Google Is Its Own Secret Weapon in the Cloud

Google is wielding a new weapon against Amazon and Microsoft for cloud computing customers: itself. Google is talking more openly about companies that use its cloud business, and revealing more about its computing resources, perhaps the largest on the planet. These include disclosures about Google’s ultrafast fiber network, its big data resources, and the computers and software it has built for itself. The aim is to position Google as a company capable of handling the biggest and toughest computational exercises, lightning fast. The disclosures follow earlier moves by Google Cloud Platform, as the search company’s cloud computing business is called, to show off its data analysis capabilities. Details like the ability to pass information between Europe and the United States in less than 100 milliseconds, and a practice of fully backing up user data in nine different locations, make Google seem both cutting-edge and even bigger than most people suspected.

But the company may also be borrowing a playbook from Amazon Web Services, which in 2013 started disclosing some mind-blowing metrics about its global computing network. At an event for Google Cloud Platform -- Google’s name for the computing, storage and networking it sells to business -- Google will name the Taiwanese phone maker HTC as a customer. HTC has used Google to build a new kind of computing architecture that enables smartphone apps to update data fast and reliably to many devices at once, and look efficient even when the phones get poor reception. On June 17 a senior Google executive is expected to give what the company says will be an unprecedented look at the overall Google network design. This includes key tools that enable large-scale management of computing devices across the globe, according to one customer.