Amazon strikes back, launching speedy solid-state block storage one day after Google
If you're looking for more proof that Google's public cloud is a competitive threat to market leader Amazon Web Services, consider this. — Just a day after Google announced that it would back up its …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest beat in a chase Google began years ago: its 2011 storage and App Engine push was explicitly framed as an attack on AWS, and by 2012 Gigaom reported both Google and Microsoft building clouds aimed squarely at Amazon. What changed with this launch is the tempo — Amazon answered Google's solid-state block storage announcement within a single day.
The story traveled unusually wide for an infrastructure product note: VentureBeat, eWeek, Computerworld, The Register, Gigaom, TechCrunch and AWS's own channels all carried it on or about June 17, 2014 — evidence that the market reads these back-and-forth launches as signals in the broader AWS-versus-Google contest rather than routine feature news.
First-order effects
- AWS customers gain solid-state-backed block storage immediately, closing a capability gap Google had opened with its own announcement the day before.
- Google's public cloud gets validated as more than a niche challenger — fast enough to force the market leader into a next-day response.
Second-order effects
- Feature-parity pressure now operates on a days-long cycle instead of quarters, forcing both vendors to keep storage performance roadmaps permanently warmed up and squeezing slower rivals like Microsoft to respond in kind.
- With SSD-backed block storage available from both hyperscalers, latency-sensitive workloads become portable between the two platforms, weakening AWS's historical lock-in advantage.
Third-order effects
- If next-day counter-launches become the norm, raw feature differentiation stops being a durable moat in commodity infrastructure, shifting competitive weight toward pricing, ecosystem services, and enterprise contracts.
- A credible two-horse race in block storage strengthens buyers' second-source positioning, giving customers negotiating leverage over the incumbent across their whole AWS spend.
The trend: Hyperscale cloud competition is compressing feature-launch cycles from quarters to days, as Google's challenge forces AWS to match storage capabilities almost instantly.