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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

#181

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

Sure muggles don't care about Google dropping services.

My experience is that Google services are often an order of magnitude harder to use than competitors.

For example I did a shootout between the visual recognition APIs from IBM, Amazon, clarif.ai, Google and some others.

I had the other ones up and running in under ten minutes each.

Google made me go through a sign-up and authentication process that looked like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWEvp217Tzw

and then installing their Python SDK trashed my Python installation and forced me to reinstall anaconda.

I think Google is used to hiring people with 130+ IQs and wasting their cognitive capacity and they would love to make you waste your cognitive capacity too.

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

#182

Post by sigfubar »

StreamBright wrote: post #173
sigfubar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not at all. It is there because AWS's S3 became the defacto solution for storage and because they were first AND also because of popularity and how well it works. Your Oracle example is flawed for many reasons. SQL standard pre-dates Oracle and I am not even sure what you mean by every RDBMS client got written in Oracle's wire protocol. Ingres also predates Oracle. Are you implying that S3 API is there because they w…

Save the Wikipedia links: surely you remember the time when database selection boiled down to "Oracle or bust". I'm not implying that S3 was first & dominant early on: I'm stating it as a flat fact.

Yes, many RDBMS offerings have preceded Oracle, but none gained such wide adoption early on. Oracle has always had a strong sales team, so they've been able to grow their business rapidly. Good for them. SQL standardization has nothing to do with it either, because SQL is the user-facing language, not a wire protocol. What travels over the wire between an Oracle client and the server has about as much to do with SQL as the S3 API has to do with XML.

In your rush to defend AWS you seem to be falling into the same trap of immaturity as the people who have assumed that S3 will always remain the one true storage layer. It is not your fault, just a sign of the times. You're part of the generally apparent downward trend in level-headed, long-term thinking among the software cadre. For your next project, I recommend that you keep in mind that proper abstractions and clearly defined interfaces are crucial for maintainability of software over the long term. Good luck!

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

#183

Post by PaulHoule »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #129
scarface74 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, AWS has never abandoned a service. They deprecate services and occasionally make services unavailable for new accounts.

Technically Amazon and not AWS but they deprecated then removed two separate payment APIs one after the other (SimplePay and another). It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother? Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.

I think payment APIs have all kinds of social and legal problems associated with them that go beyond the technical.

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

#185

Post by PaulHoule »

aqwsedopl wrote: post #150
godzillabrennus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us not forget the Google Maps price bump still fresh in everyone’s mind. That was a kind way of reminding customers that Google isn’t serious about cloud. Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.

Microsoft’s bias towards windows stunted it’s growth severely. It seems googles bias towards its ad-revenue based models is something similar. Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam. Fundamentally, as long as google offers fre…

"Microsoft's bias towards Windows?"

Microsoft was one of the first major developers for the Mac when it came out originally.

Microsoft is happy for you to run Linux in the Azure cloud. Microsoft added Linux emulation to Windows. Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone (if only because Verizon and AT&T refused to approve new Windows Phones on their networks.)

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

#186

Post by sempron64 »

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…

Actually Azure has a huge hook at the engineering level in that Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions come with $150 a month in Azure credit. It's very hard to avoid using when you just need to slap a quick demo online and need a server or DB and your in-house IT is away, it's all right there in the IDE... and then you're in hook, line, and sinker. So while there are C-suite level mega-sales, Azure has plenty of grassroots appeal.

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

#187

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #181
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…

Sure muggles don't care about Google dropping services. My experience is that Google services are often an order of magnitude harder to use than competitors. For example I did a shootout between the visual recognition APIs from IBM, Amazon, clarif.ai, Google and some others. I had the other ones up and running in under ten minutes each. Google made me go through a sign-up and authentication process that looked like h…

> My experience is that Google services are often an order of magnitude harder to use than competitors.

Huh, I think most people feel the exact opposite, especially with the comparison between AWS and GCP. GCP has lots of services that are really easy to get set up and running easily by a small Dev shop (Firebase is pretty fantastic in my opinion), while with AWS unless you have some DevOps/networking experts it's a lot harder to do things correctly and securely.

If anything, I think the biggest issue with GCP is they still don't have the "DNA" to do enterprise support at the level large companies expect, while AWS does.

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

#188

Post by ardy42 »

mathattack wrote: post #137

They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known)

> They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google’s Customer perception problem is that it’s too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM’s is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known)

Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation, and account closures without recourse.

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

#189

Post by spricket »

ohaideredevs wrote: post #179
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…

"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN. Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious. As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps…

It really comes down to having code I can copy-paste. Google's documentation tends to be minimalist, like a research paper. One small example for everything, just enough to cover every feature.

AWS is closer to "copy paste this big blob and modify it a bit". A lot less work for people trying to implement. I'm not planning to read all the documentation, I just want something that works. Google almost forces you to in many cases

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

#190

Post by bhouston »

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…

I wish Google has a CloudFront equivalent cache system. Their CDN can only be bucket supported or in front of an load balancer. But sometimes I want to just have an arbitrary back end which I can do on CloudFront.

I ended up using CloudFront in front of Google services just last month to hit a performance need.

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