Google Cloud boss Diane Greene takes a veiled shot at Amazon's big cloud outage
Greene was likely referring to last week's big Amazon Web Services incident - where an employee fat-fingered the wrong command and took down critical cloud services for hours, rendering websites (including Business Insider) slow to load or otherwise unusable.
Without calling out Amazon by name, Greene notes that Google's search bar runs at a vaunted "five nines of availability," which is the industry way of saying that it's 99.999% reliable. She says that Google Cloud, which competes with Amazon Web Services, is running on that very same technology.
"That's how we designed our cloud," Greene says.
Greene still has a lot of ground to gain in its quest to catch up to Amazon, the market share leader in the cloud space. But Google is closing in on Microsoft for second place.
Greene even says that she just heard that Google Cloud was recognized for beating Amazon and Microsoft for the title of most reliable cloud in 2016, per CloudHarmony.
"I think 2017 will be promising too," Greene says. "We're putting a lot of effort across the board."
That dovetails nicely with the rest of the message Greene is trying to convey at the Google Cloud Next conference this week: The company's cloud has a reputation as being best-suited for startups and consumer apps like Snapchat and Pokémon Go, both of which are huge Google Cloud customers.
But Greene is hammering down on the notion that Google Cloud is built on the very same technology, including reliability, security, and even future-looking stuff like artificial intelligence, that's led the company to dominate search for the better part of two decades. It's a message she's oft repeated since taking the job in late 2015.
Beyond touting the technology, Greene is hammering on the notion that it understands the needs of big business customers, too, highlighting the company's customer support, security, and manageability for customers of all sizes. To win ground on Amazon and Microsoft, the onus is on Google to prove it understands those stakes.