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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#81
post #45
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?

There's likely a significant difference in cost and capacity between copying a PB of data from a corporate datacenter over that corporation's connectivity to S3 and copying from S3 to Google over Amazon's and Google's connectivity.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#82
post #72
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…

So kinda kills the primary analogy the article is based on.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#83
post #22
post #18

tldr; competition is good. Google Cloud UI is vastly superior to AWS. It's clear to me AWS didn't put a lot of effort into their interface, Google console is nice too in order to quickly experiment with the platform. On the other hand, it seems to me that AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now.

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.

Actually, in larger enterprises (or maybe this should be "non-startup stage companies") I find its actually often the exact opposite.

If we're profitable, we're going to invest in a better working experience so that our employees spend minimal time 'dealing with' a tool's 'issues'. -because we can.

If we're a smaller pre-profit/cash-strapped/VC-beholdened company everyone is going to be expected to tolerate working with 'rough' tools if it can save a few bucks.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#84

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…

> App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow. App Engine was a precursor that came 5 years too early. The hype about serverless is only starting now.

Was it really just "too early"? I always thought App Engine was a fantastic idea, and I wondered why it never seemed to catch on.

Choice of languages -- initially just Python and Java? Fiddly APIs, different from competing platforms but not actually super-simple for simple tasks? Lack of a straightforward way of running background tasks (still a bit of a mess)? Lack of management support? Maybe just underpowered at first for large sites, and insufficiently compelling for small sites to build a loyal fanbase?

I just built a new, very small project in App Engine (Python, standard environment). It works fine but the tools are quite fiddly. There are plenty of docs but they're a bit of a trainwreck, in the classic Google "the old way is deprecated, but the new way is still in beta" way (e.g. standard versus flexible environments).

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#85
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?

To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#86

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…

Only a few months ago Amazon bought Cloud9, arguably the best online IDE. [1] Perhaps they might beat Google to the punch?

[1]: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/07/14/amazon-buys-cloud9-aws/

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#87
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a single programmer, manager, or any other central office employee gets paid out of COGS. There are at least 50,000 of those. Same goes for real estate costs, legal costs, etc. Servers and their operations costs might go into COGS on the AWS side, but definitely not on the retail side.

Breaking out investment vs administrative cost is actually very hard to do. Is a programmer working on a new feature an R&D cost, or an administrative cost? What if it's a new service? What if it's a new product? What if it's a bug fix? What if it's a critical vulnerability? What if your programmer does all of the above at different times of the year? It's pretty much impossible to separate administrative overhead from research and development in tech companies, which is why they tend to not do it unless they are forced to. It's up to their shareholders or the SEC to force them to do it if it happens, which hasn't been the case for Amazon yet.

It is assumed that they would be turning a profit if they decided to just keep the lights on and not invest in the future. That's what they tell us, and that's what we see (new product and service announcements tell us as much). What we don't know from public information is whether they would be 10% more profitable or 10,000% more profitable. And that's before we know if their investments will pay off or if they become another perpetually subsidized program like Amazon Fresh. That's why Amazon stock is considered to be a speculative investment, whereas Google and Microsoft are more in the blue chip camp. My experience and hunch tells me that Amazon stock prices are at least 50% undeserved hype.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#88

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…

App engine is the biggest enigma. On paper it is a near perfect cloud experience. It has a huge range of services covering the needs of most web applications: task queues, caching, RDBMS, storage, monitoring, logging, a fantastic dashboard; the list goes on and the scope of GCP and GAE in general is truly massive. At first glance the documentation is exhaustive, support quick, and you get the feeling that the product…

> All our python examples are in framework X, that's sufficient for everyone using framework Y, right?

I work on GCP on the Python samples.

We generally pick Flask, since our thinking is that for many API calls, it is pretty much identical code in other frameworks, and Flask has minimal boilerplate.

We have quick starts for Django for all our platforms. I think Flask + Django covers a huge chunk of Python frameworks people are using.

If you think we are missing important Python samples, you can file an issue here:

https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/python-docs-samples

There are a lot of potential samples to write, so any guidance on which ones people want is always helpful to us.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#89
post #49

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.

Reading GCP documentation is a delight. Reading AWS documentation feels like reading Salesforce's documentation.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#90

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…

Only a few months ago Amazon bought Cloud9, arguably the best online IDE. [1] Perhaps they might beat Google to the punch? [1]: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/07/14/amazon-buys-cloud9-aws/

yup, this was what I was referring to in my other comment.

a cloud based IDE is certainly lighter than VS. the fact that it's accessible anywhere is a huge plus.

I would still like to see a desktop version of C9, sort of like Atom & Microsoft Visual Code.

It's going to be hard to justify using Google Cloud after this when I know I'm most likely to ditch Azure in the process as well.

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