Google and VMware have never been particularly chummy but now they're suddenly each other's new best friend and a little cloud brought them together.

As a result Google is going to support some of the Java tools VMware got with its acquisition of SpringSource, enough so users can move relatively painlessly between Google's cloud, any VMware-based clouds like, say, its VMForce cloud combined with Salesforce, and Amazon's EC2. It will also make certain adjustments in the Google Web Toolkit to oblige the effort.

See, Google is cultivating its yen for the enterprise and claims that its App Engine, its platform for web applications, is now ready to support customers' internal apps so it announced a version called App Engine for Business that big companies are supposed to use as infrastructure.

Its shiny new alliance with VMware plays to this card - supposedly removing fears of lock-in - and Google is kicking in a 99.9% (Three9s) SLA, SSL security and MySQL, a shift away from the vaunted Google BigTable that many users find way too proprietary as well as hard to use.

App Engine for Business is currently in preview and will cost $8 per user per application a month. General availability is slated for later this year,

Then where there are clouds there has to be storage and in that respect Google's cloud, which isn't all that much of a cloud yet, is starting to look a lot like Amazon.

Its newfangled beta Google Cloud Storage, which integrates with its App Engine, is initially free and when it goes GA should be priced to compete with S3 with base storage set at 17 cents a gigabyte a month, uploads at 10 cents a gigabyte, downloads at 15 cents a gigabyte in the Americas and EMEA and 30 cents in Asia-Pac with requests a penny a 1,000 (Put, Post, List) or 10,000 (Get, Head).