Google has been the biggest name in search engines for years. They have also ruled the internet with their email services and YouTube. Not too long ago they got into the social networking game with Google+. What’s next for the Internet giant? Cloud computing.

Google Drive, the company’s online storage service, is nothing new. The company rolled it out years ago, albeit under a different name, and it has performed moderately well. Today, however, they have decided to roll out their Cloud Platform services to the general public. They hope to compete with Amazon’s Web Service and Microsoft’s Azure by offering companies the ability to work in the cloud.

“People make a mistake thinking this is just a version of the computers on their desks at a lower cost. This is lots of distributed computing intelligence, not just in computers and phones, but I cars, in thermometers, everywhere. The demand will only increase,” said Greg DeMichillie, the director of Google’s public cloud platform.

They plan on offering users and businesses the same services they use to run Google. They are offering virtual machines that are reliable and scalable meaning you pay for the amount of storage and data you plan on using.

Previously this service has been offered only to select clients that were already using their Google App Engine to create popular applications. Snapchat and Rovio are two companies that utilize the Google App Engine to create and manage their applications and games. Snapchat is one of the chosen few who has been using the Google Compute Engine, their cloud computing service. According to Snapchat’s co-founder, Bobby Murphy, using the cloud service has allowed them to keep service costs down.

Google’s initial offering to the public is at a reduced rate compared to what it has been billing at. Users wanting to utilize their persistent disks will get a discount of 60% per gigabyte and the I/O fees are dropped. Those interested in the standard Compute Engine instances are seeing a 10% drop in prices.

[via New York Times, via Google Cloud Platform Blog]