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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#71

Post by ranman »

user5994461 wrote: post #61
dekhn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Author of the polemic post here! :D @ranman: You could start by disclosing that you work for AWS ;) I'll stand by my word. I can present the pricing comparison at reinvent 2017 if you'd like. 1) The equivalent instances are cheaper on Google. 2) Automatic discount is significantly superior and more customer friendly that reserved instances. 3) Google is faster or more flexible, usually both. That means that when you…

I disclosed in the parent post and the linked post. Not sure what more you want me to do there sorry.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#72

Post by zeveb »

daxfohl wrote: post #66

> Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps that even today keep Windows at the center of business. Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

> Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

I certainly don't think so (although there are some nice things about the Windows kernel, if one comes from a VMS background), and it's certainly not the reason for the success of Windows. Remember that MS-DOS beat Mac OS; Windows 1 beat Mac OS; Windows 3.1 beat Mac OS; Windows 95 beat Mac OS. None of those was technically any good whatsoever, and only one of those had a UI that was worth shaking a stick at.

The reasons for the success of Windows are non-technical: Bill Gates's mother served on a charity board with the chairman of IBM; business bought IBM computers because no-one ever got fired for buying IBM; IBM clones were cheaper than Macs; IBM clones were more extensible and hackable than Macs; Unix workstation vendors thought they could keep milking their cash cows; Microsoft engaged in noncompetitive behaviour; random chance.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#73

Post by saosebastiao »

darawk wrote: post #56
saosebastiao wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Their gross profit in 2015 was 35 billion. Google's was 46. The difference in final profit comes down to how much they reinvest in R&D and future growth. I'd call that the same league.

You are sorely mistaken as to the difference between gross and net profit. R&D is in there, sure...along with a billion other things that also don't get accounted for in cost of goods sold.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#74

Post by olimashi »

I think Ben (who I generally think is right on) in this post misapprehends the effectiveness of generalized data for machine learning services and thus the effectiveness of this approach in Google’s strategy here. Perhaps the slide makers in Mountain View have the same misapprehension.

1 - Prediction API - you provide your own data there, so no data advantage from Google there.

2 - Cloud Natural Language API - the effectiveness really depends on what type of text you want to understand. If Google’s training data includes information about my type of text application great, but if it doesn’t then what? How do I know that?

3 - Cloud Vision API - likewise. Can I subset the training set? Provide my own examples? If they subset, can I inspect the examples?

4 - Translation API seems like the exception here, mainly because the odds are that customers of translation service are unlikely to have collected language pairs and this collection is more highly specialized. But it’s unclear that this one API would be the deciding factor for many companies choosing which cloud vendor to use.

ML services as a differentiator have yet to be proven out. I am highly suspect. Yes, some big general data sets will be better on some applications than others, but an enterprises’ own data about their problem will always be better than a huge, general data set. And if you’re using your own data anyway, you’re going to care about all the platformy things Amazon has already been winning with.

Barring proprietary breakthroughs in unsupervised learning, I don’t believe that this strategy as outlined will work in practice.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#75

Post by daxfohl »

brilliantcode wrote: post #46

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 the…

What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#76

Post by vmasto »

dekhn wrote: post #47
vmasto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

So the question then is what are those services for?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#77

Post by brilliantcode »

daxfohl wrote: post #75
brilliantcode wrote: post #46

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 the…

What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?

Yes so deploying on Azure is right clicking the VS project and hitting deploy, it walks me through all the setup steps in one spot without leaving the IDE.

This takes a huge cognitive load off the developer who won't have to do context switching between portal.zure.com and VS.

But portal.azure.com is a much better, smooth, streamlined & intuitive interface than AWS, and I find myself wanting to work with Azure more and more.

There is still a stickiness to AWS and stuff like Cognito seems way more less intrusive from brand point of view (MS AD redirects you to onmicrosoftonline.com when logging in user)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#78

Post by darawk »

saosebastiao wrote: post #73
darawk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their gross profit in 2015 was 35 billion. Google's was 46. The difference in final profit comes down to how much they reinvest in R&D and future growth. I'd call that the same league.

You are sorely mistaken as to the difference between gross and net profit. R&D is in there, sure...along with a billion other things that also don't get accounted for in cost of goods sold.

Ya, but Amazon doesn't break it down any further than that. I'm aware that there are other things in there, but it is well known that the primary contributor to that figure is R&D.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#79

Post by brilliantcode »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #67
brilliantcode wrote: post #46

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 the…

I haven't used Azure, so I'm a bit confused. Do you mean something with different capabilities than Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio? https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/

nice find! I didn't know about GCT plugin but yes that's more or less along the lines of what I expect from AWS.

However, Google Cloud really hasn't entered my mind as much as Azure has this year. AWS has always been there. I'm not sure as to why this is maybe I have built a perception that GCE is more expensive and my documentation experience with Google wasn't anymore smoother than AWS.

One thing for sure, Build 2016 earlier this year was one of the key driver for my conversion + Nadella's leadership.

Google Cloud has always been obscured by AWS and now Azure in my mind and so far, they've yet to really jump out at me like AWS does on HN regularly which Azure is now catching up.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#80

Post by daxfohl »

daxfohl wrote: post #70

Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. That seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It seems like they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their vi…

The article mentioned kubernetes multiple times and I think it's providers like Heroku that actually stand the most to gain there. With kubernetes in theory they should no longer have to make you choose between providers, and be able to run on spot instances of whatever provider is cheapest at the time. You just choose your max latency at certain geo areas and a budget to balance by, some AI to help you determine the tradeoffs, and it does the rest. If Heroku isn't working toward that then there has to be someone doing so soon. If not it seems like there's a pretty big opportunity there.
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