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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#111

Post by st3v3r »

brassic wrote: post #85
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?

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

That's not really an OS level thing, though. That's an application level thing. Finder was chosen not to be extensible, and Explorer was. There are Finder replacements that are.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#112

Post by foxylad »

user5994461 wrote: post #53
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…

> 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.

We jumped on Appengine very early, and have never regretted it. It's remarkably stable, and not having to worry about the security issue du jour, scaling, or any other sysadmin stuff means we can concentrate on what we do best - building apps.

I've been surprised how few people understand the value proposition, and how little competition there is. When I first heard about Azure I expected it to be PaaS, but it turned out to be Windows-first AWS.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#113

Post by detaro »

foxylad wrote: post #112
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.

We jumped on Appengine very early, and have never regretted it. It's remarkably stable, and not having to worry about the security issue du jour, scaling, or any other sysadmin stuff means we can concentrate on what we do best - building apps. I've been surprised how few people understand the value proposition, and how little competition there is. When I first heard about Azure I expected it to be PaaS, but it turned…

Isn't Azure Cloud Services pretty close to Appengine?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#114

Post by seregine »

jimbokun wrote: post #94
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 infrastruc…

Products and platforms overlap quite a bit, e.g. many enterprise products can be thought of as platforms, or AdSense and Android. That's why I think it's less useful to contrast the two companies on a product vs. platform axis, and why I find the cultural differences more interesting.

Google does make great products, especially when it's a matter of presenting a simple elegant interface to a complex internal system. I'm a big fan of Google Search and Maps UX, and Google Now.

But the UX of a product isn't just its immediate interface, it's also all the interactions you have with support, documentation, and change over time, and trust. The cultural differences are more evident there, though some teams at Google are getting pretty good at these things as well.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#115

Post by olimashi »

halflings wrote: post #108
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 don't think Google is marketing their Cloud NLP/Vision APIs for big enterprise customers that have very specific needs. Those APIs are meant for people that have common needs ( = want to identify which items or people are on a photo, understand queries in commonly used languages, etc.) If you have specific needs, then you can use TensorFlow running on the app engine (as they will soon be providing hosted and GPU-ac…

I guess that's kind of my point about Ben's argument. Are pre-trained models going to be the "sustainable advantage" against AWS. I don't think so.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#116

Post by JeremyBanks »

jptman wrote: post #103
trautlein wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Doesn't Google already have a web based, but internal only, IDE? I don't know if that'd be easy to make external, but my understanding is that they've got a lot of internal users on it.

Yeah, and Cider was getting surprisingly good at the point I left Google (I was initially a skeptic). But so much of what made it good came from its tight integration with other internal tooling. I'd be surprised if it's ever externalized in a form that captures most of that value.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#117

Post by jacques_chester »

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…

I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal. Cloud Foundry was partly inspired by and is somewhat in competition with Heroku.

"Do one thing and do it well" is underselling Heroku.

PaaSes have to do a lot of things and do them well.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#118

Post by wangii »

>> Microsoft did the same with its Win32 API. Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS ...

The author loses his creditability since here.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#119

Post by mikecb »

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?

Google's new NoVa DC will probably be in/around the equinix right down the street from AWS.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#120

Post by jonwayne »

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…

We are indeed working on creating a standalone Task Queues service that will work across all hosting platforms. You can sign up for the alpha here: https://goo.gl/Ya0AZd

(I work on the Python developer experience for Google Cloud Platform)

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