That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has opened up cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine to more customers while also lowering prices and adding several new features, the company said today in a blog post.

Amazon currently holds the title for largest infrastructure-as-a-service provider with Amazon Web Services, with Rackspace firmly in second place. But Google has a lot of cash and a lot of servers, both of which could help it force its way into the infrastructure-as-a-service sector — much like Microsoft is doing with Azure.

Google announced Compute Engine back in June, but it has limited its widespread availability so far. Today’s announcement makes it so any developer who buys Google’s $400 per month gold support package will now have access to it.

The search giant also lowered all Compute Engine pricing by 4 percent. In the United States, pricing starts at $0.132 per hour for its smallest virtual machine and tops out at $1.221 per hour its most powerful high-memory virtual machine. (Prices in Europe are a bit higher.)

Google says that it has also added the following features to Compute Engine:

• The option to boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system, persistent disk snapshots, the capability to checkpoint and restore the contents of network resident persistent disks on demand, and the capability to attach and detach persistent disks from running instances.

• An improved administration console, the Google Cloud Console (preview), which allows you to administer all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.

• Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-CPU configurations), with 16 new instance types.

• Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our gcutil command line tool.

• An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running instances (which enables dynamic reconfiguration scenarios).

Clouds photo via Nicholas_T/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Compute Engine has added 36 server instances to its cloud catalog and cut prices by 5 percent in a bid to compete with Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud services in the world.

It’s still early days for Google Compute Engine, which has received the bulk of its signups and support from Silicon Valley tech startups.

We’re sure incumbent players in the space such as Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure have been paying close attention as Google slowly reveals more details about the service.

Compute Engine provides virtual machines developers can use for hosting and storage. Google has data centers from around the world, so it makes sense to use them as sites to store data. The cloud infrastructure is considered to be reliable for businesses as it’s made of the same data center servers that power Google search.

“Google certainly has established themselves as one of the few companies in the world with an army of developers that can build massive-scale solutions at low cost and a network of data centers to host it at,” said Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst Andrew Reichman in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Reichman predicted that a three-way battle of de facto standards would eventually erupt between “Amazon, Openstack/Rackspace/HP/Dell/IBM, and Google.”

Google’s previous entry level virtual server (3.75 GB of RAM and 420 GB of disk space) was priced at $0.145 an hour. It’s now $0.138 an hour. With the price reductions, cloud storage that was $0.12 for the first terabyte is now 20 percent to $0.095 per terabyte.

Google has been slowing building more muscle behind Compute Engine, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering since it was first announced during Google I/0 in June, 2012. Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions, told InformationWeek that the service will remain a limited preview for the time being.

Top image of Google IO Compute Engine demo // Sean Ludwig, VentureBeat 

Compute Engine is the newest kid on Google’s block of cloud products. It sits in the same suite as App Engine, Big Query, and other products that allow Google to make money on what it does best: big, hairy server/data center work.

We just sat down for a lovely chat with Urs Hölzle (pictured), Google’s senior vice president of infrastructure, who presented Compute Engine to a thrilled audience of developers today at Google I/O.

First things first, we asked him how Compute Engine fits into Google’s other cloud offerings.

“What’s the difference between a platform and an infrastructure? Nobody knows,” Hölzle quipped, quickly adding that while App Engine and Big Query allow developers a lot of convenience, Compute Engine allows them to get closer to the metal, meaning they can see better performance for large-scale computational tasks.

For example, in his onstage demo, Hölzle showed Compute Engine crunching human genome data to find associations between chromosomes. It took Compute Engine seconds or fractions of a second to perform tasks that used to take 10 minutes. “That’s what happens when you have 10,000 cores working on it…. There are 771,886 cores available to the app right now,” he said during the demo.

“That is how infrastructure as a service is supposed to work.”

In our offstage talk, he said of that particular party trick, “No one’s demonstrated anything even remotely close to what we showed in our live demo today. That speaks for the quality of the underlying infrastructure…. Performance was the first thing our beta customers commented on.”

He continued to say that at least some of that performance is due to the fact that the developers are much closer to the hardware. Part of Compute Engine is that the developer has the duty or ability, depending on your perspective, of certain administrative tasks not within the grasp of an App Engine customer.

“These other things [Google's other cloud services] are more like services,” Hölzle said. “We do a lot of the [sysadmin] work for you…. It’s not like one or the other is better, they’re just different tools.”

Compute Engine, while it is intended for use by customers with some experience in cloud computing, is well suited to any number of tasks. “Infrastructure, because it is so low level, there’s really no intrinsic bias toward one workload or another,” Hölzle said.

Right now, Compute Engine is being used for big-data crunching, large-scale computations, like video transcoding, but Hölzle said the service is valuable for anyone needing a high level of performance, scale, and consistency.

He also said Compute Engine’s cost savings were a draw. “We have seen beta customers that spent up to 50 percent less than [with] their equivalent setup with another cloud provider,” he said.

These are big claims to make, and claims that any cloud services provider would make: We’re big. We’re stable. We’re cheap.

But Hölzle, who was one of the search giant’s first ten employees, backs up Google’s particular claims with an interesting anecdote.

“Search is such a computationally intensive job,” he said. “From the beginning, the biggest problem in the first two years at Google was scale…. When I started, [Google web search] was university code. A search at noon on a Monday would not work.”

So his first task at Google was really figuring out how to build an infrastructure that would allow Google’s nascent web search service to scale.

“We also had to deal with cost,” he said. “Our monetization back then was not high, and a lot of our products are free. If you don’t make sure that the infrastructure costs a fraction of the low revenue per user, you’re in trouble.

“It’s natural, it’s easy for us to do well for an external offering because we are familiar with these topics from the last century…. This is the externalization of what we’ve been working on for a long time.”

Google Compute Engine is available now for a limited audience. Currently, Google is seeking customers that would need to use 100 or more virtual machines. General availability will roll out, well, later, “depending on how well it’s going,” Hölzle said.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google will soon take on Amazon, Rackspace, and more with its new Compute Engine infrastructure-as-a-service, a new product it introduced today at its annual Google I/O conference.

With Google’s incredible stash of data centers around the world, it makes sense to use some of those data centers to host and store sites and data. It could be an incredibly disruptive product to Amazon Web Services, the reigning king of public cloud infrastructure. Other players like Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Microsoft’s Azure will also be paying close attention as Google reveals more details about the upcoming service.

Compute Engine will provide Linux virtual machines that app developers and businesses can use for hosting, storage, and computational power. For example, as you can see in the photo below, the company spun up an instance with more than 600,000 cores to fire up an app called Genome Explorer from the Institute for Systems Biology.

The service starts today in “limited preview.” Pricing is as follows:

Update: I asked Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst Andrew Reichman for some instant analysis of Google’s big announcement. He writes:

Google certainly has established themselves as one of the few companies in the world with an army of developers that can build massive-scale solutions at low cost and a network of data centers to host it at. This is a huge economic advantage over a firm that intends to buy commercial products and use facilities owned by third parties. Can they execute?

Most of what Google has designed so far has been advertising-driven free services with limited SLAs. That makes IaaS a very different business than their traditional core, but they have the money and the resources to give it a run if they are willing to invest heavily to make their offerings enterprise-class. If I’m Amazon, I’m not quaking in my boots as I have a big lead, but if I’m IBM, HP, or Dell, I’m even more anxious about my ability to get something going in this space, and worried that I might just get leapfrogged.

I’d say that we’re now likely to see a three-way battle of de facto standards between Amazon, Openstack/Rackspace/HP/Dell/IBM, and Google. [There] could be other entrants emerging, but I’d guess that it will settle into a relatively small number of options in time.