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Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

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Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#41

Post by dragonwriter »

jedberg wrote: post #27
nodesocket wrote: post #19

I'm calling this: after attending Google Cloud Next last week, and seeing the huge improvements to GCP in the last 18 months, I am supremely confident that AWS should be worried about Google as a legitimate competitor. $GOOG is betting big on GCP, and they are executing at a very high level releasing iterative products and new features. I'm recommending GCP for all my clients (shameless plug https://elasticbyte.net )…

Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise. Google's sales method is, "There's the docs, good luck". Enterprises don't like that. They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out for lunches and dinners. So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how…

> Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise.

They seem to be doing the build technology and sell to and partner with forms that specialize in enterprise sales thing, while building their own enterprise sales capacity.

Lots of players now dominant in enterprise and very big on direct enterprise sales (including Microsoft) got to that position largely by the same route, unseating predecessors who had much more expertise in direct enterprise sales.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#42

Post by ma2rten »

jedberg wrote: post #38
ma2rten wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last job I actually talked to a sales person from Google who tried really hard to get us to move to GCP.

Did they succeed?

Partly. They created a VPN between AWS and GCP and moved some data warehouse/analytics stuff to Google. This is after I left, so I don't know the details.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#43

Post by vacri »

nodesocket wrote: post #24
bitmapbrother wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimate competitor? With all of the data centers they have sprouting up this year and their superior networking technology and infrastructure I'll go on the record and say they'll be #1 in 5 years.

Completely agree they absolutely nailed networking and VPCs. GCP network attached disks are so much faster and easier to groc than EBS. The bigger the GCP disk, the faster it performs. If you want to maximize IOPS make a disk 750GB or larger. Compared that with EBS that has overhead with concepts like enhanced networking, EBS optimized, and don't even get me started on provisioned IOPS.

Provisioned IOPS is still there, but in AWS the standard disk is 'the bigger the disk, the faster it is' - 3IOPS/GB (theoretically), with max IOPS at 1000GB. 'Enhanced Networking' is on most server types now as well.

AWS pricing is definitely not made to be simple to understand, though...

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#44

Post by jedberg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #41
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise. Google's sales method is, "There's the docs, good luck". Enterprises don't like that. They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out for lunches and dinners. So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how…

> Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise. They seem to be doing the build technology and sell to and partner with forms that specialize in enterprise sales thing, while building their own enterprise sales capacity. Lots of players now dominant in enterprise and very big on direct…

This is a fair assessment. It will be interesting to see how it plays out now that they have a semi-complete enterprise offering.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#45

Post by bitmapbrother »

jacquesm wrote: post #34
nodesocket wrote: post #19

I'm calling this: after attending Google Cloud Next last week, and seeing the huge improvements to GCP in the last 18 months, I am supremely confident that AWS should be worried about Google as a legitimate competitor. $GOOG is betting big on GCP, and they are executing at a very high level releasing iterative products and new features. I'm recommending GCP for all my clients (shameless plug https://elasticbyte.net )…

Without functioning customer support all that is moot.

Have you even used the service?

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#46

Post by bitmapbrother »

jedberg wrote: post #27
nodesocket wrote: post #19

I'm calling this: after attending Google Cloud Next last week, and seeing the huge improvements to GCP in the last 18 months, I am supremely confident that AWS should be worried about Google as a legitimate competitor. $GOOG is betting big on GCP, and they are executing at a very high level releasing iterative products and new features. I'm recommending GCP for all my clients (shameless plug https://elasticbyte.net )…

Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise. Google's sales method is, "There's the docs, good luck". Enterprises don't like that. They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out for lunches and dinners. So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how…

>So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how to enterprise, and in fact it's fairly counter-cultural for them.

They have over 3 million businesses that use G Suite and their other enterprise offerings. To imply that they no inclination on "how to enterprise" or that "it's fairly counter-cultural for them" is disingenuous to say the least.

>But right now, almost all the money in cloud is with the enterprise, and right now Google has no idea how to address that market.

