that a customer can get a single dashboard for all of its cloud deployments.
“OpsWorks is a validation that something more is needed atop these cloud infrastructure platforms.It does overlap with RightScale but it’s a single-cloud solution and our experience with customers is that they’re increasingly concerned about supporting multiple options,” he said.
It’s true that AWS is the 800-lb. gorilla in public cloud infrastructure. But it is also true that more and better competition is coming online all the time — from Rackspace, HP and other OpenStack players, as well as more cloud options from telcos and legacy hosting players.
That, plus issues with Amazon’s US-East data center farm, means more companies are evaluating multi-cloud options. While some may not see GCE, which officially launched in June, as wet behind the ears, conventional wisdom holds that Google is one of a handful of companies that can compete with AWS on sheer scale.
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