The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.

The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.

However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.

Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.

Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.

Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to …

Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.

Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.

AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.

What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.

The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.

Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.

If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.

Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.

Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.

VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.

OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”

Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.

In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.

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My money’s on Google taking the GA plunge but then again the company is known for fielding “preview” products for years. Still, Urs Hölzle, SVP of technical infrastructure and Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for Google’s Cloud Platform, will host a session Wednesday afternoon on the next-generation of cloud computing which will feature “announcements and demo important new features of the Platform.” Hmmm, smells like a GA announcement to me.

A Google spokeswoman said she had nothing to share at this time but referred users to the above-mentioned session. One of the things Google is expected to do is drive use of its cloud platform via its Google Drive and Apps franchises and right on cue, Google on Monday said customers will get 15 GB of unified storage across Google Apps, Drive and Google +. According to the Google Drive blog post:

“So, instead of  having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.”

While that’s not really tripling the amount of storage for Google users, as some have reported — it actually spreads it across Google properties. But 15GB is still more than what competitive free services offer. Dropbox offers 2GB for free; Microsoft SkyDrive starts users at 7GB for free while Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Storage provide 5GB before charges apply.

GA or not, here it comes

But getting back to GCE, here’s the thing:  even some AWS cronies say that GCE is the cloud infrastructure to watch in the upcoming year given Google’s experience in scale-out computing. It would also make sense for Google to roll out a for-real load balancer service, which one AWS partner said is a huge hole in Google’s platform strategy compared to both AWS and Rackspace. Google has also been working to beef up Google App Engine capabilities, something that Snapchat co-founder Bobby Murphy will doubtless address at GigaOM’s Structure event next month. The popular Snapchat photo sharing service runs on GAE. Google telegraphed (by virtue of its Google I/O agenda) that it will add a new language to the fold for its Google App Engine Platform as a Service (PaaS). GAE now supports Java, Python, and Go. Speculation at Reddit is that PHP will get the nod . Thomas Clayburn over at InformationWeek would prefer to see Google add Node.js or JavaScript first, so we’ll see. Some also say Google needs better integrate its Cloud SQL database service into its cloud platform

Battle for public cloud workloads ratchets up

Whatever Google’s official roll-out plans, GCE is already considered a contender in a hard-fought battle for public cloud infrastructure dominance by virtue of Google’s size and expertise.  AWS, launched in 2006, has a prodigious head start, but now with Microsoft’s Windows Azure  and GCE coming on line, AWS faces two extremely well-funded and tech-savvy rivals, both of which seem  determined to carve out a healthy chunk of this market. And then there are all the OpenStack-based public cloud options from Rackspace, HP and others. It’s still very early on in the cloud deployment game so things should get very interest in the race to add services — and cut prices. It could be a very good time to be a buyer of cloud services over the next few years.

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Structure 2012: Launchpad: Jason Hoffman – Founder and CTO, Joyent, Matt Howard – General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners, Aaref Hilaly – Partner, Sequoia Capital

And the finalists are:

28msec: With offices in Palo Alto and Zurich, this startup aims to streamline the task of writing complex queries against your MongoDB database of choice.

Appscale Systems: This open-source implementation of Google App Engine (GAE) can run on a developer’s laptop, on Amazon Web Services or the Google Compute Engine.

Factor.io; This service lets developers knit together their tools of choice — for source control system, for PaaS, for testing — into a coherent, flexible workflow using an “if-this-then-that” interface.

Metrica: Metrica’s service lets folks use SQL queries against their MongoDB data, cutting the time it takes to create histograms, time series, and scatterplots and other data visualizations.

Saltstack:  This startup tool aims to speed up devops tasks including cloud orchestration or in-house server automation and infrastructure management.

Synapsify:  The company’s text search and analytics capability can help companies find the most important and relevant content for their needs.

