Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
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I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.
> said people with knowledge of the matter.
As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.
> The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.
So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.
You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.
And finally:
> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."
There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative.
Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
This. A thousand times this!
Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline.
Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ...
Google should hire Satya Nadella.
Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
I believe google cloud platform might be slowly turning to be similar to oracle, if things do not change to care more for users. As many people noticed google like oracle started changing their products in such a way as to have lock-in like oracle.
So it’s just a matter of time when they start behaving like the old Oracle to use the lock-in to ask for price hikes.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-ceo-greene-bein...
Kinda make me consider the comparison with the changes to Map API pricing earlier this year. Exactly the sort of sales weasel and lawyer driven revenue booster you'd expect to have come directly out of Ellison's office...
Google used search for additional revenue by first make advertisement appear as legitimate search results by using a non prominent and small font text “Ad” in front of ads. But these are on top of search result. So asking users and company to pay to be on top of search results.
Launching new service and then offering free to attract developers and users and if it failed to generate revenue shut them down. [1]
As google is faltering on revenue in cloud, they started using security as pretext to scare the users of gsuite [2] and take away the functionality and force them to toe the google line and soon there will be change in charges and conditions.
Also shut down of gcp is a legitimate concern, google doesn’t care about users, they offer free to gain traction and if can not generate revenue shut down the service without regard for users.
I still say cloud is their best bet besides ads. They absolutely do have to diversify. Once regulation hits it‘s gonna be tough. So cloud needs to be profitable when ads aren‘t growing 20% yoy anymore.
> Microsoft’s Office365 will make a similar change in October 2020.
> https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/blogs/end-of-su...
So read of that what you can.
And I don't even want to comment on killedbygoogle.com. I don't see many Google Cloud or paid products there. And there was a similar Microsoft site posted here couple of weeks ago.
I would have hoped in yester years that instead of Amazon api for cloud, companies would have adopted an open source standard, or just use API from openstack and extend them.
But that didn’t happen now cloud API are new windows kind of platform lock-in of old Microsoft. Personally I use apache-libcloud [1] to make my service as cloud agnostic as possible.
Also try to use a non USA company as backup mostly in Europe given strong privacy laws unlike US firms.
Source?
>As google is faltering on revenue in cloud
Source? They don't break this out in earnings so I assume you're just reading tea leaves here?
For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?
If they did that, I'd trust them. If they breached my trust, I'd get a cool $10M. They wouldn't shutdown the service because of the extreme financial disincentive to do so.
Providing credible hostages is a good way to build trust. Such a promise would be fairly credible if drafted properly.
Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against.
Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.
If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and shared hosting for application hosting because they eliminated the costs and burden of systems administration and hardware maintenance. If you’re a company that did move to AWS/Azure - provided you stuck to their commodity offerings (App Service, EC2, RDS, Azure SQL, etc) you can move back to your own hardware just fine. For other things like S3/Azure Storage which are hard to move in-house, at least it’s easy to separate that from the rest of your application.
But what does GCP have that is cool - but without associated costs of what is essentially vendor lock-in? Without a solid contract/guarantee from Google that some binary I wrote that uses a GCP-exclusive service _will_ be supported for a minimum of 2-5 years it’s hard for me to justify risking it.
Their 'serverless' batch/stream processing works this way as well, with Apache Beam you can deploy effortlessly to GCP for large compute jobs (i've spun up hundreds of nodes in minutes), and also run it against on prem spark clusters with zero code changes.
So Google realizes being late to the game means they have to offer something more, and what they're offering is a lack of vendor lock in.
The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use.
Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google.
Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map.
Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835
Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
That said, do you have any anecdotes about Google Cloud's customer service? Customer service from Google for app developers is non-existent.
It was an unpleasant process, and then we dropped them anyway (but not because they suck at billing).
I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I commented on Amazon. Now can see here when it’s critical of google.
Just curious - how do you "see" this? What exactly are you seeing?
I am not really sure if you have some magical HN karma level to see any special activity here. If so, I would be curious what that is.
No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this?
Astroturfing and reputation management are a thing. Also, big companies have a large number of employees some of who hang out here and will simply take offense by association, which could be more than enough to explain the effect even if the company itself has nothing to do with it.
HN is no longer niche.
> Who has the budget for this?
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and whole pile more if they wanted to it would be a round off error on their budget but besides one of those I don't think there was ever hard evidence that this happens.
Reputation management is becoming more and more important to brands.
Every enterprise, basically.
You subscribe to social media monitoring as a service, they monitor the fire hose and flip on the bat signal as needed.
It’s dirt cheap, relative to not knowing what’s said about you.
Ummm, Google(/Alphabet)?
You might have heard of them? Fourth biggest company (by market cap) on the planet? They have budget to do all this shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
Pretty sure they wouldn't even notice the costs of downvoting every single negative comment about them on every single website they're already crawling and mining for keywords and sentiment...
The claim of a covert army of astrotufers / reputation management firms was silly when it was made back in the day on Slashdot and it's still silly today. If nothing else, it would never pay well enough for people to keep such a juicy secret.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-o...
Google letting the Google Maps API rot on the vine even as they raise their rates for developers and exactly zero support for effected users is a perfect example of how they are pulling the rug out.
Also, as has been mentioned, if your option is tolerating seriously crappy support or having a service pulled entirely, most people would take the crappy support.
I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems.
I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_.
If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...
I've used GCP at 2 different places. One with a 10k/month spend and another with closer to 200k/month and received the same level of service. In both instances I've had direct access to engineers to get shit fixed when needed, phone/email/gchat.
Sounds great!
We're running production systems making a significant amount of of our revenue, and when, not if, shit hits the fan we need someone with intimate knowledge of the internals to give us undivided attention until it's resolved.
Sometimes it's because we fucked up, sometimes it's the perfect storm of internals working unexpected - all of the time our systems are not working and our customers depend on them for their daily work.
Effective immediately and without warning, YoutubeTV will not have a dedicated channel for Seattle Sounders games (the whole reason I got YoutubeTV was because they were advertising they would do that) and all the previous Sounders games you’ve recorded are now gone effectively immediately (even though, once again, they sold me on their “infinite DVR capacity” that lasts for two years).
Great customer service :-/
Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.
Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services.
When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.
Try using apache-libcloud to make your deployment and programs cloud agnostic. Also try using smaller alternatives like hetzner or scaleway.
Once you go down this cloud rabbit hole you will be hold hostage to whims of these providers, where they can shutdown any service at their will or ask to pay an arm and leg. Also try to have non USA cloud providers as another backup option in the long run.
After many years of working with AWS almost exclusively, I recently started a new $DAYJOB where our primary public cloud provider is Azure. A couple of days ago I was chatting with a co-worker about something, and he literally says "I think we should just chuck it in S3 and call it good" (paraphrased slightly, due to my imperfect memory).
It struck me as odd for a few seconds, and then I realized that exactly what you are talking about has taken place. S3 is so dominant that it's become the default label for object storage in the cloud.
I'd put it this way: Google has a reputation for turning things off, but its _problem_ is an inability to stop doing that, to commit to its users/customers. In other contexts this could be written in terms of addiction.
If I were Sergey and Larry, this would be the thing I'd be retiring over, and I'm not sure Suchar can change it.
From everything we have seen of Google's culture, working on new projects is exciting and is absolutely the way to get promoted.
Doing maintenance work, especially on products that aren't wildly successful gets you no attention, no staff, no funding, and probably more than a little tongue waging.
The CEO cant just change all that with directives, even if they do something extreme like a "No Depreciations" policy, products are liable to be depreciated in all but name (Joe the intern takes care of it every 5th Tuesday, technically not depreciated) by sheer corporate momentum alone, nobody wants to be stuck with a dead fish, even if its now illegal to openly comment on how much it stinks.
It would require change at every level of Google to place value into fixing/improving existing projects, rather than all the glory going to greenfield development.
