RightScale hopes to change that. In a blog post Wednesday, Brian Adler, RightScale’s senior cloud architect outlines tests RightScale performed with Apica,a website testing and optimization company, that give some indication of the scope and performance to be expected from GCE.

In the testing, Apica drove traffic to a three-tier web application running on GCE with RightScale Cloud Management Platform configuring , monitoring and scaling the deployment.

From Adler’s blog post:

During the test, we scaled up to 330,000 page views per minute from 200,000 concurrent users, maxing out at 42 servers on GCE during the peak load. To put these numbers in perspective, Evernote states that its application on average receives 150M requests per day. Our testing on the GCE platform nearly doubles the load that Evernote typically experiences.

Now keep in mind that RightScale is supporting GCE — indeed reselling it. I would recommend reading the blog for the full result summary, but net, net, net, Adler said GCE exhibited “extremely high performance, low complexity, and great flexibility.”

Now here’s hoping that RightScale will run some comparative tests of GCE and Amazon Web Services to see what sort of race we’re looking at here.

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The company provides a graphical visualization of the architecture and resources used by a given application, not just a spreadsheet-like list of all the AWS instances on one page and all the databases on another, said CEO Daniel O’Prey via email. MadeiraCloud got its start in Beijing and now has an office in San Francisco.

That funding comes atop about $160,000 in seed funding, and will be used to beef up the development team and to market the product. The 11-person shop has done no marketing to date.

There are a raft of companies that provide AWS monitoring and management capabilities, but O’Prey said Madeira’s simple, self-service interface probably competes most directly with the AWS Console itself. Longer term, he sees MadeiraCloud taking on companies like RightScale and Enstratrius, just acquired by Dell.

Those are some pretty big rivals to contend with but the company most of these contenders have to watch is Amazon itself, which is rolling out more and more of its own management and monitoring tools, including OpsWorks. 

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According to a survey by Cloudyn and The Big Data Group of 450 Cloudyn customers — who all use AWS — here are the main takeaways:

• Amazon’s EC2 constitutes nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of total AWS spending.
• More than half of those EC2 users now deploy Reserved Instances as part of their deployment.
• On-demand pricing remains the number one choice for most users — it sucks up 71 percent of all their EC2 spending.
• The S3 Simple Storage Service is still the most popular storage option, although Glacier, the cheaper archival storage choice, is gaining momentum.
• The largest constituency among the Cloudyn/AWS users are those who spend less than $50,000 a year on AWS, but they account for just 4 percent of total AWS spending.
• Just 4 percent of the customers spend more than $1 million a year on AWS, accounting for 52 percent of total spending.
• Customers who spend less than $50K per year make up the largest group of AWS users, yet account for only 4 percent of total spend.

Cloudyn is one of a half dozen or so startups that have made tracking, monitoring and managing AWS infrastructure their business. Competitors include Cloudability, Newvem and RightScale. And all of them are eager to prove that they can save their customers the most money by guiding their AWS deployment choices. Of course AWS itself is not standing still, building more granular monitoring and management options — including Trusted Advisor –  over time.

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 A RightScale survey released last week said  bigger companies — those with more than 1,000 employees — are “slightly more likely” to claim  cloud adoption than their smaller brethren: 77 percent of large companies surveyed said they’re adopting cloud in some form compared to 73 percent for smaller companies. The survey reinforced what RightScale CEO Michael Crandell says all the time: most companies want to use multiple clouds to avoid over-reliance on one provider.

Of course companies like RightScale and competitors like Enstratius and Server Density, which promise  a single dashboard for multiple clouds, have a vested interest in multi-cloud being the adoption mode of choice. So do most of the cloud providers who fear a world were Amazon Web Services will become the cloud standard.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services keeps chugging along. For Amazon’s first fiscal quarter, the business category including AWS, logged $750 million in net sales, down from $769 million from the historically strong fourth quarter, but still a pretty impressive number.

Mobile cloud access is hot hot hot

Not that it’s a surprise, but mobile is big. More people tap their cloud services with their tablets and smartphones instead of (or in addition to ) their PCs. that’s why Facebook bought Parse, the mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) provider.  And why AWS is bulking up its mobile development efforts. And also why Rackspace and Salesforce.com are building up their own mobile development portfolios.

All of that activity comes after Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish. It’ s clear that expertise in mobile development platforms is a huge draw right now.

The takeaway from this activity? Expect more “acqui-hires” by big companies of mobile back end services players.

What’s up with Dell cloud?