Structure is GigaOM’s flagship conference that focuses on the future of cloud computing and internet infrastructure. For the past seven years, it’s convened the most influential speakers, buyers and vendors for two days of discussion, reporting, and debate.

Startups less than 12 months old with innovative technologies in cloud computing, internet infrastructure, or big data applications were eligible to apply for LaunchPad. The finalists will present their business plans on stage at the Structure conference in San Francisco, June 19-20. Follow @GigaOM on Twitter (#structureconf) to keep apprised of new speakers and sessions.

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Salesforce says developers using its tools can build apps that tap into troves of legacy data from existing CRM customers.

Given these developments, and rumblings that public cloud king Amazon Web Services is gearing up its mobile development push, it looks like legacy cloud giants are crowding into a space pioneered by smaller, more focused providers of mobile back-end services. (GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV has a good take on choosing an MBaaS here — subscription required.)

Who needs an MBaaS?

Salesforce.com’s pitch is that, while there are tons of useful consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps to date are still lacking.  ”It’s hard to build mobile apps that don’t just look nice but are engaging and that comes down to data. They need to be connected into your work data,” said Adam Seligman, VP of developer relations at Salesforce.com. “You have to make it easy to build the apps, the client side stuff, but you also need those hooks into corporate data.”

The new mobile packs, which support three lightweight mobile frameworks — jQuery Mobile, Backbone.js and AngularJS — should help on the ease-of-development front.

Salesforce, which backs both Force.com and Heroku Platforms as a Service (PaaS), subscribes to the school of thought that a specialized Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) — from Parse, Kinvey, Kii or Stackmob — isn’t necessary. Those smaller competitors would no doubt argue that developers need to build applications that connect to myriad applications from many sources — not just those from one company.

Rackspace wraps up mobile stack in an easily deployable package

Rackspace already hosts “tons of mobile apps” but it wants to make it easier for developers and companies to deploy and run them, CTO John Engates said. So the San Antonio, Texas-based company wrapped up a mobile-focused technology stack as a sort of prepackaged cloud for that type of user.

“We want to streamline things. We put together a stack — including Linux, MySQL, PHP, Memcached, Varnish cache in a sort of blueprint that we can deploy consistently and quickly,” he said.

This backend runs in Rackspace’s public cloud infrastructure, but on cloud servers that are dedicated to that customer. “We’re basically running a single tenant infrastructure on a multi-tenant cloud,” Engates said. “Heroku is a multi-tenant platform that lives on Amazon, a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud. We’re trying to build a single-tenant platform atop a public cloud so you can build your own deployment and spec and scale it for what you need.”

Rackspace CTO John Engates

The entire stack is open source and developers can use their SDKs of choice to develop for any mobile device. Rackspace has also signed up some partners to work with its stack: FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob and Trigger.io.

“The idea there is you use our infrastructure but then SOASTA can test your application from many perspectives — not just Rackspace — and throw a load up there to make sure it scales before you deploy it,” Engates said.

Bring on the consolidation

As more of these bigger, broader “cloud” companies add mobile development and hosting capabilities, it may be time for consolidation in the MBaaS business to kick off for real.

Forrester senior analyst Michael Facemire said consolidation in the MBaaS space, which started to happen last year with Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish, will likely heat up now that these bigger players finally see how important mobile developers are to the future of their overall businesses.

And, it will be extremely interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve vis-a-vis Google App Engine (GAE). Oracle, a power among enterprise applications, will be another company to watch.

This story was updated at 7:50 a.m. PST with analyst comment

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Google is offering a new tiered structure that includes a basic free level offering online documentation, forums and billing support; a Silver tier that adds best practices, email access to the support team for $150 per month; and a Gold level which layers 24X7 phone support and app development or architecture consultation atop all the rest starting at $400 per month. And then there’s the super-duper Platinum support that Google won’t even tell you about on its blog — you have to call in for details.

