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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

#201

Post by boulos »

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…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this...

Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their unicorn days. Is Niantic interesting? Shopify? Presumably Spotify stopped being a unicorn startup and is now just a successful company.

To your other point, lots of ex-Googlers choose GCP, which I mostly put down to "I don't worry the way others do". If you've been at Google, you already know and trust a lot of the underlying systems and people. Adopting BigTable, Spanner or Dataflow doesn't sound scary to you, or make you worried that you won't be able to hire people that "know GCP" the way that "everyone knows AWS". Similarly, you "know" that Google isn't going to shut it down. Others don't necessarily feel that way, and frankly we just don't even get considered.

I personally think that's an interesting signal for a startup: if they do a technical evaluation and choose GCP, rather than sticking with AWS as the default. The ex-Googlers choosing it because they still have friends at Google isn't a particularly great business plan for us, but they do provide great feedback! (Particularly people who say "Umm, I used to work on , can't you just enable that for the public version? I've got money").

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

#202

Post by nradov »

mschuster91 wrote: post #80
keypusher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is not even in contention. Not only do they lack the expertise, they have a terrible reputation and offer nothing unique. Alibaba is a different story. China is a huge market that western companies typically stuggle in, and many of the large businesses there do not have the infrastructure debt of older US companies. Alibaba has massive infrastructure, strong technical expertise and their cloud offering has bee…

Alibaba can definitely take a huge chunk of the Chinese market - but internationally? They're Chinese. General opinion in Western politics is to distrust Chinese-controlled stuff, as evidenced by the handling of the Huawei case.

Alibaba is well positioned to capture a large share of the small but growing African market.

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

#203

Post by judge2020 »

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…

AWS also won't hesitate to help on bare "free tier" accounts if the issue is billing related, which is awesome. I accidentally ran up $400 by setting up the managed private Certificate Authority and forgetting about it, and AWS billing was quick to give me a $400 credit since the private CA went virtually unused.

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

#204

Post by boulos »

bhouston wrote: post #190
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.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

The main challenge with "remote origins" is ensuring that it's legitimate to do so (so that we don't allow folks to use our network as a weapon), and that most of our load balancing / GFE-based systems have historically only known how to point at Borg jobs (this is why it took so long to add the GCS bucket support!).

We hear you.

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

#205

Post by boulos »

avip wrote: post #78
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…

Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k).

While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.

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

#206

Post by avip »

boulos wrote: post #205
avip wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I spoke with both gcp and aws reps in previous startup (not in US), and both told me the "take free 500K in credits" party is over. YMMV

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars…

Agree completely, and the 500K number was indeed from azure. So have consistently done $100k means this program still exists?

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

#207

Post by yuy910616 »

devy wrote: post #200
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. You nailed it. Coming from 8-years of AWS and working on GCP for the last 4, enterprise support is the BIGGEST differentiator IMO between AWS and GCP. GCP's services are usually technical advanced sooner (encryption architecture, various of compliances certification, et…

Well I wouldn't say their consumer facing products are bad. We've spend $70mil a year with them for google ads and I would say their support for Ads are fantastic.

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

#208

Post by boulos »

avip wrote: post #206
boulos wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k). While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars…

Agree completely, and the 500K number was indeed from azure. So have consistently done $100k means this program still exists?

Yep! I mentioned it in a separate comment but the URL is cloud.google.com/startups (and has been since we started it).

The easiest mechanism is via a firm who has funded you, and they just "nominate" your company via a simple portal.

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

#209

Post by jniedrauer »

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…

> See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?

This doesn't necessarily detract from your point, but this hasn't been true since the release of module support in go 1.11 last year.

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

#210

Post by hacknat »

Google is the only (major) cloud provider to suffer global service outages (AWS and Azure have only ever had region-wide outages). They have done so more than once, and they have no notable blog posts that ever explain how they will mitigate it in the future. That's enough from my perspective to never recommend them to any customer that ever needs region redundancy.

From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not, but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the cloud yet.

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