Considering the kind of "kingmaker" culture Google's mentality breeds, ie what gets me ahead is gathering resources to focus on my project, changing things to a setup where contributing to other peoples silos is welcome and common is going to be an extremely difficult prospect because virtually all the people with power inside Google got that way by carefully tending their fiefdom, they aren't just going to throw that all a way, no matter what any executive says.
You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world.
To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke.
Edit: spelling.
Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance.
In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source.
Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.
I'm one of those persons who upsold friends, families and at least one boss on to use Linux.
I'm not a business analyst but I can say that Microsoft has transformed. I still prefer Linux as does a number of fellow sysadmins and developers, but Microsoft has changed to the point where they are not a problem to us anymore. Azure portal works equally well from Firefox on Linux as from Internet Explorer or Edge on Windows.
> as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance.
The best reason for transformation in fact: because the subject realizes it is in their own best interest to change and it improves their situation.
> Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues.
I don't know.
> This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
I've used Amazon (two years, narrow experience) and Google Cloud (two years, broader but possibly shallower experience, certified) and now Azure lately.
So far, inferior is not the word I would use. I'd possibly stick with different or something neutral.
Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend.
That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it.
I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications.
The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure.
Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts.
Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years.
Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.
Also .Net is synonymous with microsoft so there is no reason to trust AWS, it's not their priority, they are a Perl and Java shop in general.
AWS a Perl shop?
All of AWS services treat C# .Net Core as a first class citizen.
- CodeBuild has prebuilt C# .Net Core images for building apps. For licensing reasons they don’t have prebuilt Windows/Framework containers but their instructions are so clear that I was able to build one before I knew anything about Docker
- Lambda has native support for .Net Core 2.x and the C# SDK for AWS has a template to build a custom runtime for C# 3.x
- Speaking of which, the AWS SDK and plug-in for C#/Visual Studio and the corresponding Nuget packages are excellent and fully featured.
- The CloudFormation Developer Kit supports C#
- There are CodeStar and ElasticBeanstalk getting started templates for .Net Framework and .Net Core
What are they missing?
Regarding support for .NET whatever AWS does microsoft will always be way ahead of them. Microsoft is not elastic.co that AWS leech on and put the original guys on the side and don't contribute back. AWS is really like a leech on open source now trying to leech on Kubernetes.
They can do this with small open source project, not with the projects supported by google or Microsoft. Like when it comes to Kubernetes AWS is playing catch with Google. So AWS Fargate and other services are still inferior to Google managed K8s. Indeed microsoft at present is ahead of AWS in managed kubernetes services. Its just the initial head-start and developers who are familiar with AWS proprietary API's find it hard to believe that in such a short time the skills they learned is no longer cutting edge and google or microsoft proprietary API's overtaken them in performance and ease of use.
All of these things are widely believed myths that have little to no basis in reality.
It certainly was not designed as some kind of Perl hosting environment.
It didn't even host Amazon.com at all until many years after the fact.
Can you give one concrete example of where MS has a feature for .Net that AWS doesn’t have?
The only one that I can think of is that their lambda equivalent works with .Net Framework.
Amazon doesn’t care about EKS, it’s just a check box option to say they have it. Elastic Container Service is far more integrated with AWS.
Have you actually used AWS? Care to enumerate how it’s “inferior”?
I have yet to see any good open source project by AWS team in the wild like Kubernetes, Linux Kernel Namespaces and Cgroups, Map Reduce from Google or .NET from Microsoft. So far what I have seen is that AWS just leech on other open source like PostgreSQL to build Aurora and RDS service without really contributing back to PostgreSQL, because postgreSQL comes with BSD license AWS can just leech on it. Same for elastic search and many other open source they leech on. I am still waiting if they are really just leechers or giving back to the open source community. Like Amazon Redshift is based on an older version of PostgreSQL 8.0.2, and Redshift has made changes to that version [1], but nothing is made open source because BSD license do not require it. This is just one big example but there are many. For open source community and contributions I feel Google and Microsoft are much better than Amazon and AWS by miles. It's just that due to early start AWS is reaping benefits by leeching on open source.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-an...
How does open source help an end user who is deciding which cloud provider to use?
AWS does not develop .NET SDK, as I mentioned in my earlier post there is no contribution of AWS in development of .NET, so they just provide infrastructure support of what ever Microsoft and the open source community releases.
In general microsoft acts as a steward to develop .NET and related infrastructure on Azure, then AWS copy and launch it as .NET infrastructure as service. They play catch up with Microsoft in this area.
I will stand corrected if you can show me that AWS (i.e. Amazon) has active open source .NET framework core developers in their internal team developing and enhancing .NET SDK or CLR open source versions.
They do the same with AI and ML Services. It is built using TensorFlow, sci-kit learn, pytorch, CNTK and various python and C++ open source libraries. Again I have yet to see example of AWS (i.e. Amazon hiring core developers of these libraries and release open source versions). They don't develop these libraries just leech on it to create it's own API's. I have yet to see any framework from AWS like TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch and CNTK.
There is nothing to copy as far as .Net. Microsoft releases a new version of .Net, all AWS has to do is make sure that its SDK’s support it. But there usually aren’t any breaking changes.
As far as the other services that I could see needing to support, the only ones that I can think of is CodeBuild and lambda. For those two, you can create custom Docker images and runtimes respectively.
And the other question, are you a .Net developer?
.Net Core is open source and available for Macs and Linux. It’s almost 5 years old now.
“All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
Thank you; have a nice day!”
I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.
I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit.
So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.
Apple - look at Apple’s revenue and profit mix over the past 10-15 years its apparent that they were able to change. Of course the change after Jobs came on is well known.
Microsoft - was “Windows first” during the Balmer era.
Facebook - was in danger of being made irrelevant after mobile. They were making a lot on games hosted on their platform.
Amazon: AWS and their move toward services even internally.
Netflix: went from shipping DVDs and had to become a tech company in the era of streaming.
And then there is Google....
But there still seems to be a fight going on in the cockpit.
Honestly, and I'm more of a Google side-eyer than a hater, but I'm not sure they're capable of this, it's just not in their DNA. I've been saying "Google is bad at product" for a long time, like a "high PR" long time, and this mindset has been greeted with continual killoffs and usability stumbles (current Android is kind of a mess UI-wise, e.g.).
I simply don't think they're capable of putting a division together that could be relied upon. Heck, Alphabet might simply kill that off after a few years!
... where one of the few ways of rectifying the situation is to get a top posting on HN in the hope that a Googler will see your plea for help.
I mean, that's probably mainly related to Android dev but I've seen plenty of stories to support that feeling:
E.g. (just a random example) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
My perception might be misguided / influenced by being in a perception bubble, however that is my reality and AWS or AZURE just seems a whole lot safer. So, why should I as a developer invest any time in GC? I did attend a Google dev day re machine learning++ in Melbourne a couple of years ago, and the products seem nice and all, but the competition isn't exactly lagging behind.
My recommendation would be to really address this issue of human support and trust.
Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone.
GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly.
https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-nevada/
https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i...
But for companies picking a cloud platform tomorrow, that’s a fate as good as death! AWS and Azure won’t slow down development and new features, so a couple years after GCP stops being a priority, it’ll start also being a bad deal, and a couple years after that it’ll be a straight-up strategic liability. THAT is why anything other than full-throated support from Google leadership for indefinite GCP investment will lose them business.
Nothing has a guaranteed future.
> AWS and Azure won’t slow down development
As long as it's paying off, they won't, and AWS maybe for longer even if it isn't. But Microsoft is no stranger to making investments in offerings and letting them stagnate or outright killing them if they don't pay off.
Google is just too big as a company, and if they replaced every human in it with drones no one would know the difference. There is no human face or point of contact or any accountability and it’s becoming a problem.
The woman was still snarky to her and unhelpful but still a real human was available.
A lot of this has to do with our own perceptions and trust. Purchasing decisions are never fully rational or information complete.
In any case, its a free market, but buying from vendors who I can talk to if something happens, has way more value to me than a ‘free’ product.