In January, Dell said it would hold off on its public OpenStack cloud until the fourth quarter and two week sago it announced a partnership with SUSE to build out its private OpenStack implementations. Under that pact,  Dell will package up SUSE’s OpenStack implementation on Dell hardware in a sort of easy-to-plug-in cloud appliance. In the background, the battle raging around Dell’s future ownership model has had to be a distraction. That may start easing up since Blackstone, which had been mulling its own bid, reportedly dropped those plans last week.

And, in a surprise appearance at the annual Silverlake Management conference in New York, company founder and CEO Michael Dell said IT security and cloud computing are key customer pushes for the company going forward — and  defended the much-maligned PC business in a world obsessed with smartphones, according to Bloomberg News. 

Mr. Dell is partnering with Silverlake to take his company private in a deal valued at about $24.4 billion when it was announced in January.  Some shareholders, including Southeastern Asset Management, which owns about 8.4 percent of Dell shares, and Carl Icahn characterized that as a sweetheart deal that undervalues the company.

There’ll be lots of cloud infrastructure talk, including on mobility, at Structure 2013 in San Francisco June 19-20. Please join us.

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The interesting area is the rise in the provisioning of resources on multiple clouds, which includes private-public combinations as well as multiple public clouds. Of the more than three quarters of larger companies that are adopting clouds, 77 percent of those are deploying across multiple clouds. Last year’s survey, which did not break out companies by size, found that 68 percent had deployments spanning more than one cloud.

It’s great news for RightScale, which helps Zynga and other companies keep track of all their clouds from a single pane of glass. It also bodes well for competitors, such as Enstratius (formerly named enStratus) and Server Density.

Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, speaks at the RightScale Compute conference in San Francisco on April 26

At a meeting with reporters and representatives of RightScale customers, RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said that although he doesn’t have survey data to back up the assertion, he believes the use of multiple clouds has been steadily rising. “I think it (multi-cloud use) was lower (before the first survey),” Crandell said. “That’s my gut instinct.” Whether it’s to save money, to have different applications running on different hardware or to focus on core competencies, companies have a variety of motivations to try running their operations on clouds.

Still, compliance with regulations and concerns about security keep some companies from trying out the public clouds or, in some cases, even private clouds. Crandell said it can come down to legal issues. Businesses might not want to risk putting their own customers at risk of data breaches. “It’s their attorneys who are dealing with that as well as ours,” Crandell said, describing the thinking of some businesses.

Even with those conditions, it does seem that cloud and multi-cloud adoption will keep going up, and that means full speed ahead for management companies such as RightScale.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Rechitan Sorin.

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The London-based company made its bones by offering customers — which include Electronic Arts, Intel and The New York Times — an easy way to monitor their Amazon Web Services and Rackspace workloads. In that arena it competed with open-source tools like Nagios, Cacti and commercial offerings like Scoutapp and Cloudkick, which Rackspace purchased in 2009.

Now, it’s moving into the more rarefied air of multi-cloud monitoring services where RightScale, Santa Barbara, Calif. reigns as a big, entrenched competitor.

Server Density, which now has 13 employees, put Server Density v2 in private beta a few weeks back and will start rolling it our more broadly in coming weeks, co-founder and CEO David Mytton said.

RightScale has its vulnerabilities, in Mytton’s view, chief among them what he terms its “awful UI” and pricing that he says is more enterprise-y than you might expect for a cloud focused company. (For the record, RightScale offers a 60-day free trial and then pricing starts at $500 per month for one account with 5 users.)

Server Density monitors an unlimited number of servers for $10 per month and then will charge per server when the user enables additional capabilities.  Its route to market is bottoms-up — sysadmins sick of dealing with multiple cloud dashboards — from AWS and Rackspace —  typically use their credit cards to check out Server Density and its use often spreads to whole departments, Mytton said.

“We’ve spent the past year taking feedback from our existing monitoring customers and are adding cloud provisioning which is our first step into infrastructure management — we provide an abstraction layer for web and mobile that lets you control your Rackspace and Amazon instances without having to use those APIs,” he said.

Of course, RightScale isn’t standing still. The company builds and buys additional capabilities as needed.  And it works with lots of clouds including Google Compute Engine in addition to AWS and Rackspace.

Server Density will also evaluate adding more clouds as it grows, but for now AWS and Rackspace are the two huge opportunities, Mytton said.

In some ways, this upstart and the company it seeks to unseat, also have to face the fact that the cloud providers themselves are adding more monitoring and management tools themselves. AWS Opsworks is an example.  Then the argument is that most  companies don’t want to lock into one cloud and will need a tool set to monitor and manage multiple cloud infrastructure providers.

