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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

#81

Post by arethuza »

mox1 wrote: post #17
CBLT wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdata is that Microsoft used salespeople to talk to executives and give them a deal on Azure so good they couldn't pass it up.

Migrate your Exchange serve(s) to google suite or Azure, which one do you think is an easier sell? Repeat for Random windows server to Azure and again for Office Live. Ohh, you can ru Linux too and do most things people are doing with AWS. It’s a pretty easy sell to me (and worked pretty well on the F100 company I work for).

Microsoft is pretty clear that they want people to move workloads to PaaS and SaaS - with IaaS (VMs) really only for "legacy" applications.

The migration from on-premise WSAD and Exchange to Azure AD and Office 365 is pretty painless - and once you've done that why wouldn't you use the rest of Microsoft's cloud based platform. That's the big advantage Microsoft has for most enterprise customers.

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

#82

Post by avip »

Brahma111 wrote: post #47

I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features…

Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?

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

#83

Post by vfc1 »

Google is betting on serverless, with products that are very developer friendly.

Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication, file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.

Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely need, like for signing Stripe payments.

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

#84

Post by bad_user »

keerthiko wrote: post #70

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantl…

Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal.

Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to even find out what the hell happened [2].

I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or content on Play or to access your email archive.

And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire company of 100-150 people banned [4]?

So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down products over night.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

[2] https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u...

[3] https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-wi...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...

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

#85

Post by mrweasel »

fredguth wrote: post #71
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…

Right. My only complaint on AWS is how confusing it is. Gcloud is much simpler, IMO.

I've looked into a few AWS service over the last week and coming from Azure I am very confused. It's not at all clear how AWS service are grouped together or why certain resources where created at all.

The resource group concept in Azure is, in my opinion, much easier to use and understand that VPCs in AWS.

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

#86

Post by ec109685 »

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…

Agreed. Slack is also awesome in this respect. You file a ticket and a human answers it quickly and it doesn’t matter if you are the IT department asking the question or just a regular user in the enterprise. They even offer live chat. I have no idea how to file a bug / feature suggestion with google. Big missed opportunity.

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

#87

Post by spricket »

The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground.

Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity.

GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?

It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses

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

#88

Post by mrweasel »

keerthiko wrote: post #70

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantl…

Capturing startups seems like a gamble, compared to Microsofts strategy of just forklifting customer that already known and trust them into Azure.

And at this point IBM is basically starting from scratch. You have to be an enormous company, with existing IBM contracts to even consider them a cloud provider. They also made a mistake with Watson and focusing too much on that one product. Right now it's hard to see that IBM cloud offering doesn't necessarily involve Watson.

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

#89

Post by mustardo »

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…

Anecdata, I was completing a proof of concept for deploying one of my companies apps to GCP and AWS comparing them and evaluating what platform to use. About 3 days before finishing my work and demonstrating how both went to my colleagues my GCP account linked to my company email address was blocked and then deleted with no warning otherthan a single email saying I had violated some T&C.

I tried very hard to contact anyone about my issue and naturally got nothing

We went with AWS

Two years later I've left the company now valued in the billions and spending several hundred thousand dollars a month on AWS

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

#90

Post by paganel »

airstrike wrote: post #7

> Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. > (...) > Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer,…

Google needs sales-people on the ground, plain and simple. I live in a reasonably big European market when it comes to IT services and the Google cloud people are absent, and for that reason everybody goes either with Azure (because MS has got the most people trying to make the sale) or AWS (because it's still seen as technically ahead of the field).

Now, as an aside, rumor has it that even MS's Azure numbers are a little inflated, a big part of their cloud sales is just Office 365, but I think MS does some marketing and accounting gimmicks on the side by "attaching" Azure to these Office 365 sales.

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