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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

The main sales pitch of Cloud Spanner is Google's network infrastructure.

No startup will be able to replicate that anytime soon, a lot of time (and money) has been put into it by a lot of people over a long time.

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Curious: is there any company in the world that could replicate its breadth, performance, and reliability in the next decade?

Could any government? Has any government?

My impression is that, infrastructure wise, Google is genuinely in a class of size one.

Its probably a class size of 2, with Amazon. Beyond those two though, no one else is close.

I honestly don't think Amazon is even close to Google.

How much more infrastructure do they have besides AWS? How much does Google have besides GCP?

That's ignoring just how much larger AWS is than GCP.

Sure, but those are the public offerings - the largest part of Google's infrastructure is not public.

Capital expenditures might shed some light on this. I don't think there's enough public data to be clear but in 2015 Amazon (4.8B), Google (9.9B) and Microsoft (5.9B) were at least on the same order of magnitude in terms of CapEx, whereas other major "datacenter" companies like Rackspace (475M) are much smaller.

I don't think you can draw any definitive conclusions from this, but calling it a class of size 1 or 2 is probably an overstatement of Google (+/- Amazon)'s advantage over Microsoft at least.

What? Close to what? There are many many companies with lots of network infrastructure. Google and Amazon are not by themselves.

Ever heard of Facebook ? :)

> Could any government?

NSA's annual budget is $50bn. U.S. military budget is about $600bn.

Google's revenue is $90bn and they don't spend all of it.

AWS, they just don't talk publicly about it so much.

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