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

How Google Is Challenging AWS

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 175 posts

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#41

Post by bduerst »

ranman wrote: post #31
bduerst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now How so? I thought this was brought up just a week ago saying GCloud is consistently cheaper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021

That article had a unique relationship with reality. A few of my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 (I work for AWS)

I definitely agree on your critique of the bandwidth claims, but the gist I got from that article was that custom instances outcompete AWS's reserved instances on price - i.e. per CPU and per GB memory, GCloud is cheaper.

Is that not true?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#42

Post by ranman »

bduerst wrote: post #41
ranman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article had a unique relationship with reality. A few of my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 (I work for AWS)

I definitely agree on your critique of the bandwidth claims, but the gist I got from that article was that custom instances outcompete AWS's reserved instances on price - i.e. per CPU and per GB memory, GCloud is cheaper. Is that not true?

Actually I do think that GCE offers cheaper instances, but the 50% overall price reduction claim is unsubstantiated. The author compared completely different instance types. Monthly discounts does make GCE cheaper but for many instance types without that discount it's actually more expensive on GCE.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#43

Post by saosebastiao »

darawk wrote: post #15
darksaints wrote: post #7

> Amazon’s AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company successful in the first place I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. As far as Amazon's AWS strategy, I can't comment (I worked in the retail business side). But I can comment on a relatively…

> I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and t…

>Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not?

Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#44

Post by govg »

brianwawok wrote: post #34
hueving wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI doesn't really matter for people with enough instances to care about money. Nobody is going to blow $1,000/mo because the interface is nicer.

Really? Because slack is IRC with a nicer UI. There are many examples of this. Executives love slick UIs and flashy dashboards. Executives have a lot of power.

Should we be looking at Slack as an example here? Their interface is necessary for people to use it, if your company uses Slack you will have to use their UI/UX. Whereas for AWS, your engineers are more likely to make the call on UI/UX, and not the executives.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#45

Post by vmasto »

dekhn wrote: post #28
ranman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point (many 1000s of terrabytes) it is faster and cheaper to ship the data on physical devices than it is to send it over the network. (I work for AWS)

Yup, and I work for Google. We routinely copy petabytes between AWS and GCP. It's not currently more efficient to ship petabytes if you include the time to copy to the device and then recover it.

Given that Amazon currently offers this as a service (two different services actually, snowball and snowmobile for exabytes), i wonder what gives?

Is one less informed than the other or what am I missing something? Why such disparity in opinion?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#46

Post by brilliantcode »

If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost.

If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge.

By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#47

Post by dekhn »

vmasto wrote: post #45
dekhn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and I work for Google. We routinely copy petabytes between AWS and GCP. It's not currently more efficient to ship petabytes if you include the time to copy to the device and then recover it.

Given that Amazon currently offers this as a service (two different services actually, snowball and snowmobile for exabytes), i wonder what gives? Is one less informed than the other or what am I missing something? Why such disparity in opinion?

Google also offers this as a service;

I've work on high performance networking file transfers. my experience is that most people who move data get very low utilization compared to the actual throughput of the network. People typically use one TCP connection, one process. high performance data transfers use thousands of TCP connections and thousands of processes.

Many other people underestimate the time/labor effort of dealing with a snowball.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#48

Post by dekhn »

ranman wrote: post #42
bduerst wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree on your critique of the bandwidth claims, but the gist I got from that article was that custom instances outcompete AWS's reserved instances on price - i.e. per CPU and per GB memory, GCloud is cheaper. Is that not true?

Actually I do think that GCE offers cheaper instances, but the 50% overall price reduction claim is unsubstantiated. The author compared completely different instance types. Monthly discounts does make GCE cheaper but for many instance types without that discount it's actually more expensive on GCE.

Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#49

Post by Rapzid »

seregine wrote: post #25

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matte…

AWS has fallen flat in the past with cross-service initiatives. Tagging and IAM keys come to mind. I haven't personally used Google much but from what I hear their stuff is a bit more cohesive..

This new Org stuff might be a recent exception though; I haven't read through it all and tested it to know. Hopefully.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#50

Post by zippergz »

saosebastiao wrote: post #43
darawk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and t…

>Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the…

I think you may be confusing profit and revenue. Amazon's revenue is higher than Google's.
Post reply on HN