The news about Google Compute Engine‘s general availability seems to be getting buried a bit, but it is now official. Google’s IaaS offering is ready to take on Amazon Web Services after 18 months in beta and testing.

To take on AWS, Google (GOOG) even reduced the price of GCE by 10 percent at the same time it announced a new persistent disk and expanded OS support (Windows is still missing, though). Even with the general availability announcement and some new additions and a price cut, Google is still going to be playing catch-up to the kind of the space, but also the likes of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Azure, which is frequently seen as the up-and-comer in the Iaas space.

According to a blog post by Gartner’s Lydia Leong, GCE is likely to try carving out its niche by targeting “the cloud-natives that are going to AWS now.” But Leong noted that Google still has some barriers to overcome before it could become truly accepted as a business IaaS alternative to AWS and Azure, including “a matter of go-to-market execution, along with trust, track record and an enterprise-friendly way of doing business.”

Google certainly has a recognizable brand that could help it in the battle for the IaaS market, but so does Amazon. Another way that it is trying to compete with the incumbent in the space is by offering an SLA that guarantees 99.95 percent uptime.

And according to Leong, Google has a few things going for it that may not enable it to knock Amazon (AMZN) off the hill, but will put it in a good position to compete directly against Microsoft. 

“In fact, I think that Google is likely to push the market forward in terms of innovation in a way that Azure will not; AWS and Google will hopefully goad each other into one-upsmanship, creating a virtuous cycle of introducing things that customers discover they love, thus creating user demand that pushes the market forward,” Leong wrote in her blog post.

It’s not like Google Compute Engine hasn’t already been trying to make its way as a significant player in the IaaS market. It may only now be generally available, but Google has been promoting the cloud service for well over a year. Google’s offering has a long way to go in its features and track record, but by officially announcing GA, Google has taken that next critical step towards becoming a major IaaS player.