Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by raxxorrax » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

ernsheong wrote: post #40

keypusher wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to de…

Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business. But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given h…

I don't think you can fully separate business and customers. Google Maps? Google suddenly vastly increased prices.

This is something all cloud providers suffer from. What assurance do I get that pricing and quality of service remains stable? Amazon has the same problem. If I look into my billing console, I see an increase of used computing resources. From inactive projects. They still managed to use significant CPU-time. I would not be able to claim otherwise. As long as the costs remain low, this is not a problem. But you have to believe your cloud provider...

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

#162

Post by LoneWolf123 » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

spricket wrote: post #158

skywhopper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Golang mention reads as a total non-sequitur. I'm not even sure what it means. I think you are mad that they didn't provide a way to pin dependencies built-in to the language from the get-go? But few if any languages provide that. In every case I can think of, package management is done by an external tool. The only exception is... oh right, Golang now builds it in, including the ability to pin old versions. Sur…

It's an example of how they treat "old" code, services or otherwise. Fixup your code to use new version or you can't build. Replace "build" with "deploy" and you have the policy of GCP. Now it's been a few years and they may have fixed this, but Go was the only language I've ever used that didn't let you pin dependency versions

You may want to use this small script: "Like 'go get' but with pinned package versions. A tiny shell script".

https://github.com/joewalnes/go-getter

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

#163

Post by mac_was » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

politelemon wrote: post #92

spricket wrote: post #87

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. T…

Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++). GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they w…

'1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate' - that is barely enough for a SMB and it is not possible or acceptable for any enterprise customer! Imagine how long it takes to investigate on new solutions, rewriting stuff, testing it, releasing, etc... 1 year is a joke which I might accept as a startup with a single node.js app but would not as a CTO of any company.

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

#164

Post by nicoburns » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #45

emilsedgh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will use it on a day to day basis. When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have. I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing…

> I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.

Presumably they're making a profit on selling the linux VM's. I think MS have more or less accepted that windows has been outcompeted in the server OS market over the long term. It's hard to compete wih free...

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

#165

Post by StreamBright » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

patwolf wrote: post #147

spricket wrote: post #87

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. T…

I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use. I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud se…

Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability

https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...

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

#166

Post by michaelt » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #112

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…

> App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook. why did this hurt them? I thought appengine was great when i used it (granted, i never paid them for it - the free tier was way too generous).

It delayed them making the product customers wanted?

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

#167

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #45

emilsedgh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will use it on a day to day basis. When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have. I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing…

Microsoft does not need to shift a single Azure Linux customer to the MS stack to make money on Azure. This was a major mindset breakthrough at MS that Nadella is not responsible for, but has leaned into. MS is not a Windows company anymore, they are back to being a software company. And Linux is fine software.

AWS delivers most of Amazon’s profit despite Amazon having no proprietary software story to speak of. Well, MS can do that too.

EDIT to add that MS does not even sell consulting services, their partners do. I’m sure the “lift and shift” story makes sense to long-standing MS shops, and MS may have even included that in their Azure pitch to them. But ultimately one of the best things about Azure from MS’s perspective is that they don’t need consulting partners to make money from it. They can reach directly into the product and ops teams at major enterprises and sell them raw capability with a spend that auto-scales.

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

#168

Post by T2_t2 » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #52

partiallypro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video transcoding is particularly suited to the cloud. This sort if unpredictable load - new titles will pop up at odd intervals - is ideal for striking the balance between speed to market (you don't want to delay releasing new titles) and cost (having extra capacity for transcoding on the off chance you need it is expensive).

Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #165

patwolf wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use. I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud se…

Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by sigfubar » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #165

patwolf wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built applications on AWS, IBM Cloud (Bluemix at the time), Azure, and GCP. If a client has no preference over platform, I usually go with GCP. I find it the simplest, cheapest, and most reliable for the type of stack we use. I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud se…

Anecdotal evidences are great. It is not an accident that GCP and Azure storage service has a S3 API and not the other way around. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...

S3 API compatibility is there because creators of open source "data engineering" tools have in the early days rushed to develop their tools around the S3 API. I can make the case that the need for a properly abstracted storage layer should have been obvious, but in that early gold rush no one would have listened to such reason. Nowadays vendors are stuck shipping S3 compatibility layers in order to avoid locking out tools that cannot work without S3.

If you think I'm wrong, imagine for a moment what life would be like if every RDBMS client in existence got written in terms of Oracle's wire protocol, back when Oracle's RDBMS offering dominated its respective market. Thankfully that parallel universe is somebody else's problem right now, but it could have happened.