Google brazenly strokes its mobile cloud tools just before Amazon shindig

Google has released two mobile development tools to coax app writers into storing data in the ad giant's cloud services.

The unveiling comes a day before the kickoff of cloud-rival Amazon's AWS:Reinvent, a love-in held in Las Vegas. Google's utilities give developers two ways to tie applications into cloud storage and compute services from the Mountain View iant.

"As a mobile application developer, some projects demand building your own backend, while others can move faster with a ready-made solution," Google wrote in a post announcing the availability of the tech.

The two products – Mobile Backend Starter, and Cloud Endpoints – have been in preview since June, and February, respectively.

Cloud Endpoints gives developers a free tool to create, expose, and pull data from APIs hooked into the company's platform-as-a-service App Engine.

To access Cloud Endpoints, they need to write a Java or Python class containing the methods their app needs to access, then annotate these classes to tell Google how they are represented int he API. Cloud Endpoints then automatically generates client libraries for Android, iOS, and a JavaScript library for the web.

In tweaking the APIs to work with Google's products, the developers will also gain access to Google's features for denial-of-service protection, automatic OAuth support, and client key management for building (hopefully) secure apps.

Mobile Backend Starter, by comparison, is a kit for deploying a set of generic cloud infrastructure onto the Google cloud, that developers can then tie their app to. It can be combined with Cloud Endpoints to make it easier for less sophisticated developers to build apps with the Google cloud.

The tech has received a couple of upgrades for its general availability release, such as being able to deal with large media files by getting close integration with Google Cloud Storage.

Both Microsoft and Amazon have their own similar backend services as well, which give developers a similar set of features.

As these three clouds compete with one another, they will all continue to expand their mobile products in an attempt to secure lucrative repeated data flows from consumer apps up into their cloud. The main thing for developers to be wary of is going too far down a particular cloud's design path, as this could make subsequent migrations difficult. ®