Before now, “premier” users of the Google App Engine platform as a service had access to advanced support, but users of the other products had to tap Google Groups and Stack Overflow for support. That sort of informal structure is not copacetic with most IT buyers.

The new options, announced on the Google Enterprise Blog Thursday, show that Amazon isn’t the only big cloud provider that’s trying to lure business customers into the fold. While Amazon Web Services (AWS)  is by far the leader in public cloud services, Google is one of a handful of vendors that even skeptics think can provide comparable compute and storage scale. The fact that third-party cloud providers like Cloudscaling — are adding support for Google Compute Engine APIs in addition to Amazon’s also shows that folks are looking for an alternative — or at least a backup — to AWS.

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These two patterns are described well in this recent post from Neal Ford, self-described “Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler” at systems integrator ThoughtWorks:

In my keynote, I defined two types of extensibility/programability abstractions prevalent in the development world: composable and contextual. Plug-in based architectures are excellent examples of the contextual abstraction. The plug-in API provides a plethora of data structures and other useful context developers inherit from or summon via already existing methods. But to use the API, a developer must understand what that context provides, and that understanding is sometimes expensive…The knowledge and effort required for a seemingly trivial change prevents the change from occurring, leaving the developer with a perpetually dull tool. Contextual tools aren’t bad things at all – Eclipse and IntelliJ wouldn’t exist without that approach. Contextual tools provide a huge amount of infrastructure that developers don’t have to build. Once mastered, the intricacies of Eclipse’s API provide access to enormous encapsulated power…and there’s the rub: how encapsulated?

In the late 1990’s, 4GLs were all the rage, and they exemplified the contextual approach. The built the context into the language itself: dBASE, FoxPro, Clipper, Paradox, PowerBuilder, Microsoft Access, and similar ilk all had database-inspired facilities directly in the language and tooling. Ultimately, 4GLs fell from grace because of Dietzler’s Law, which I defined in my book Productive Programmer, based on experiences by my colleague Terry Dietzler, who ran the Access projects for my employer at the time:

---

Dietzler’s Law for Access

Every Access project will eventually fail because, while 80% of what the user wants is fast and easy to create, and the next 10% is possible with difficulty, ultimately the last 10% is impossible because you can’t get far enough underneath the built-in abstractions, and users always want 100% of what they want.

---

Ultimately Dietzler’s Law killed the market for 4GLs. While they made it easy to build simple things fast, they didn’t scale to meet the demands of the real world. We all returned to general purpose languages.

Composable systems tend to consist of finer grained parts that are expected to be wired together in specific ways. Powerful exemplars of this abstraction show up in *-nix shells with the ability to chain disparate behaviors together to create new things. A famous story from 1992 illustrates just how powerful these abstractions are. Donald Knuth was asked to write a program to solve this text handling problem: read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies. He wrote a program consisting of more than ten pages of Pascal, designing (and documenting) a new algorithm along the way. Then, Doug McIlroy demonstrated a shell script that would easily fit within a Twitter post that solved the problem more simply, elegantly, and understandably (if you understand shell commands):

tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' |
tr A-Z a-z |
sort |
uniq -c |
sort -rn |
sed ${1}q

I suspect that even the designers of Unix shells are often surprised at the inventive uses developers have wrought with their simple but powerfully composable abstractions.

Ford goes on to describe the pros and cons of each approach in much more detail, but the key conclusion he reaches is, I think, critical to understanding how one should develop the tools and tool chains that drive new IT models:

These abstractions apply to tools and frameworks as well, particularly tools that must scale in their power and sophistication along with projects, like build tools. By hard-won lesson,composable build tools scale (in time, complexity, and usefulness) better than contextual ones. Contextual tools like Ant and Maven allow extension via a plug-in API, making extensions the original authors envisioned easy. However, trying to extend it in ways not designed into the API range in difficultly from hard to impossible, Dietzler’s Law Redux. This is especially true in tools where critical parts of how they function, like the ordering of tasks, is inaccessible without hacking.

