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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#91

Post by newjersey »

serge2k wrote: post #68
btilly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would state the tradeoff very differently. Amazon gives each team independence. Therefore it is virtually impossible to insist on consistency between what different teams do. Each team makes sense on its own, but the whole can be very, very confusing. Google has a process that results in much greater internal consistency. It may not be a great UX, but it is consistent. Inside and out. For small systems, Amazon is g…

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here.

I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says:

> Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511...

It sounds like they have been committed to it at least since 2005? https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonCom... I'd imagine internally it'd have to be a lot sooner than that because I think they were ready to release AWS by 2006.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a holy war. I just wonder if there's any connection... What do you think?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#92

Post by acdha »

iainmerrick wrote: post #84
user5994461 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

App Engine seems to me like the classic Google product: some cool ideas but the initial experience was clunky and the pricing model scared people, especially since you were locking yourself into a proprietary architecture. Google engineers could point to various things it did to help with future scaling needs and took the advantages of things like the NoSQL data model for granted but everyone I knew who didn't work for Google was generally asking questions like “How long would it take to migrate if they cancel the service?” or “What's my coping strategy if they have another major outage?”.

I think a little time invested on customer service and user experience would have gone a long way.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#93

Post by NetStrikeForce »

ap22213 wrote: post #57
dekhn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to move data between AWS and GCP using a hard drive? The networks between the two cloud providers are immense.

I didn't realize that they have direct connections. The AWS data center down the street (Virginia) is directly connected to some google cloud datacenter? Sorry - I'm generally ignorant of datacenter technology. So a back of envelope calculation says that it would take around 10 days to transfer 100 PiB over Gigabit ethernet. When you say immense, do you mean faster than that?

They probably meet at some exchange very close to the DCs

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#94

Post by jimbokun »

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…

"Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics."

You are using the terminology of products and platforms with the exact opposite meaning of the article's author.

Those "services with well-defined interfaces" become a platform others can use to build their own products. Similarly with the e-commerce and fulfillment infrastructure third party sellers can use. And maybe the transportation infrastructure in the future.

I also think you vastly underestimate the quality of Google's UX. Type any thing you can think of into one simple box, and you get surprisingly useful auto-completions, relevant spelling corrections, and almost always find the answer to the question you had when you started typing. There are any number of complex back end services working in parallel to resolve your query, with results gathered, ranked, merged, and rendered in a fraction of a second. Pretty hard to beat that user experience.

This is how the author defines product focus, emphasis on combining many components internally to provide an outstanding end user experience, without necessarily making the components available to be used by others to create their own user experience for their customers.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#95

Post by ben_jones »

waprin wrote: post #88
ben_jones wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for your comment and I want to say, though my comment was rather pointy, I respect the work all of you are doing and I do see a lot of improvement in the platform.

I keep a local branch of the python-docs-sample repo and just took a gander to refresh my memory. Specifically I see a quite a few examples using class based views based from the webapp2 package. I don't think it's unreasonable to have this as a major reference point, but it does require some extra documentation reading when converting to say, function based views in Flask.

Our personal use case is python3 in the flexible environment and I'd like to point out two notes while I have you here (if it's appropriate):

1) Are task queues coming to GAE Flexible environment - python? (and more over is feature parity coming between the google.appengine and google.cloud packages)

2) It's undocumented that the flexible environment of python requires a specific configuration variable to be set in order to make a connection to cloudSQL. I raised a support ticket for it a few weeks ago and the documentation hasn't been changed. It took me a few hours to debug it personally and I would like to save others the effort, can users make a pull request on the docs directly? For reference the variable is "beta_settings: cloud_sql_instances:" in app.yaml (it's present in the python-docs-samples but has no comment explaining its significance/requirement).

EDIT: I can no longer edit my original comment, but it seems GAE flexibly environment for python does support web sockets, though I would question the effectiveness of stateful servers in GAE. Of course thats an implementation problem and not one with GAE.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#96

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

newjersey wrote: post #91
serge2k wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here. I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says: > Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511... It soun…

If we use Steve Yegge's famous rant for reference, it goes back to 2002.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#97

Post by lmickh »

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…

Those Azure gains only exist within a small space. Once you step outside the C# ASP.net sphere, their picture is no where near as rosy. Much of their offerings are minimal products for checkbox comparison sake.

When the answer to your tech problem is not ASP.net/SQL Server, you are going to find their services much more difficult to put up with compared to the competition.

Before someone jumps in with ".Net is huge in the X space" thing: There has been double digit growth of close to a decade now of platforms that don't run .Net. That ecosphere was a giant. Now it isn't.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#98

Post by waprin »

ben_jones wrote: post #95
waprin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for your comment and I want to say, though my comment was rather pointy, I respect the work all of you are doing and I do see a lot of improvement in the platform. I keep a local branch of the python-docs-sample repo and just took a gander to refresh my memory. Specifically I see a quite a few examples using class based views based from the webapp2 package. I don't think it's unreasonable to have this as a maj…

Thanks for the feedback, not pointy at all.

You're right my original comment was misleading, most of the GAE Standard samples are webapp2, but that's because it comes built-in to the platform and can be specified in the app.yaml, so webapp2 doesn't require people to `pip -t` to vendor Flask into the project. It might be worth revisiting if some of those samples should be in Flask or in both.

1) Guessing you already know you can use Pub/Sub for background tasks, examples here in our Bookshelf app:

https://cloud.google.com/python/getting-started/using-pub-su...

I think Product knows that the developer experience for tasks could be better and closer to Standard, but we haven't announced any public roadmap for task queues on Flexible.

2) I see references to that variable in our docs so I'm not sure where you're saying it's missing. Unfortunately you can't submit PRs for our docs, I wish you could.

Thanks again for the feedback, getting pretty off-topic so maybe good to take any further conversation to #python in GCP Slack?

https://googlecloud-community.slack.com https://gcp-slack.appspot.com/

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#99

Post by brilliantcode »

olimashi wrote: post #74

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 ef…

I think you've really pointed out a very important flaw in that as developers and startups we don't have terabytes of training data.

However, I'm not sure who's in the leading edge here while Microsoft seems to suggest as the leader, but in the end machine learning, deep learning will be commoditized with enough training already baked in.

ex. Need your web app translated flawlessly into Farsi? Just drop in farsi.js to your and etc.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#100

Post by paulddraper »

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.

Are your executives launching servers? Do they care about their IDE's UI too?
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