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Scalr is clearly a big fan, but even if you don’t buy its rather impressive report card, there are other reasons that Google Compute Engine should be considered the biggest potential rival to AWS.

Google knows from scale

Even Google bashers will concede that the company understands massive scale. It has the data center fire power; it has the software tools to harness that power; and it has a deep engineering bench that includes several key hires from — you guessed it — AWS. A quick LinkedIn search shows some of these hires, but omits many. One of those is Sunil James, who worked on the AWS Virtual Private Cloud and Direct Connect and who now heads up networking services and technologies for the Google Cloud Platform.

Multi-cloud strategies demand a back-up cloud

As big and great as AWS is, most existing and potential business customers will not lock into a single cloud provider. They are still bruised from the current generation of vendor lock in. On the other hand, they can’t afford to support too many. “You can only make so many bets, and it’s clear that Google is in this public cloud game to stay,” said one vendor exec who would not be named because his company does business with Amazon.

Companies who made early bets on GCE are Cloudscaling, the OpenStack player which said last fall it will support both the AWS and GCE APIs, and RightScale, a pioneer in cloud management and monitoring that signed up as GCE’s first reseller in February.

Google is serious about GCE

Let’s face it: Google does have a bit of a credibility problem for launching, then deep-sixing services. (Hello, er, goodbye Google Reader.) But no one can seriously doubt that GCE is a priority.

“This is no skunkworks. This is not some little company they acquired. There’s a big team on the engineering side and if you look at the data center footprint, the fiber, the tech expertise, the internal platform and tools, they are serious about this,” said the vendor exec.

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver, a Boston startup, said the time is ripe for an AWS contender to surface. The industry, he said, appears to be waiting for someone — Google? Rackspace? Someone else? to challenge AWS.

“Clearly, Google’s strategy is to differentiate on performance (overall and consistency thereof,)” he said via email. “Our first test suggests that they are delivering on that promise … so far,” he noted. He also pointed out that GCE’s admin console UI needs work and that less than a year in, there are limited services and features compared to AWS. A new Stackdriver blog details its first impressions of GCE.

The big question is how performance will hold up when the service actually leaves beta and opens up to the real world. There are reportedly tens of thousands of users queued up and ready to jump in when that happens. “Sure it feels fast with my six instances in limited preview. How will it feel when I am sharing with the rest of the world? And what has Google done to limit the host, network and API contention that plague large AWS customers?” Belcher asked.

Lack of legacy baggage helps GCE

Microsoft Windows Azure is paying the price now for Microsoft’s huge installed base of Windows and .NET legacy applications. While it’s done a good job incorporating support for open-source technologies under the Azure umbrella, that support is not on par with Windows, at least when you ask developers outside the .NET world.  Microsoft remains”weighted down by its Windows and Office mentality,” said one vendor who weighed supporting Azure but decided against it. “There are aspects of Azure that are technically superior but then their APIs are atrocious,” he said.

On the other hand …

Skeptics will always wonder if Google’s heart is in anything other than internet search and advertising. And, Google, like AWS is not particularly known for working well with others in the partner community.

The other issue is that while Google Apps has gained traction in business accounts — largely because it’s so much cheaper than Microsoft Office —  one long-time Google watcher wonders if it will ever “get its enterprise act together.”  In his view, Google Enterprise Search appliance never got traction so Google has to prove its credibility outside internet search.

Going forward, Google will also have to offer a more comprehensive menu of services. And, most importantly, it will have to bring more enterprise workloads on board so all of those companies looking for an AWS backup (or alternative) can really put GCE through its paces.

We will be talking about public and private cloud adoption, gating factors to that adoption, and other hot-button topics at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco in June.

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RightScale maintains that its long history of monitoring AWS and other cloud activities for customers gives it an advantage here. It tracks price changes across the major clouds —  Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace and offers a free service to folks wanting to tap into that knowledge.

“We track 11,000 or so cloud prices across six clouds. People can use that data to help forecast their cloud costs into the future and tweak the deployments they already have,” said Kim Weins, VP of marketing for RightScale.

RightScale says there have been 29 price changes across AWS, GCE, Azure and Rackspace Cloud over the past 14 months, and, frankly, that number seems low to me. In November alone, there were something like six cloud storage price cuts between AWS, Google and Microsoft.

And that’s what RightScale will continue to do, pressing into a service technology it acquired last year with its acquisition of ShopForCloud, which it renamed PlanForCloud.

In one respect, RightScale is in a good spot because it can claim expertise across the major clouds. Last year it said two-thirds of its customers ran multiple clouds and newer data is tracking the same way, Weins said.  As more business-capable cloud services come out of the OpenStack crowd — Rackspace, HP, IBM, Cloudscaling and others, being able to tap into multiple cloud data and aggregate it on one dashboard could be a draw.