They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable.
If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running.
There have been plenty of other cases where google has burned bridges with the technical crowd which they should have embraced as champions for selling services. Killing off XMPP support was another prime one for me, and absolutely affected paid enterprise customers as well.
You simply cannot trust Google to do right by me, the user. That's it.
Aside from their bad reputation for killing products, they also have a bad reputation for providing next to zero human support services for their products - even if you do pay for them.
It’s somewhere in between and if Google started launching a bunch of new DB and other infrastructure products I’d be worried about adopting them individually - not worried that the entire data centres and business divisions getting shut down. Because Google will probably move on to another product without thought of the last one.
As a developer or a company, why should I trust Google as a platform?
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ecacki/gsuite_sus...
Money talks. Culture talks louder.
To be perfectly honest, i would rather go with a company that provides cloud as one of their main products rather than a company that has it as one of their many products.
Just have a look at "API" and also "Services"...
https://cloud.google.com/products/
If you wanted to make a comparison, you should compare Google Reader to Traffic Director or DialogFlow
All the cloud offerings are massively more expensive than owning/leasing unless you have large dynamic scaling requirements. There will be middleware in the future to allow cloud agile / hybrid operation, so maybe cloud compute will become more commodity, as opposed to the current Rolls Royce pricing. At that point will Google be interested? Depends how much marginal cost is involved compared to running data centers just for themselves.
These are big numbers to us, but it's about 1/4 of their quarterly revenue--i.e. they bring in 16 times that number every year.
Don't think they wouldn't sell it to Amazon or Microsoft in a heartbeat if they decided to exit the cloud business.
Personally, I don't think Google will yank the cord on this entirely, but they may just stop piling resources into it and/ or significantly increase prices to ratchet up profits. They don't have to drop the whole cloud to really screw up a developers life, just screwing with one API I rely on can kill a product and they've already done exactly that.
The problem is with Google you just don't know what's going to happen. Microsoft and Amazon are both known and neither plays games with their products.
I’m by no means a AWA or Azure fanboy, I’m on the team that hopes we get a solid European alternative, but until we do both Amazon and Microsoft are leagues ahead of Google.
Contrast this with AWS. They have expert engineers, pre- and post- sales, helping you find good ways to solve your problem. I could ring a senior guy on his cell right now if needed. The only problem with AWS is cost and complexity, it's the fast path to developing a $20k/day cocaine habit. But the AWS dealer will definitely come to your house to deliver at 11pm.
(It is a bit of a change from 10 years ago though, when everything had to be paid by credit card. Gave the accountants a heart attack. Gave me an ulcer from thinking about everything halting because the fraud control might reject the bill without warning...)
Azure definitely isn't in that league, still want to sell to the whole enterprise, getting promo stuff requires them to sign off at five levels, lawyers are involved in everything. In short, their dev relations are shite.
* Access to their developers for core services
* Discounts available
* Quality of support
* Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting
* Dev Tools around Infra
* Future Roadmap
Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise that members of the population of products have to die for the population itself to survive.
And the group making these decisions are a bunch of Unixheads who were some of the first members on The Old Reader. We made a few hundred million bet that GCP will be around and capable for the next five years (and probably for the five after). I am confident this will play out in our favour. I'd put money down except for the fact that I already did effectively by recommending the deal.
Do you mean you’re confident this choice will be a decisive competitive advantage vs. having gone with AWS or Azure?
Or simply confident they won’t be gone before you have options?
0: Maybe I'll say "on the order of a hundred million" next time.
1E8 = 1 * 10^8 = 100,000,000 (xEy = x * 10^y).
Of course, personally I chose AWS over Google Cloud well before that, because Google Cloud's authentication is so complicated and their examples so indecipherable.
I'm not actually worried much about the multi million dollar companies using Google Products because then they start actually caring about you. When I worked at a place that made them significant ad money, I got splendid sub hour support. But Google is among the most disrespectful companies towards smaller actors while still trying to get as much money out of them as possible I have ever interacted with. E.g. Just recently it took us 3 weeks, 5 chat support sessions and 2 interventions from their supposed expert team to get an inappropriate "customer photo" shot 4'000 km away from maps/search removed. Or the whole Youtube ContentID disaster, or getting forced into G+ just for them to close it, etc etc.
Don't think anyone really cares about 1-2 products being closed that they were using, it's just a lot a things that add up and changed the perception of the company quite a bit over the years.
Perhaps someone who's made the decision on that can share.
This is merely a symptom of the real problem Google has: a contempt for humans that aren't Googlers. Everything about Google - as a company and their products - speaks of an institutional contempt for the normies outside their walls: everything from the interview process through the complete inability to respond to criticism with anything other than a "you're holding it wrong".
Google's high-handed behaviour around "oh your account got locked, fuck you", or "we shuttered this thing that people depended on, fuck you" is a product of that contempt. You're a Googler or you're shit.
I think they might have.
I used it about a year or two ago and remembered the UI as horrible. I then had to use it a few weeks ago and didn't have the same negative reaction I had the first time I used it.
There are a lot of things that AWS produces which never receive adequate polish or timely updates. I’ve been in betas for more than a few new offerings and was stunned at how incomplete and buggy these offerings were. More than a year later, they remain in a half usable state.
Google dumps things it’s not committed to making great. AWS maintains numerous things which are half usable, poorly documented, and incomplete. It all depends on the context, but in some ways I prefer drops to half-assed products.
Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.
Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.
How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.
No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.
Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.
Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.
Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand.
Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.
E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...
I don't work at google so I have no idea of knowing what it's like.
Turns out that setting absurdly high hiring bars doesn't mean much if you don't make products people like, and kill off the ones that people do.
You can't plant a leak, if it's planted by a 3rd party it's either a lie it's or a leak.
Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are other costs as well, but it seems realistic that they are making money off of it.
Google can utilize dark GPU hardware for numerous tasks. For example, YouTube video transcoding, ML, and Cloud batch processing.
Games, like websites, seem to expand to fit the available space. Today's smartphones would beat a ten year old mega-powered gaming PC.
(Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)
What. The. Fuck.
First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will they charge us for having memories of their IP?
We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The rent-seekers are taking ownership away.
They take away the games you claimed as a Pro subscriber - similar to how PS+ works. If you claim a game on PS+ and quit PS+, you lose those games.
If you buy the game you can keep it and still play it even after you're done subscribing.
That is a factually incorrect statement. You lose access to any games you claimed for free as a benefit of your Stadia Pro membership if you cancel your membership; you regain access to those games if you renew, but you will not gain access to games that were offered for free during any interval where you were not a subscriber.
You retain access to any game you paid for, _even_ if you paid a discounted rate as a result of being a Stadia Pro member, even if your subscription is canceled.
Oh, so if I cancel my Stadia subscription I can still play the games?
As far as I can tell from [1] the situation is:
* Per-game purchase price.
* There's a free 1080p streaming tier.
* There's a $10/mo 4k streaming tier, which also includes discounts on games and some free games.
* However, you won't be able to convert your Stadia-purchased games into local games or Steam codes.
* And of course you won't be able to close your Stadia/Google account and still keep your games.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-06-06-google-stadia-...
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.
Think how good your rates might be for the last six months of 2022!
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
- Gmail
- Android (and Google Play)
- Drive
- Maps
- Chromecast
- Google Home
- YouTube (+Premium)
https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-has-sold-55-millio...
Anecdotally it's pretty popular with folks I know in Columbus, OH - admittedly they tend to be on the tech savvy side.
Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search.
Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem.
That leaves Drive, which might have some good margins, but they give it away for free to many users...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...
Gmail makes money from business users and I would go as so far to say that if it doesn't make more money that Drive now it will make more money in 10 years from people who have lived their entire lives inside of a gmail account using it for business.
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
Totally gonna believe them
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
> That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
I fail to see how this is even a reason to get off GCP, yet a good one.
If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit.
That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided.
Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.
