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Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

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Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#51

Post by pm90 »

What this articles doesn't mention that much is that IBM and Google are both betting on catching the wave of containerization by following a somewhat similar strategy.

They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development, AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.

As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the buzzwords).

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#52

Post by dsl »

partiallypro wrote: post #29
excalibur wrote: post #2

Related, seemingly contradictory: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...

This is one of the main reasons I am so highly confused why Netflix is so melded with AWS. When Netflix more or less made itself 100% AWS a year or two back, I was genuinely baffled.

> Netflix is so melded with AWS.

But it isn't.

Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go down and customers don't get that upset.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#53

Post by mark-r »

ernsheong wrote: post #42
mark-r wrote: post #39

Google has always seemed actively hostile when it comes to support, since they don't like to leave any power in the hands of a human when an algorithm could do it more efficiently. Is cloud any different?

You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product issue tracker. To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: https://cloud.google.com/support/

It would be interesting to hear some contrasting reports from people who have actually needed support.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#54

Post by sandGorgon »

ernsheong wrote: post #44
sandGorgon wrote: post #43

Google has two big problems - developer relations and compliances. Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups. AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live ch…

You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.

These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#55

Post by latch »

toast0 wrote: post #49
latch wrote: post #9

Am I the only one that thinks IBM's acquisition of Softlayer did more to help Amazon than it did to help IBM? (or, more specifically, their mishandling of the acquisition) Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud…

As a customer of Softlayer, I haven't noticed very much from the acquisition. Support has gotten a bit worse, but our account has also gotten smaller, so I'm not sure if we were getting special treatment before. I still think the old portal was faster, and login via IBMid is dumb, but the servers still work, the network still pretty much works, and it feels like their networking monitoring got somewhat better. Their…

I didn't mean to imply that it got worse for existing customers. But I feel like by killing the Softlayer brand (softlayer.com is just a landing page where everything redirect to IBM cloud) and making "cloud" the focus, they're missing out on new business (including winning back people to baremetal who are tired of AWS' poor price/performance).

Maybe they still are and I'm just not paying enough attention, but Softlayer was essentially the _top_ choice for dedicated hosting for the large number of customers that wanted something more reliable than OVH without having to go to Rackspace.

I feel like they just walked about from that. Or, more to my point, that they're neglecting driving business to it to a point where it's actually helping AWS grow.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#56

Post by jhwang5 »

aboutruby wrote: post #18

From a user point of view I much prefer AWS than Google Cloud (and I got used to the AWS names). Also as AWS is what basically everyone used, all the tooling is built mainly around it and sometimes support Google Cloud but it's not very well tested / supported. All that steams basically from being the leader by a vast margin.

What people don't get is that all AWS services work seamlessly with each other. There's no use major use case that AWS don't provide a solve for. If you already use EC2 and S3, then it's obviously lower hurdle to also use RDS, Dynamo, etc. Then before you know it, you are using Lambda, ECS, etc.

To sum it up, anyone who says GCP is easier to use than AWS don't understand the power of having the most feature-rich ecosystem.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#57

Post by [deleted] »

emilsedgh wrote: post #38
richardw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park. Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt th…

> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. I'd be interested to know about the number of: * Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku. If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room…

[deleted]

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#58

Post by pjmlp »

emilsedgh wrote: post #38
richardw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park. Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt th…

> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. I'd be interested to know about the number of: * Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku. If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room…

All the .NET projects I have done on the cloud have been deployed on Amazon EC2 instances.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#59

Post by ernsheong »

sandGorgon wrote: post #54
ernsheong wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.

These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".

Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community.

For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues

You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information.

There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#60

Post by solipsism »

Analemma_ wrote: post #12

Cloud is where Google's reputation for killing products is really going to haunt it. Every time HN commenters complain about Google axing a service, there are lots of "you're making too big a deal about this, no one is leaving Google because they ditched Reader" responses, and for its consumer products that may be true. But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutel…

But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google

You sound quite certain of that, so can you share your sources?

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