Ford’s distinction is one that finally helps me articulate a key concern I’ve had with respect to Platform-as-a-Service tools for some time now. In my mind, there are primarily two classes of PaaS systems on the market today (now articulated in Ford’s terms). One class is contextual PaaS systems, in which a coding framework is provided, and code built to that framework will gain all of the benefits of the PaaS with little or no special configuration or custom automation. The other is composable PaaS, in which the majority of benefits of the PaaS are delivered as components (including operational automation) that can be assembled as needed to support different applications.

Contextual PaaS

Examples of contextual PaaS include the original releases of Google App Engine, Heroku and other “first-generation” PaaS systems that asked the developer to adhere to specific architecture and consume PaaS-specific classes in the application itself. These systems were incredibly powerful for building applications that were variations of what these frameworks were designed to do, but began to fail quickly for applications that fell outside of that domain.

The classic example is Google App Engine’s limit of 30 seconds for any backend request to complete. Great if you were building a Facebook game, but a requirement that eliminated its use for many multi-step transactional applications. Of course, there were ways to deal with those situations, as well, but they were mostly complicated and added risk to the system.

There is a parallel here with the 4GLs of the late 1990s that Ford talks about in his post. At that time, I worked for Forte Software (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999), which built a 4GL development and operations environment for distributed application development. We had a business model where we relied heavily on systems integrator partners to help our customers deliver these often sophisticated applications, and every one of those SIs eventually built a framework environment to make building complex applications “easier.”

The problem? Almost every customer that used one of these frameworks had a requirement (or many) that the framework didn’t handle well. This resulted in either the SIs scrambling to modify their frameworks to support these requirements — inevitably resulting in the framework being much less “easy” to use — or the customer bypassing the framework all together for those needs, resulting in an application that was harder to debug and operate.

Composable PaaS

Composable PaaS systems, on the other had, do much less to anticipate the architecture or functionality of the application built on it, and do much more to simplify the assembly of services, including underlying infrastructure, automation, data sources, specialized data tools, etc. I think the classic example of a composable PaaS is Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS effort from VMware that’s now part of its Pivotal Initiative spinoff. Modern versions of Heroku, Engine Yard, CloudBees and other also exhibit more of this approach than “first-generation” PaaS systems.

An old, but illustrative, Cloud Foundry diagram.

Perhaps most importantly, however, there are open source “build” tool chains being deployed directly to infrastructure services that exhibit a purely composable approach toward delivering and operating applications. Combining GitHub with Jenkins with Gradle with AWS CloudFormation and Autoscaling and so on gives a fully automated, flexible “platform” for application development and operations — everything you want from a PaaS. The catch, of course, is that you’ll need to assemble and maintain that tool chain over time (rather than letting the PaaS vendor do it for you).

Now, take the concept a step further. Imagine a deployment environment that delivers a wide variety of these individual tools and components and simplifies the process of creating tool chains on demand from them. Imagine that environment would let each development team choose from known tool chain “patterns,” but modify them as they see fit for each project. This, I believe, will be the ultimate general purpose PaaS success, not some hard-and-fast framework-based PaaS.

The concept of composable and contextual applies to a lot more than PaaS and cloud, of course. And it is important to note that it’s not an either/or choice, much like stability and resiliency. Parts of an IT environment should be composable, but there will always be elements where the relative stability of contextual extension makes more sense. And composable systems can leverage API-driven systems that themselves are designed primarily for extensibility via contextual approaches.

The key is to think about each system from the perspective of how it will be used, and to target its extensibility mechanism based on needs. Just remember, however, that choosing a contextual path will dictate a lot more about how your system could be used in the future than a composable approach would.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in the comments below, or on Twitter, where I am @jamesurquhart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Nenov Brothers Photography.