That's amusing considering all of the enterprise customers that are using GCP. Perhaps you should watch their cloud conference.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#47

Post by Guest98123 »

nodesocket wrote: post #40
jedberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did attend briefly, and I got a run down from some enterprise folks. They said Google appears to be thinking about making an effort towards enterprise, but they aren't there yet. Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product. They are still trying to solve human problems with engineering, and sales is a tough nut to crac…

> Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product. Here's the catch, the "bunch of non-engineer humans" as you called them are not stupid though. All around these people are watching the landscape and market. They are aware that GCP has a superior pricing structure and can be up to 50% cheaper[1]. Therefore my theory is that…

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation. However, they all account for Google sustained use discount (30% automatic discount on instances that ran for the entire month)."

I'll never understand why people keep referencing that 50% cheaper article. They take into account the 30% monthly discount from Google, but ignore the 47% discount I currently get from Amazon by reserving my instances for a year. Why? Well, because the author thinks "Reserved Instances are bullshit!".

Now, I agree reserved instances are not ideal, but if you're trying to write an article about pricing, it's absurd to exclude such a discount. It's obvious the author was just going for click-bait.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#48

Post by oaktowner »

Waterluvian wrote: post #13
pugio wrote: post #12

I know it's Pi day, and the title uses the word for the greek letter, but my mind read the domain and immediately thought Google was offering an API for automated pie delivery. Now I really want this.

I thought it was someone with a large array of raspberry pi computers for rent. It would be like an itty bitty AWS with adorable APIs at cute as a button prices.

There's a great April Fool's joke in there somewhere.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#49

Post by jedberg »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #46
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most folks on HN are part of the startup crowd, and what that crowd misses is that while GCP is technically superior in every way, they have no idea how to sell to an enterprise. Google's sales method is, "There's the docs, good luck". Enterprises don't like that. They like to be hand held, they like lots of humans taking them out for lunches and dinners. So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how…

>So far Google has not shown any inclination that they know how to enterprise, and in fact it's fairly counter-cultural for them. They have over 3 million businesses that use G Suite and their other enterprise offerings. To imply that they no inclination on "how to enterprise" or that "it's fairly counter-cultural for them" is disingenuous to say the least. >But right now, almost all the money in cloud is with the en…

Selling GSuite is very different than selling compute. Besides being SaaS vs. infrastructure, the GSuite contracts are tiny compared to enterprise infrastructure. If a company with 100,000 employees paid list price for GSuite monthly, that would only be $1,000,000/mo, which is peanuts for an enterprise contract. Especially since they would probably get a huge bulk discount.

What I mean by counter-cultural is that at Google, they try to solve problems with computers instead of humans. It's worked really well for them so far, but it won't work for selling huge enterprise contracts. Yes, they have spun up a small support and sales team, but they will need to grow it a lot to support lots of large enterprises. Also, in companies that cater to enterprises, the sales team drives the engineering roadmap, or it is at least a collaboration. From talking to folks in Google, it seems that they don't really allow the sales team any input in to product cycles or technology.

And I attended their cloud conference and I'm very aware of their customer base vs. AWS. Their customers would all be considered fairly small to AWS, with the exception of a few big players.

Edit: An additional anecdote, I saw firsthand how they support an enterprise install of thousands of GSuite users. For the most part, it was "there's the docs, good luck". Sometimes they would assign an engineer, who would never come on site, to tell us that what we want is impossible.

Re: Google Cloud Platform’s Pi API – With access to 750B digits of Pi

#50

Post by jedberg »

nodesocket wrote: post #40
jedberg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did attend briefly, and I got a run down from some enterprise folks. They said Google appears to be thinking about making an effort towards enterprise, but they aren't there yet. Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product. They are still trying to solve human problems with engineering, and sales is a tough nut to crac…

> Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product. Here's the catch, the "bunch of non-engineer humans" as you called them are not stupid though. All around these people are watching the landscape and market. They are aware that GCP has a superior pricing structure and can be up to 50% cheaper[1]. Therefore my theory is that…

That's not how enterprise sales cycles work though. They don't call you, you call them. Even when they want the hot new thing, they shoot an email off and say, "please have a salesperson here to make a presentation on why we should switch to you".

And at the moment, AWS has them beat hands down on governance. It's one area where GCP still needs to play catch up, and it's really important for enterprises. I'm sure they'll get there, but they aren't there yet.

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