You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
> The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.
At Google's level I would not expect less than billions in investment, the growth of the platform is for now still substantially lagging behind the competition as far as I know, the bulk of the companies I look at are solidly in the AWS camp or in some cases running on Azure, Google is still the exception but getting more common over time. I look at about 50 companies / year so that's a relatively small sample but they are typically well funded start-ups or later stage established companies.
> You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
No, that's not how I'm reading it.
It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.
So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:
1. Invest More + High Growth
2. Invest More + Low Growth
3. Maintain Investment + High Growth
4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth
5. Divest
You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.
So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.
But Google doing it seems totally believable.
See the problem?
GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.
No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...
The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.
Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.
I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".
I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap.
It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.
Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.
Microsoft has one hell of an enterprise sales and marketing machine though, probably the best in the world, so I’d assume they are doing quite well, even if they are mostly reinvesting it.
You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.
We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).
Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.
The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.
If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.
In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.
I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhere.
Why? Because big-spender enterprise customers demand that vendors implement hand-holding red-carpet VIP support for them; and most of that work is, surprisingly enough, a capital cost, not an operational expense; and so you can free-ride on it as long as it's been set up.
On the other hand, if there is any way to typewise-differentiate you from the big-spender customers, then you'd better believe that they'll have support channels you don't have.
To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.
For example, the person who wrote this book is probably never going to post a complaint on social media:
https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Against-Windows-10-Microsoft-...
Microsoft does offer paid support for Windows.
The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.
We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen.
The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.
Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.
If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
I think in general, scaling support for such complex a product that’s constantly changing is really difficult.
Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a < 1TB dataset cleaning costs $25...
Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But lately Ive been trying to figure out a semi-managed way of doing exactly-once stream processing for cheaper than dataflow. Possibly an architecture around cloud run might work.
“ Our benchmark results show that Apache Beam has a noticeable impact on the performance of DSPSs in almost all cases. Programs developed using Apache Beam suffered from a slowdown of up to a factor of 58 in the worst case. At the same time, there is one scenario where the query developed using Apache Beam is about as fast as its counterparts using the APIs of the corresponding DSPS. However, for most scenarios we observed a slowdown of at least a factor three.”
Do you need to run this pipeline more than once a day? Is it sufficiently important for your business case? I feel like 25 is a very small sum if any of them are remotely true.
On a related note, how practically reliable is the DataPrep->DataFlow workflow? Could a reasonably smart analyst with zero programming experience set them up and run them? Feel like that's who this workflow is built for, but I've not had the best of experiences with Trifacta demos in AWS with reliability.
I agree a warehouse could get more expensive, but that’s where Athena or BigQuery is supposed to come in? BigQuery is rather expensive though. It can’t support reading Parquet natively (of course Google insists on their own format) so you have to pay their heavy tax versus just object storage and elastic compute.
Also the classic BigQuery UI is way less buggy than the new one, and the PMs won’t take bugs for the new UI.
GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?
Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?
I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not.
Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest.
This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me a whole lot of headache.
I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly let you to that conclusion?
1) The article.
> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
That only means that the team's head is on the chopping block. That's all.
> 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
This assertion is utterly absurd as you're describing the world's third largest cloud provider, and thus one of the dominant players, of being "underperforming" and justifying pulling the plug on a 8 billion-dolar a year business.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/public-cloud-market-sha...
As far as the manager “being on the chopping block” the article talks about “losing funding”.
$8 billion in revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?
This is the same company that left an entire city’s streets in disarray after abandoning Google Fiber.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
You're being a bit disingenuous. Your own source states quite clearly that Google is in the 3rd spot and arguably, if you cherry-pick results, you can place it in 4th.
By cherry-picked results I'm referring to posting 2018 results and ignoring how GCP's revenue doubled in the last 18 months, nearly matching Azure's revenue.
Also revenue != profit. If it was profitable enough would management be complaining?
Yes, AWS is 1st. What's your point? Azure is 2nd and GCP is currently 3rd and catching up with Azure. What does AWS has to do with whether GCP is 3rd or 4th?
Only Amazon breaks out its AWS numbers completely today, but the other cloud providers bundle their cloud computing numbers together with other "cloud" numbers, so it makes it very confusing to keep track of what numbers people are talking about.
A mildly successful cloud provider would probably make FAR more money long term than the median Google product. Pulling the plug on GCP to build a couple dozen projects that will mostly get killed themselves seems like a huge waste, even without considering all of the negative externalities of burning even more customers by cancelling a major service.
Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to be #1 in every business you touch.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...
Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)
The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.
Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.
So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.
(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
This is like corporate infighting for comedies set in the 50s really.
Only one company needs Google's internal infrastructure. That company is called Google.
The lessons learned in building those systems can be applied to more generalized solutions which can be sold as standalone products.
The origins of AWS are entirely unrelated, Amazon simply realized it was good at operating infrastructure. This led to the conception of offering infrastructure as a service. The initial AWS service offerings were built based on Amazon's experience and expertise but were not the literal internal services of Amazon.
See https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-... for more historical details.
Amazon (or Google, or Microsoft) is an anomaly, the things Amazon needs to operate Amazon.com are very very different from what most companies need. The internal services and architecture are purpose built although today they do heavily leverage AWS under the hood. Amazon.com is just a customer of AWS, there's no special installation.
Almost nobody needs Amazon.com's infrastructure (except Amazon) or could even afford to staff it. What people do need are generalized, managed services they can combine for their own use cases.
I think the only needs that are likely different are scale, so bigger instances, and the fact that they have a massive legacy infrastructure that can't be easily migrated off of. So that's pretty much what I would expect; Amazon.com does use AWS for new stuff but is still operating a lot of legacy as well.
This article lists some of the AWS services that now power Amazon.com since they moved away from Oracle. So, while it may not have been true in the past, it does now appear that AWS powers a significant portion of Amazon.com.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
AWS services have always been their own thing, they happen to be useful so today Amazon utilizes them just like anyone else. That doesn't mean the services started internally.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
https://www.pcmag.com/article/364611/microsofts-cloud-how-th...
> Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast majority of its internal servers to Azure, including its SAP implementation, payment systems, and test systems. This has helped Microsoft learn what it takes to run the technology on an enterprise scale.
I’m not willing to die on this hill. I could be wrong about the origins of Azure. AWS and GCP are not productized versions of internal services.
Same for Amazon, it took them very long also, including dedicated internal projects with focus on moving. But majority of Amazon and Microsoft workloads now run on their respective cloud offerings.
Google is probably still be at least 3-5 years before that would happen be aligned. GCP is quite immature and young, which this leak highlights also. I assume this would mean that also internal teams at Google won't be moving workloads to GCP.
E.g. what coup would be for Google Search to run on GCP. Imagine the CIO conversation of, “well, if it is good enough for google search, it must be good for me”.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
They're at war with a subset of the staff over unionizing. And they have a "culture of openness" around internal information.
This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.
Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.
What and where is the story?
GCP produce new products and features every week [1]
At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two.
Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.
Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.
There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?
Going for broke on projects and then canning them when they fail to attract the kind of success that a smaller company would be more than happy with is in the long run a losing bet.
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...
I’d say the biggest situation that materially affected companies was the Google Maps pricing change, but most seem to be fine with that now.
> The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters.
It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.
How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you say and you might as well be speaking Greek.
The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose it.
You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow).
You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of course this is all moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont shut down by 2023.
See Nytimes, Twitter and Spotify for examples.
Now if you’re talking about future-safety there was an argument...until a few hours ago.
Every company you named isn’t the same thing as just arguing to the powers that be - AWS is what Netflix uses. AWS has many more “referencable clients” that matter.
I agree the cloud (pun intended) of doubt is unsettling when you're considering a switch, but I'd consider risking it anyway. They do have a tendency to kill projects, but killing a capital investment of this size is a bigger pill to swallow than not supporting xyz software anymore. So even if they do exit, I imagine it would wind down slowly.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.
Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with 'total failure'?
Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuri...
And that is not a surprise since Google's culture is to get rid of the human / customers interaction and wants to automate everything. But in real world all business are conducted by person.
Because if so, he did a pretty good job of achieving his objective: establishing market dominance in the face of superior competing products.
Hiring Kurian is a message to investors that Google is serious[1] about trying to take over the cloud platform space, through any means necessary.
[1] At this moment, at least. Given Google's history, their actual commitment to their cloud platform remains to be seen.
Not sure how you come up with this. Is this backed with actual data?
Note that Amazon declared itself Oracle-free this year, to big fanfare. SFDC is ripping out Oracle too - their single largest DB customer.
ORA is a dead man walking, just like IBM. Zombie momentum will keep them going for a looooong time.
On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.
What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.
I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
Can you describe what you are referring to here?
I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
Does Azure have an equivalent for this invaluable resource?
Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.
The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes.
You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there's no backup even in this minimalistic sense.
There is no "backup" for anything but a handful of object types (Web Apps, VM disks, Secret Vaults, and that's about it). If you want to protect your data, you'd better have an on-premise copy and 100% automated deployment capability.
Speaking of automated deployment capability, 99.9% of the Azure docs mention manual deployment or procedural (PowerShell) deployment. Declarative is clearly an afterthought, and mentioned only in passing. Because of this, ~95% of Azure deployments I've seen in the wild were entirely hand built and very fragile. If some malicious admin ran Remove-AzResource on everything, those orgs may as well declare bankruptcy the next day.
Despite this fragility, Azure sales reps are pushing-pushing-pushing for their customers to go "all in" on cloud, be "cloud first", and to basically "lift and shift" their data centres. You gotta break a few eggs to meet your quarterly targets, am I right? Right? Guys?
Speaking of the PowerShell, it's 99% auto-generated from the JSON API binding definitions, and about 5% of it is documented even in the bare minimum sense.
IPv6 "support" is hilarious. They very generously provide a /124 static public subnet prefix. So many addresses! A whole 14 of them! Woo! It's the future now! No need for NAT! A routable address for every endpoint! Let me get right on that, soon as I figure out the fiddly scripting needed to allocate addresses from hundreds of tiny pools. Much fun.
If you delete a DNS Zone by accident, you can't properly recover it within 48 hours because they randomly pick one of 10 name server pools. Hence, your NS bindings at the registrar will point at the wrong servers and even if you update this, there's an inevitable propagation delay. I am aware of workarounds for this like Resource Group Pinning, but only because we jumped up and down and forced support to admit that it's a problem. This little "surprise" is still undocumented.
Speaking of DNS, until we forced Microsoft to fix it, the only way to back up Azure DNS records (az network dns zone export) would corrupt CNAMES and wouldn't round-trip.
Azure DNS uses an idiotic Zone->RecordSet->Record hierarchical structure, which makes small incremental changes hugely fiddly in scripting. You have to download the existing RecordSet, modify it, and then send it back with ETags intact. You can't treat each record as independent rows in a table, even though they effectively are.
The Azure DNS servers don't send "Additional" records (e.g.: the matching A records for the target of a CNAME record), which means that a) it's slower for clients, and b) they can charge you more. They have zero incentive to fix this, because it literally doubles their revenue for alias records of all types.
DNS Metrics are collected every 2 hours, but the graph displays only daily or hourly intervals, so you either get no detail at all, or a sawtooth graph that gives you no useful feedback at all at best, or is panic inducing at worst. Imagine making a small change, glancing at the graph, and seeing it hit zero. Then... staying at zero for an hour. A joyous time, for sure.
I could go on and on.
Azure has some neat stuff, but they're moving fast and breaking things, and half their products are basically MVP garbage authored by the lowest-bidding Indian outsourced teams.
Anything they don't offer directly, they offer a pile of canned VMs authored by Bitnami, who adds their own layer of management scripts to them, which (in our case) corrupted the filesystem on restarting from the great Shellshock cloud reboot.
Azure is, in part, an ad-hoc cloud offering made up of services offered by mutually incompatible business units. Adding analytics in the dashboard has a 50% chance of routing you off of Azure to a separate MS monitoring/analytics solution (OMS) requiring its own licence.
Their linux management agents have repeatedly locked up our VMs.
Because of the way Cosmo pricing works, we were billed ~$5,000 over 3 months for 50MBs of data that was basically unused at the time--because you pay for "reserved network units" on a per collection basis (as in a mongo collection), and the floor pricing drove it that high without any utilization.
As parent said, it's a bunch of MVP garbage, to which I'd add: to tick a bunch of checkboxes for Fortune 100s to sign 8-9 figure deals with promises of volume pricing. Operationally it's flea market.
* When selecting a VM size in the new-VM wizard, it silently resets it to "DS1 v2" a bit later. You have to go back to the first tab and re-select the size you really wanted.
* This then promptly resets my "Already have a Windows Server license?" setting so then I have reapply that too.
* The default VM template suggested is Windows 2016, not Windows 2019.
* The selection box for the region keeps resetting to US East, even though that's the worst location for me. There is no default location setting in the portal that I can set for myself. This is an Enterpise-wide setting only.
Kind of sounds like the good old Microsoft that made Windows a stable in nearly every enterprise...
I did want to correct one misconception, which is that we do not outsource Azure product development (we do, from time to time, hire contractors to add force on projects, but these projects are led by FTEs who are involved on a daily basis). There are certainly areas where we strive to target lean MVPs so we can get new products into customers' hands faster and get feedback earlier. I'm sure there will be some sharp edges there and we greatly appreciate you giving these services a try.
We have renewed our focus on ARM Template deployments(our infra as code offering) and have a dedicated team working on addressing the pain points described in the thread as well as other deployment issues. We are not going to solve all the problems instantaneously but we are consciously working on it.
Would love to get your input on other ARM Deployment related feedback and areas of improvement. If you haven't had a chance you can check out some of the deployment improvements we announced recently in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D-JIKShrws
* Comments in JSON -- the standard explicitly bans this, making ARM templates no longer JSON, and hence not processable by standards-compliant tools. Including, hilariously, PowerShell. ConvertFrom-Json barfs, as it should. The correct approach is to have an explicitly non-JSON format like TOML or YAML that allows comments.
* "ARM has this whole time been secretly case insensitive" -- Someone clearly hasn't been notified about the harmful consequences of the Robustness Principle. [1]
* "People say that nobody authors ARM templates from scratch" -- Well, yes. This is because the template format is barely more than serialised RPC and wasn't developed like a proper programming language.
* The tab completion suggests strings that are too long for the dropdown UI and are cut off, making this feature unusable for a lot of ARM fields, such as the resource "type" values, which have long prefixes.
* "This shows as something different in the Portal" -- You have to memorise internal project names, aliases, or other difficult-to-discover names for things instead of simply using the display names. This is not user-friendly.
* A general issue I've seen with JSON-style configuration files is that things that should be side-by-side (e.g.: a bunch of related VM names) are scattered and separated by a lot of repeated "ceremony" text. Take a look at Altova XML Spy, which has a hierarchical grid view that moves such text fields into adjacent columns and rows, much like Excel does. This makes it far easier to spot mistakes or to make bulk changes.
* The "WhatIf" support is hilarious. I updated my Az module yesterday and I don't have that command. In the demo, it did something terrifying and the presenter had to close it. The output looks hideous, not something that looks useful to me.
This is what it boils down to: I don't want color-coded output that is almost-but-not-quite-JSON. I want tabular output. I want to see what happens if I pipe in 1K rows from a spreadsheet into a template. I want ConvertFrom-Json to work. I want to be able to validate things before deploying them. I want to see WhatIf support in the Azure Portal, with the final look. I want more than one tool to be able to process ARM templates. I want ARM templates to default to 2019, not 2015.
Tooling isn't going to fix this.
I want a language designed for humans.
This demo video to me felt like putting lipstick on a pig. Sure, it's better looking, but... still a pig.
