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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

#241

Post by davidjnelson »

bad_user wrote: post #84
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 decis…

A similar thing happened to me. I had some domains with tons of backlinks hosted on app engine. Without any notice, my app engine version got deprecated and my sites went offline. I hadn’t setup any monitoring as I trusted google. I visited one of my sites manually and saw it was down. It turns out both of my sites had been down for two months. I logged into the google app engine ui to see an error message for both apps that I was running “a deprecated app engine version”. Most of the backlinks to the sites had been removed as broken links. Thousands of customer reviews of software I had published were erased by that. I dig google but this was an enormous failure on their part.

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

#242

Post by manigandham »

yuy910616 wrote: post #207
devy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not a consumer product, that's their core business. Also you need to spend over 1M/month to get any real support.

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

#243

Post by Shakahs »

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).

Three things. First, GAE has drastically, massively improved as a product since it was first introduced in 2008(!). But a lot of people don't know that, and the original reputation remains.

Second, App Engine was the original Google Cloud product, it came out years before Compute Engine and never took off like they expected but for awhile it was all they had to offer.

Thirdly, in 2011 Google changed the billing model. Datastore requests were no longer free and CPU billing was switched from CPU time to wall time [1]. The old billing model did not account for how some developers were actually using GAE and it was not sustainable, so Google had to make a correction and some apps saw a massive cost increase. This further tarnished the GAE reputation.

[1] https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...

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

#244

Post by manigandham »

tyingq wrote: post #110
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.

SimpleDB is probably a good example. You can find 5 year old threads discussing whether Amazon is going to kill it. But it appears to still be there.

SimpleDB is still used by Amazon's own services, it's not going anywhere.

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

#245

Post by manigandham »

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…

IBM/Softlayer value differential for dedicated servers disappeared years ago. Cloud VMs are now faster, cheaper, and more reliable (because of abstracted components and live migration), and they all have dedicated nodes if you need isolation.

IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.

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

#246

Post by manigandham »

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.

Nothing there matters unless you work at Google. They are a general dumping ground of feature requests and bug reports with many being several years old.

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

#247

Post by devy »

munchbunny wrote: post #226
yuy910616 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's quality of support tends to correlate strongly with how much money you pay them. They treat their large advertisers very well, but for that very same product, support under $1mil/year is pretty bad, and that's actually still quite a bit of spend.

True. AWS enterprise support varies based not on how much money you spent on the account but rather how much money you opt-in on the support tier - the top tier support contract is expensive but AWS really treats you like a partner with prompt updates on the issue resolution, sometimes live support over the phone to tell you how to debug and identify issues.

What about Google support? Nada. They don't even have a direct phone number to reach (requests are sent via email). There are issues that they completely dropped the ball on and provide no updates whatsoever or reluctant to look into or to put a closure on. Day and night difference. (We weren't a $1MM account in terms of total annual GCP spending just yet, we very well could be in the next years I hope.)

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

#248

Post by manigandham »

jacques_chester wrote: post #146

Desperate? I'm not sure. The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need. That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It can't be done later. If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away…

Yes, it's been posited right here on HN years ago that GCP could dwarf their existing ad business and that gets clearer by the day. However the vision and momentum just doesn't match the opportunity.

It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of Google's ad products.

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

#249

Post by mark_l_watson »

chaoticmass wrote: post #222
mark_l_watson wrote: post #101

I have never been a fan of IBM but if you like open stack for dev ops then their BlueBiz service is nice, with a very generous free tier. I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support offered. It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams for sales and support.

BueBiz? Do you mean Blue Mix?

Yes, thanks

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

#250

Post by ksavenkov »

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…

You may check this Single API to a bunch of visual recognition services, in case you still need it: https://inten.to/api-platform/ai/image/tagging
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