Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#31

Post by boulos »

msravi wrote: post #9

I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region) a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM flexibly to a point, which is important…

Don't feel like you're missing out. The RI "resale" market isn't particularly liquid in the US either and there's a 12% fee to do so.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (so of course I'm biased against RIs)

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#32

Post by willvarfar »

kyrra wrote: post #16
partiallypro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Apps in the enterprise Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust in its offerings and just so much better all around. My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a start-up.) I feel like an SMB…

What issue do you have with Google apps that Microsoft does better at?

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever.

The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc.

Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy animations etc.

Basically, I was forced to go back to Powerpoint, and I didn't want to.

Given that the google docs today is the same google docs from five years back, I figure that Google invests 0% in them and using them themselves.

It is really frustrating - it wouldn't take a programmer more than a few weeks to clean things up and make real headway. I really can't cut google no slack on this - its an unloved backwater of featurelessness.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#33

Post by boulos »

fpgaminer wrote: post #25

I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter. If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down? Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet, having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences have left me sorely disappointed. It's been…

Sorry to hear about your troubles! Assuming you got hit by our painful network outage, we can only repeat: sorry, and we have taken serious action internally to avoid this again.

To explain the difference between your experience (outages taking you out) and "Google.com", I'd guess the difference is that "Google.com" is massively distributed. Perhaps you were running in just one zone or region, or maybe even quite sophisticatedly running across two regions (say us-central1 and us-east1). For Google.com, we have 15 "major" datacenter locations (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...) which are approximately regions in Compute Engine / Cloud parlance.

To your other question though, Cloud is not a side project. Google happens to be enormous, so even though we have thousands of folks across Technical Infrastructure (TI) working on Cloud, thousands divided by tens of thousands is still a "small" percentage (but TI is bigger than say YouTube or Android).

[Edit: And please reach out to support! Don't be silently unhappy, have someone call us up, even if it's just to strangle a PM about how difficult it is to use.]

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#34

Post by SystemOut »

willvarfar wrote: post #32
kyrra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What issue do you have with Google apps that Microsoft does better at?

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy ani…

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available.

Disclosure: I work at Google

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#35

Post by mimming »

fpgaminer wrote: post #25

I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter. If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down? Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet, having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences have left me sorely disappointed. It's been…

Sorry to hear things are more difficult. I'd love to hear specifics, if you're interested in sharing. I'd love to try to get them fixed :)

And yeah, I'm a developer advocate on GCP

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#36

Post by boulos »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #7

GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?

AWS currently has:

- three in the US (1 in Virginia, one in Oregon, one in Northern California)

- two in Europe (Dublin and Frankfurt)

- four in Asia (Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul)

- one in South America (São Paolo)

and both Montreal and India announced. So by part way through 2017, the "numbers" would be sort of comparable but the real factors are your latency requirements, data sovereignty (hello Germany!) and the features you need (and not all features are available in all regions!).

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#37

Post by querulous »

google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#38

Post by shostack »

SystemOut wrote: post #34
willvarfar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy ani…

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available. Disclosure: I work at Google

If you are a heavy Excel user, Sheets just doesn't compare in many ways. Even for basic things such as pivot tables. The interface is just painful, and you flat out can't do certain things.

I really with that team would bring it up to feature parity similar to how Marissa Mayer grabbed everything she could from AdWords in terms of features and UI design.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#39

Post by solidsnack9000 »

fpgaminer wrote: post #25

I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter. If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down? Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet, having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences have left me sorely disappointed. It's been…

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with GCP. In my network there are a lot of people who speak well of it, specifically with an eye to performance. Would you say your difficulties are around the APIs and processes? Or have there been misaligned expectations?

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#40

Post by willvarfar »

SystemOut wrote: post #34
willvarfar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy ani…

I'm not sure if you're saying you think that Google doesn't use Docs, Sheets, etc inside of Google but that is the entire opposite of what is happening. Anything that you'd normally do in Office is done on Google for Work at Google. There really isn't any other option available. Disclosure: I work at Google

I pity you all.

You are forced to use it, but seemingly nobody is allowed to improve it.

I too use it daily as my employer is a google apps customer. Which is why I am so frustrated and really need to vent about how featureless it is, and especially about how its improvement trajectory is so flat.

Post reply on HN