Microsoft announced their first serious, developer-oriented cloud computing service yesterday, Microsoft SQL Data Services. This particular service doesn’t appear to compete directly with Amazon S3, but does appear very similar to another Amazon Web Service – Amazon SimpleDB.
There have been many rumors over the past few months about Microsoft making a serious push into cloud computing, an area which thus far has been pioneered (at least on a wide scale) by Amazon. It will be interesting to see where they go from here. Launching a bulk data hosting service or a virtual hosting service to compete with Amazon S3 and EC2 seems like a strong possibility. Beyond Microsoft, I think we’ll see other large companies get into this market including Google and Sun (which already has the Network.com computing service). All this competition can only be a good thing for cloud computing customers such as Jungle Disk and our users. Competition will drive down prices and start a functionality race as each service tries to attract developers.
It’s worth noting that although Jungle Disk only works with Amazon S3 today, we’ve designed the software to be flexible enough to allow us to add additional storage providers in the future if there is customer demand. Right now there really aren’t any viable competitors to Amazon S3, but it looks like that is going to change as the major Internet companies slowly transition from being simple web sites to Internet infrastructure utilities. While the media is focused on the “social” revolution changing the face of the web through sites like MySpace and Facebook, the real revolution is happening behind the scenes as the Internet changes from being a global communication platform to a global computing platform.
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