Is Google Getting into the Application Scalability Game?

Google is scheduled to make a big announcement tonight and TechCrunch is speculating that it’s related to BigTable — which could be used to enable a scalability solution that competes significantly with Amazon. This comes on the heels of unscheduled downtime for both Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

I talked to Emmett Shear, CTO of popular lifecasting service Justin.tv. They use EC2 to handle overflow during peak demand times for their site. He told me that Google would have to significantly undercut Amazon to justify his relocation expense, even with the recent outages.

TechCrunch says that the main competitive factors will be downtime and price, but I’ll add ease of use to that. If Google builds in an application like Scalr that comes standard with its system — or modifies and bundles the open source Scalr with its product — that would be enough to make me take a serious look at Google’s services over Amazon’s.

Update: Here’s what Google announced. This is an Amazon competitor in some ways and not in others. As Mashable put it, the big winner in all of this is Google - and the Python community.

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