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....
Azure is the one to beat, IMO.
Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.
O365 is a huge lever that isn't going anywhere.
This is partially because the customers of AWS do not care too much about these solutions. I have seen other solutions used by large customers (still probably classified as a niche) getting improved over time significantly. Fargate and k8s offers very little over a well designed EC2 cluster. This might be another reason.
EKS on the other hand still feels like a checkbox service.
I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.
I guess if you have the money Azure is pretty good tho.
While this has happened in the past with GCP and AWS, the frequency is stunning from MSFT.
Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run.
Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.
My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT.
Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.
Those are two very bold statements.
I think it’s also very unrealistic, but I guess we’ll see!
So, if any Google Cloud employees are reading this, please report back that this just killed any interest I had in Anthos, Google Cloud Run, the managed Google "Kubernetes Apps", etc. Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.
> Pretty much anything that isn't basic compute VMs, storage, or out of the box Kubernetes.
I think this is perfectly healthy and a stance you should take everywhere.
Do you think you are at more risk betting your enterprise on Microsoft or Google?
you can say alot about IBM, but excellent compatibility is not one its weaknesses.
Microsoft? No.
Google? Absolutely.
I don't trust Google for anything that isn't related to selling ads. And I trust they will maintain their relationship for God-fucking-awful customer support. And I assume they will continue their tradition of sunsetting projects haphazardly.
I don't know why anyone would trust Google today.
Lately I've been using Instagram multiple times a month and the ads I get there are relvant, sometimes even useful (I once actually bought a product from one such ad that I actually like and wouldn't have been aware of without, and I am a typical HNer that have always said ads are wasted on me, because they have been for 10 years).
Contrast this to Google who has way more datapoints on me yet end up showing ads asking if I have old mens problems or suggest I join a dating site for elderly. And that is just the icing on the cake: they've been pushing dating sites ever since I got engaged over 5 years ago.
My account might be a fluke but I guess I am not allne.
There are certainly features of Google Cloud that meet the latter criteria, but stability? This leaked report suggests we shouldn't expect that past 2023.
There is tons of value for non-VPS: serverless functions, messaging queues, object storage, managed databases, CDNs, monitoring infrastructure, load balancers, etc.
Unless of course they aren't going to disappear or gouge you in a couple years. But AWS is very unlikely to do that.
Actually I started using Office365 instead of Google Docs recently and have been quite happy with the results. Especially OneNote’s live sync.
Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.
Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
Google just seems to care about the launch. Not how happy customers are. Not how much money is pulled in. Not how well it fits in with the overall strategic vision of the company. Just launch points.
And then they pulled the plug on my accounts because some of my android apps had "likeness or similarity to other apps" which I have absolutely no idea what it meant. Then they pulled the plugs on my colleague's account because of equally vague reason.
It was time for me to give up GCP forever.
Dataflow and Cloud Run are likely to be up there soon.
So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that.
The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...
The marketing writes itself.
Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.
Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019.
We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)
No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.
https://hackernoon.com/microsoft-announces-the-end-of-the-ge...
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/14944
If you still don't believe me, please provide your public key or email address so I can publish a response.
Maybe it doesn't stand out: Microsoft Germany delivered the promise that US authorities are technically unable to access stored data. The "new" data centers were without that promise, making the USP obsolete.
> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today.
> Existing customers are not affected by this and can continue to use the Germany cloud without restriction.
You don't see any Windows Phones being sold, but they still years later being supported with security updates.
No one can possibly fault a business for stopping continuing development of an unpopular offering. It's when it becomes unsupported and leaves people stranded that the the real problems happen.
It’s a matter of visibility and what kind of customers own the products being shut down. From a PR perspective there’s a big difference between killing an enterprise product with few large customers, and killing a consumer product with many small ones. Even if the few complaints are louder, the many complaints around the latter would still totally drown it out. I’m sure they have analytics to know how many people still use Windows Phones and weighing the possibility of an outcry e.g. if all their unsupported phones got 0wned and they collectively took to Twitter about it.
They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.
The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.
So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).
And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...
The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones!
I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.
There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.
The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.
If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not.
Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
Things like Google Reader had healthy user bases when Google came for them in the night.
They could even sell most of the products they murder to someone else for millions.
It would have cost Google more money to sell Reader than anyone would have bought it for.
It's hard to even imagine how it could have been split apart from the mothership at all.
No. The technology died. Isn't this clear evidence that the product was dead in the water?
I wonder if anyone in Google management ever looks back and regrets that decision?
It's still always being brought up, even 6.5 years later.
I couldn't actually read the news in it anymore.
Most sites have RSS feeds, even the heavy hitters like YouTube.
These are not really comparable worlds.
Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.
And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?
If I also thought it was unlikely that they would hit their target I would be really worried (assuming of course I had any reason to actually worry about how Amazon's business was doing)
If we were talking about a company that had a history of shutting down successful divisions because they were not successful enough I would think "hey 2023 is when the shutting down process is likely to start"
You can't predict the future.
Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time.
Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.
That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well.
We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy.
Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.
Somewhere down the line, they came back to me to let me know that I had not given them clear instructions and what I had asked was impossible. In the meanwhile, an intern in my team had got the entire solution up-and-running on a small, self-hosted containerized service. I showed them and they mumble about something to be fixed and how they'll get back to me. All in all, a complete waste of time, resources and bandwidth. I am glad it was for just six weeks and in hindsight, I'm happy I didn't get the rest of my team involved in it.
We have worked with Azure since then and I am super impressed with their professionalism. There are hiccups but the understanding I now hold is this - Google (probably still) builds great consumer products but have zero clue on how to work with enterprises while it appears to be the opposite with Microsoft. Their razor-sharp and sole focus on enterprise appears to help them excel instead of having a diffused, unclear strategy that is Google's currently.
And there can be a flavor of condesending attitude when they assume the customer doesn't know anything.
Why would you ever consider GCP over AWS/Azure knowing that the Google scythe could kill it at any time, with your suspicions confirmed by a leak this? Bonkers.
Reader could've been a successful company on its own for sure, for example. I wasn't a user of it, but there was enough people who loved it enough.
I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.
Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
If they kill GCP, what CTO in their right mind would ever choose Google for a mission critical service?
Again are they profitable? If the article is to be believed, there own management doesn’t think so and as I posted below, they are distant third at less than 5%.
Noorda's problem was he was completely, utterly, obsessed with his competition.
It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here.
All of your vendors are just as responsive.
But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure.
So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows.
Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever.
This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market.
When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.
Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.
Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.
I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud.
It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.
The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.
Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.
Edit to add: if the customers have a choice. Telecoms do just fine because there's not really an option that will make you happy.
Amazon is able to scale 'making customers happy' fairly well.
It is all about the company's priorities and the direction that the leaders steer the company. Perverse incentives reap perverse rewards.
Amazon won't cancel my AWS service because they don't like the shirt I ordered.
Having personally lost a Google account, the risk of using them for something business critical seems epic.
Garbage.
For what it's worth, the 3 AZs requirement is their internal policy as well, and they intentionally run exercises where they randomly shut down important looking data centers to verify that failover is working correctly.
If you haven't set up your application to continue working if the plug is pulled on the data center, there is a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to intentional action.
To be fair, there is also a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to other people's actions. My two favorite examples are, "Gypsies stole the cables to the data center so that they could sell the metal in it" and "Hunters used the shiny supports for the cables for target practice." These happened in Eastern Europe and Oregon respectively.
On the flip side, their tools make it really easy to have your software run extremely robustly. Even if Gypsies or hunters attempt to ruin your day.
No notice. No warning. No email or call. Just bam - your infrastructure is offline.
[1] https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...
Now maybe they've gotten better. But this was only a year ago. You have to at least acknowledge that they are quite frequently not at all on par with organizations known for customer service in this time such as Microsoft.
People are quick to grab their pitchforks.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And yet here we are. Glad I kept clutching those pearls.