On the other hand, AWS remains by far the largest cloud provider and as we have seen over the past year, Amazon is rolling out more Rightscale-like services of its own, notably OpsWorks.

In other words, hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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RightScale CEO Michael Crandell

“People can come to us for onboarding and for full 24 /7 support to add to [support options] that Google just offered,” RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in an interview. In fact, Google last week announced its first formalized tiered support offerings for GCE. RightScale can also help companies design and architect their applications.

“That means a company can come to us as a one stop shop and buy Google compute time as well as RightScale in one package,” Crandell said. The news comes a week after Amazon announced its own OpsWorks cloud configuration and management tool that competes with some of what RightScale offers, but Crandell said the GCE deal just continues RightScale’s strategy of supporting all the major cloud platforms.

It also means that a customer can get a single dashboard for all of its cloud deployments.

“OpsWorks is a validation that something more is needed atop these cloud infrastructure platforms.It does overlap with RightScale but it’s a single-cloud solution and our experience with customers is that they’re increasingly concerned about supporting multiple options,” he said.

It’s true that AWS is the 800-lb. gorilla in public cloud infrastructure. But it is also true that more and better competition is coming online all the time — from Rackspace, HP and other OpenStack players, as well as more cloud options from telcos and legacy hosting players.

That, plus issues with Amazon’s US-East data center farm, means more companies are evaluating multi-cloud options. While some may see GCE, which officially launched in June, as wet behind the ears, conventional wisdom holds that Google is one of a handful of companies that can compete with AWS on sheer scale.

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The service, based on technology Amazon acquired when it bought Peritor last year,  lets AWS users configure and manage their applications more easily without resorting to custom tools. According to Amazon, OpsWorks — which uses the OpsCode Chef framework — handles rollback, patch management, auto scaling and auto healing.

The service — free to users of EC2 and other AWS services — takes on some of the tasks traditionally done using Scalr, Rundeck or Opscode Chef or Puppet (see disclosure.) Although most of those other tools do higher level work than what OpsWorks promises. And, as one GigaOM reader commented, OpsWorks also takes aim at some of the tasks that Rightscale takes care of for AWS customers.

But Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver,a Boston-based startup that works with AWS, said it is actually a boon to both customers and many partners in the Amazon ecosystem. “Customers have struggled since the birth of AWS to come up with a reasonable way of organizing their resources. Everyone does it differently,” he said.

“Because the taxonomy of OpsWorks is available by API  customers can create dashboards and policies to manage their resources. Because of that API, we literally woke up this morning and supported OpsWorks,” he added. There’s more here on the Stackdriver blog.

According to Amazon’s press statement OpsWorks Amazon can:

• Create a Stack. A stack contains the set of Amazon EC2 instances and instance blueprints, called layers, used to launch and manage these instances (e.g., all the PHP servers and the MySQL database used for your production web application). Apps, user permissions, and resources are scoped and controlled in the context of the stack.
• Define the layers of your stack. A layer defines how to set up and configure a set of instances and related resources such as volumes and Elastic IP addresses. AWS OpsWorks includes layers for common technologies such as Ruby, PHP, HAProxy, Memcached, and MySQL, and makes it easy to extend existing layers or create custom layers. Lifecycle events can be used to trigger Chef recipes on each instance to perform specific configuration tasks. For example, the deploy event could trigger a script to create a database table for a new app.
• Assign instances to your layers.Create instances in configurations you choose, including instance size, Availability Zone, volume creation and RAID configuration, EIP, security group, and operating system. Start your instances, or apply them to auto scaling groups.
• Define and deploy your apps. To define an app, tell AWS OpsWorks where to find your code and specify additional deployment tasks, such as database configuration. AWS OpsWorks supports a variety of repositories such as Git, SVN, HTTP, and Amazon S3. When you deploy the app, AWS OpsWorks will pull code from your repository, place it on the instances, and run the specified deployment tasks so that your application is properly configured. Afterwards, you can view your app’s deployment logs to review the deployment steps, verify its functionality, and debug any issues.

For a brief intro to OpsWorks, here’s the Amazon video.

The addition of OpsWorks to the AWS repertoire shows how Amazon is serious about adding higher-level and more intricate services to its stack as it hopes to lure more enterprise accounts. Those additions can be a double edged sword — they add functionality that many customers want but are getting from open-source and third-party toolsets. What’s good for AWS and some of its customers is definitely not a plus for some AWS partners.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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