Google has just announced what appears to be a competitor to Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), called Google Compute Engine. While we don't (by any means) have full details of exactly what Google Compute Engine is capable of yet, Urs Hölzle, SVP of technical infrastructure at the company said on stage that the cloud service for business "gives you Linux virtual machines at Google scale," with "high performance networking between VMs, so you can form them into a cluster." Hölzle also says that Compute Engine delivers 50% more compute per dollar than other platforms. The service will be available starting today.

Check out our full coverage of the Google I/O day 2 keynote right here.