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An eagle-eyed colleague (thanks Derrick) spotted the Heroku business critical applications page on Tuesday and sure enough, it’s a new offering that goes beyond the all-in-one Heroku services that developers get when they put up their credit card for basic PaaS services. The new services include one-on-one consulting, problem support escalation all based on a custom pricing model.

An exec with a rival PaaS vendor said these new paid options are “right out of the Salesforce handbook for how to monetize cloud.” Salesforce.com bought Heroku, which was then a Ruby-oriented PaaS, three years ago. Since then Heroku has added support for several more languages.

PaaSes like Heroku, AppFog, Google App Engine, and Microsoft Azure, target developers who want to build applications without sweating all the underlying infrastructure stuff. But, to date, the category has struggled for acceptance beyond that demographic. Classic IT types are usually not wild about running company applications on someone else’s platform so they often push to move the finished application back inside the firewall. Higher level services like these might appeal to  corporate developers and their IT counterparts.

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It also announced 36 (!) new Google Compute Engine (GCE) instance types to join the four previously announced standard instance types, which were discounted 5 percent. Also new, an Object Versioning service for Cloud Storage to help stop users from mistakenly deleting or overwriting their data.

These new perks, along with expanded geographic data center coverage for more services, were unveiled on the Google Enterprise Blog on Monday. The timing of the post, coming as it does a day before Amazon kicks off its AWS: Reinvent conference is probably not a coincidence.

According to the blog, Google is:

“reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20% and introducing a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage. DRA storage provides a lower price storage option by enabling you to trade off some data availability while still offering the durability your storage demands.

I assumed that DRA took aim at Amazon’s Glacier archival storage, but a Google spokeswoman said it’s more directly competitive with Amazon’s reduced redundancy storage.

Playing David to Amazon’s Goliath

Google launched its AWS competitor GCE last June. In the past few months has revved up its Cloud SQL database service and added 3 European data centers for Google App Engine Premier users and Cloud SQL customers. Now those European data centers are also available to all GAE customers.

As big and rich as Google is, it’s got its work cut out for it: Amazon Web Services is by far the market leader in public cloud infrastructure, and it’s anyone’s guess as to who is number two.  Microsoft is making a PaaS-oriented play with Windows Azure while Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard are pushing OpenStack-based public cloud solutions.  With GCE and associated services, Google clearly hopes to parlay its webscale computing savvy in this space.

Announcements like this one should at least give pause to people who doubt that Google is serious about providing cloud infrastructure services for business users.  The kingpin in internet search aims to lead in more categories than that. But when it comes to cloud infrastructure, it’s definitely still the underdog.

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The enhancements — which also include an asynchronous replication option to speed up database writes —  are another indication that Google is taking its non-search-related infrastructure business seriously. Amazon Web Services, the king of public cloud services, certainly appears to think so. Amazon cut the price of its Relational Database Service (RDS) earlier this week, and recently sued a former AWS exec for joining Google to work on the competitive Google Compute Engine.

Google launched a limited preview beta of Cloud SQL in October 2011. Last June, it unveiled price plans for the service, which executives said was the most-requested feature in Google App Engine. Now, the company is offering a limited-time free trial of the product for those wanting to kick the tires. The six-month trial gives users access to one Cloud SQL instance with limited RAM, .5GB of database storage, and enough network and IOPs to run the instance with “reasonable performance,” according to the Cloud SQL pricing site.

Cloud SQL customers can now also opt to run their database instances in U.S. or European data centers — another first.

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Our site is currently experiencing some issues. Our team is working hard to resolve. Stay tuned.—
  (@LinkedIn) November 05, 2012

#LinkedIn is down or having service trouble, based on user reports/other sources downrightnow.com/linkedin ~a5—
downrightnow (@downrightnowtoo) November 05, 2012

There’s not a lot of (or really any) information available, so we’ll update as needed. This snafu comes on the heels of several service outages — of Google App Engine, of Amazon Web Services, in the past few weeks.

Update: as of 8:43 a.m. PDT, LinkedIn is back online.

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