Google’s new compute cloud offers a crisp and clean way to spin up Linux instances and easily tap other Google APIs
Credit: Shutterstock / Jay Fog
You’re sitting around. You have some computing to do. Ten years ago, you would ask your boss to buy a rack or two of computers to churn through the data. Today, you just call up the cloud and rent the systems by the minute. This is the market that Google is now chasing by packaging up time on its racks of machines and calling it the Google Compute Engine.
Google took its sweet time entering this corner of the cloud. While Amazon, Rackspace, and others started off with pay-as-you-go Linux boxes and other “infrastructure” services, Google began with the Google App Engine, a nice stack of Python that held your hand and did much of the work for you. Now Google is heading in the more general direction and renting raw machines too. The standard distro …