#2 by 2023? Good luck. I wouldn't bet a dollar on them knocking Amazon or Microsoft off their perches by then, and I won't spend another dollar on GCP.
We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...
There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left for the org to do. Over—compensated, over-entitled, over-talented engineers that, when put together can’t actually accomplish anything.
Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.
Meanwhile, aws’s long history of walking people up the ramp of IAAS makes it more of a fit when they do start adding PAAS service and they fill a real need and get great adoption(for some/a lot of them)
That being said, their advertising business is insanely successful. I suspect they could at least double their stock price (and thus the wealth of their investors) if they dumped their speculative bets and focus on ads. It is extremely profitable and revenue keeps growing > 20% from a large base.
- maps
- gmail / google domains / docs
- chrome / chrome box / chrome books
- Android
- YouTube
It just seem like the “dream is dead”. Great business though.
What exactly is wrong with being on the list of potential cloud providers for almost every project? Have you ever been on a non-MS project where someone didn't at least mention GCP instead of AWS?
Google being as profitable as it is can afford options. Why not sit around in number 3 spot?
No CTO who valued their career would go with GCP. “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS/Microsoft”. Even if Azure isn’t held in as high esteem as AWS, businesses trust Microsoft.
for those interested in management fads, https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-succes...
The self-inflicted damage management fads (and Welch's Ilk in particular) have caused to our economy is incalculable.
For example, in 2014, James Hamilton spoke about how every day that year, AWS was adding enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon's global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (2004). That scale of build-out, server purchasing, etc. presumably justifies and enables significant cost reductions, such as buying equipment from vendors in bulk with steep discounts, or buying or building large facilities at once, etc. AWS is custom designing many parts of its stack including networking chips and software, ARM-based CPUs, and more; that kind of investment is only worthwhile at a certain large scale. This scale presumably motivated AWS's purchase of chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015. Some operator of a few colocation facilities, by comparison, could not justify designing custom silicon since their scale would not allow them to recoup the R&D costs. Before AWS reached whatever scale made these kinds of investments worthwhile, they were purchasing commodity hardware.
To pick another example, a company like SpaceX can only be profitable if it launches a certain minimum number of rockets per year. Without enough rocket launches, and demand from customers, you can't recoup the R&D budget needed to design them.
Google has a head start in cloud because their company's existing facilities are already huge. However, public infrastructure has different demands than internal infrastructure, and it sounds like the necessary investments in public have been costly.
If you take your SpaceX example, they need to launch some number of rockets. So what if someone else is launching more?
Why isn't the minimum expressed as a % of the market for example?
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
Its crazy that they would even consider closing google cloud after gaining so much traction. Especially with BigQuery, Dataflow, Firebase, Kubernetes engine and Cloud Run being at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going. Dialogflow is also hitting at the right time where smart home products and home automation are becoming mainstream.
How do they expect to do in 7 years (launch of compute engine) what Amazon did in 13? Its crazy that they would be so unreasonable.
"Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China. Alibaba has limited capabilities in terms of an MSP ecosystem, third-party enterprise software integration and operational tools; and small global field teams limit adoption outside of China."
"Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support."
Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot more sense than AWS.
For example, I've heard engineers complain about bad instances and intermittent networking issues. Concerns that I have never heard about in AWS except in the very early days of it.
I haven't looked at GCP in a long time, but I remember everything being very python-centric and very lightly documented.
Winning in technology often comes down to having a serious customer-centric product management function.
All of the anecdotes in this article are from early to mid 2018.
So why is someone leaking these stores 18 months later?
Detailed multi-year strategic planning as a change from 18-month plans seems more consistent with a recognition that significant progress on the obvious indicators is a long slog and that positioning for it is going to take tracking less direct indicators over a longer period than it is with increased pressure for short-term results. Increased pressure for immediate results tends to be accompanied by reduced long-term planning.
You're cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn't matter to their bottom line.
I assume the thinking is that if the ROI is not high enough, then you might as well just invest that money into the more profitable portions of your business.
If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google's flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.
Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform. That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will never be profitable at Googles current level of investment.
You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to carry on running as before.
The tech is there - but alignment isnt. I dont know if Google is capable of anything outside of search.
Even if the share has to be divided forever between 3 major cloud providers, it would eventually pay off.
That was Microsoft’s Bing versus Google strategy.
Money can’t necessarily buy market dominance, even vast quantities of money.
- thinking outside the box
- considering consequences
- estimating impacts of 2nd and 3rd order
this should lead to the realization this may not be a good idea: why didn't the managers (which quite probably have been engineers before becoming managers) consider that?
They also have no way to fix the customer service issues plaguing every product of theirs, including their cloud stuff. So, so many stories about how bad they are.
Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.
Reese Bobby : Huh? What are you talking about, Son?
Ricky Bobby : That day at school.
Reese Bobby : Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth.
Ricky Bobby : What? I've lived my whole life by that!
GCP is easy to use when compared to AWS according to me. I have used both the service providers. Starting with Firebase, Firebase hosting, App Engine, Compute Engine, GKE, BigQuery and monitoring via stackdriver. Everything just fits very well.
Number of people visiting their yearly Sessions are increasing and their training platforms(Qwiklabs & YouTube videos) are very much precise. Most of the issues are solved in Stackoverflow itself and you have Google groups for each products.
This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once and for all.
But I think even the idea of retiring is insane. This is not any free customer facing product. The impact is totally different.
But warranted, Google Fiber had never grown to Google Cloud's importance I would say
Google Fiber’s attempt to roll out its gigabit internet across the city of Louisville, Kentucky has apparently failed so spectacularly that the company has decided to completely shut down
Cloud is selling extra server space in the same data centers that support Youtube.
And they aren’t just selling spare capacity. They are purposefully building out servers and products for customers.
A big nugget from behind the paywall: "This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said."
The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current business plan: "The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market."
Google offers the Google name and a reputation for ditching services when the wind shifts. They really have little or no competitive advantage here. I'd personally rather build atop Linode or Digital Ocean than Google or at most, stick to the middle of the road, most generic parts of Google's platform.
Too absurd for reality.
Or is it more the fact they considered it at all?
Of course, this article does say "The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies" with emphasis on "big", but maybe there will be some trickle down for the small fry amongst it all.
Therefore, this story is almost equivalent to saying 'Google will ignore cloud from 2023 onward'. Were I ever to consider GCP, this alone would cause me to run far far away.
If Google is serious at all about cloud, it would issue a quick denial. If it does not, well, it would be evidence in favour of the story's credibility.
This is purposefully misleading.
From the Q3 2019 10-Q: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001...
Ad revenue: 33.9B Other revenue: 6.4B
"Google other revenues consist primarily of revenues from: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; Hardware; and YouTube subscriptions."
"Other revenues" is up nearly 40% q/q compared to Q3 2018:
"Our Google other revenues increased $1,788 million and $4,639 million from the three and nine months ended September 30, 2018 to the three and nine months ended September 30, 2019, respectively. The growth was primarily driven by revenues from Google Cloud offerings as well as revenues from Google Play, largely relating to in-app purchases (revenues which we recognize net of payout to developers)."
I begin to wonder if cloud has a parallel here: Does Google actually need, for selfish reasons, to inform significant cloud tenants in GCP that continuity of their business is core, and will be factored into any business development, or retiral, or sale options?
Elastic Search comes to mind: If you build to a dependency on Elastic, in GCP, its comforting to know it works in AWS but they are not an entirely identical product. From a business continuity model, mostly the same. Different tokens, different backend underneat the ES componentry. Does it matter? Depends how critical Clous ES is to your business.
I can understand their ambitious plans, and naturally you decrease funding for a project if it keeps hemorrhaging money. It says the Google C-suite discussed the idea of leaving the market, as any rational person would do, but dismissed it. I think the way article describes these things is putting a whole of color on this.
But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it's good they have big goals. Such a heavy bet on their cloud business seems quite sensible, and while they mention cutting spending if they don't achieve those goals, I don't see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud providers don't even have that amount of money to put into their cloud businesses' and no one is lamenting about that.
To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with customers Google has become since.. I can't even recall. Maybe it's the algorithm-based engineer interviews but something's wrong with Google's internal workings. Google Analytics' dashboard is still terrible, I don't like even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-streaming et cetera. I've never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS's console, even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and practical. It's weird and subjective, I know.
Could it be that when I had my first touch with AWS I had been given a quite positive view of the whole service vs. I have quite negative prior feelings about other Google services that cloud my judgement. Who knows.
Yet still, perhaps Googlers at their fancy Mountain View office have become a bit too detached from the regular Joes working for their gray corporate masters who want nothing to do with their hipster dashboards and just want something simple that works. Maybe pride comes before a fall, like with Microsoft. Luckily for MSFT Nadella started to change their culture.
This strategy is working so well for them, I just don’t see why they would even care about grinding out a little extra market share in the cloud hosting space. Why? Maybe just to boost their ego?
Is it really worth it to them? Whatever comparatively small amount of extra revenue they squeeze out will still be dwarfed by the ad revenue. I imagine they will continue doing what they do.
In a world where the public cloud is dominated by a handful of providers its likely (if not already the case) that AWS will become by far the biggest buyer (with the best economics) of compute and storage.
Obviously there are many other barriers to competing with google, but if amazon could provision the amount of storage and compute needed for YouTube and search in the headroom of its public cloud (and even worse if AWS customers could do this for a cheaper cost than google itself) this would be a negative thing for google.
E.g. Hetzner offers an 8-core 128GB Xeon SkyLake machine with unlimited 1gbps traffic for around $120/month while Google offers n1-highmem-8 with 8 cores and 52GB and no traffic for $240/month.
1gbps unlimited traffic on Hetzner means 324 TB/month, which would cost 26000$ on GCP at the lowest 0.08$/GB rate.
So I would consider cutting the instance prices by half, and dividing the bandwidth prices by 1000, and then they will be competitive.
(If I had negative experiences, believe me, I'd be the first to point them out. Just a happy user.)
There are a few annoying aspects of GCP, but the complexity seems roughly equal to AWS. Both have their pain points.
The $300 free credit is immensely helpful. I hope Google keeps it.
Currently I see
GCP TPU options beat the pants off of everyone. I love bigquery.
Azure has by far the best storage options. The bucket storage is much cheaper. The azure file storage is best of class. I don't like it's bigquery/athena alternatives
AWS is the incumbent, I love the spot market, but more and more we have just been running low end workloads there. Athena is the best of class of analytics tools if your data is already in a bucket.
We are firing up our IBM cloud presence now.
I'm curious as to how this will change with the acquisition of Red Hat. It's still too recent to see any kind of impact yet.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... ?pu=hackernewsyw3xln&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock
How did it end up with utm_source=hackernews in the url? Dang is this something you change or is it user submitted?
What isn’t google going to close?
Would it be reasonable to now run a headline “Google to close cloud in 2023 following failure to dominate”
Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.
It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
There are some differential privacy techniques which might help, but so far they're rather hard to use and there is no tooling for such things.
It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...
i won't say cloud isn't nice, i've been able to learn a lot by playing around with cloud servers. just good to remember that cloud isn't the only option for a lot of workloads.
Besides the notion of Google not investing in cloud seems rather ludicrous to me. They might as well formally announce that they're not competing in tech going forward & just count adtech dollars instead.
Google seems to have a tendency to shut down products that meet the following criteria:
[1] Free products that could have millions or billions of users, but no revenue or not enough revenue to justify a team working on it [2] Free or paid products in which Google is NOT #1
I am as shocked as everyone else that Google would consider shutting down GCP if it's not #2 by 2023. I would have thought they would treat enterprise business very differently from their consumer business ... but I guess not.
I am also extremely skeptical they'll be able to make it to #2 over the next 4 years. So I guess we might as well say goodbye to GCP at this point.
No one trusts your products to stick around or has the confidence that you won't shut down their accounts overnight due to an automation thinking something is wrong.
I think it's prudent to give them some time for internal dust to settle before buying into "conquer the world" deadlines.
1) Do serverless through standards and avoid vendor lock-in
There's a huge opportunity for a cloud vendor who has a credible zero lock-in offering.
Does that imply that Microsoft is first and Amazon is second? That is surprising to me.
Isn’t this backwards? I thought aws was quite a bit bigger than azure.
GOOGLE: we want to to be in the top 2 or we will throw our toys and leave / defund.
EVERYONE ELSE BITTEN BY GOOGLE DISCONTINUING STUFF: errrr, why would I EVER choose you guys to host my stuff NOW unless you are ridiculously cheap and it would be super simple to switch to azure/aws.
heck if I was using them now, and saw this, I'd be making plans/contingencies to shift off them.
It sounds like a leadership problem, because only leadership can change the culture like that.
Unless you are a Fortune 100, they don't do support.
Want to move an SMB with 50+ employees to Chromebooks with Chrome Enterprise? You literally cannot pay Google to support you. You have to work with one of their third-party vendors, who all suck.
Perhaps with Brin and Page finally leaving, this is something that can change. But, I doubt it will, since they hired the leadership that's implemented their vision. The next chapter of Google is likely to be how Sundar Pichai leads them to the brink.
Damn, that's dark.
If people are richly rewarded for launching new products, they'll optimize their work for launching new products, even when that product doesn't make sense, or when more business value could be created by supporting/enhancing an existing product.
For another example, Microsoft's dysfunction and infighting in the Ballmer era can be tied to stack ranking. If your success depends on your peers doing worse than you, you're incentivized to not cooperate at best, snipe and sabotage at worst.
Google absolutely has to change their internal incentives if they want to sustain success into the future. In the case of GCP they're gonna have to start figuring out how they can shift their culture to wooing and keeping enterprise customers. This leak, their culture, and their history is gonna make that a tall order.
To me, this seems less like they're selecting for good engineers and more like they're just selecting for people who really want Google on their resume.
> I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be.
Obviously I am biased. I don't think I'm particularly great or anything, but I find my colleagues to be by far the most capable I've ever worked with, and I did previously work at AWS, where engineers were also very smart.
> With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings.
Personally I think it's an issue with management structure rather than individuals. Frankly I don't think smart people matter all that much.. for the most part you only need sufficiently smart people to do their job, and good culture/management will make the team shine. I'd argue that engineers are individually significantly less important than product managers and managers.
That being said, I think the issue is that Google is just too engineering focused. This makes it a wonderful place to work, but I don't think it leads to great products most of the time. It's fine for products like search and ads, where you can literally measure if you are making improvements, but not so good for most products.
Engineers are more or less allowed to pick what they want to work on. Again, I enjoy this flexibility, but I think it also leads to a lack of focus, especially when product managers probably have a much better understanding of what customers want or need.
Of course, Google is a massive company so I don't know how reflective my own experience is of the larger picture! This is just my personal feeling.
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."
Or, to be perfectly honest, I do know: it's to drive outrage and clicks.
Google is not going shutter any business which brings in more than $1B in profit per year. It never has, and it never will.
Disclosure: ex-Googler, GCP user, hold no position in company stock.
They may have numbers due to Chinese usage, but no Western company is going to use Chinese hosting, ever.
IBM's *-as-a-service ARR is larger than Google Cloud's.
Oracle claims theirs is too, but my understanding is that they roll a lot of their licensing costs into the same reporting, so it's hard to tell for sure.
This gives Alibaba a huge advantage domestically.
Funny that China has a new law allowing them access to any data stored there, so it may stick to operating only in China...
A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.
For my personal projects, GCP is definitely my preference although I also like AWS and enjoyed using Azure while I had a Microsoft BizSpark grant. GCP is very easy to use.
For huge customers GCP provides good support, but I think that the GCP team really have to work harder to support small companies (I base this on HN comments, no personal experience).
Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.