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Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

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Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#611

Post by robbya »

xvector wrote: post #493
trenning wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the original title? This comment chain reads a little confusing now.

Something along the lines of "Google execs considered cutting GCP, later decided to set 2023 as a deadline for improved financial performance." A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.

I'm curious what sorts of things you had running and how complex moving off was. I'd expect any cut to have some announcement period, which I'd expect to be longer than a few months, so you may not have needed to migrate so soon.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#612

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

jiggawatts wrote: post #362
rzmnzm wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure has a pretty nice tech stack in my experience, what issues are you experiencing with it?

There's a laundry list. The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes. You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there…

Indeed, Azure to me seems to be focused on achieving success on absolutely anything else besides technical quality and competency. Their strategy seems to be acquiring every certification and qualification under the sun so that they can be the only legally viable option for many large customers.

Kind of sounds like the good old Microsoft that made Windows a stable in nearly every enterprise...

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#613

Post by manigandham »

jussij wrote: post #605
manigandham wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so much significance to such a minor line in a meeting years ago? What about the part where it was dismissed? Or does that part not matter? I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap. It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big wi…

> It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity. Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.

Cloud computing is massively profitable.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#614

Post by runT1ME »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #501
devy wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree your sentiments here. The goal for Alphabet is to make Cloud platform business profitable not shutting it down. From this article it looks like it hasn't been so since 2014 after GOOG gave it full attention. And to be profitable, Alphabet execs thought it has to be within top 2 to be profitable, I am unsure if that's true, given the cloud business is still a slow and painful transition process for Fortune 100…

Google has cool things in GCP, but I struggle to imagine them being _popular_, cool, things. If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and sh…

Google is not dumb and realizes this, which is why they're pushing so many tools that prevent vendor lock-in. K8s entire pitch is you can seamlessly go from a cloud offering to your locally managed K8s in a datacenter. Our (small) company has done it, it works very smoothly.

Their 'serverless' batch/stream processing works this way as well, with Apache Beam you can deploy effortlessly to GCP for large compute jobs (i've spun up hundreds of nodes in minutes), and also run it against on prem spark clusters with zero code changes.

So Google realizes being late to the game means they have to offer something more, and what they're offering is a lack of vendor lock in.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#615

Post by kevinventullo »

mindcrime wrote: post #607
james_s_tayler wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also AWS is just the best at marketing their services. They did what Google did with search. We always say we "Google" things. Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.

Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud. After many years of working with AWS almost exclusively, I recently started a new $DAYJOB where our primary public cloud provider is Azure. A couple of days ago I was chatting with a co-worker about something, and he literally says "I think we should just ch…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#616

Post by bigiain »

ximeng wrote: post #475
ogre_codes wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable. The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use. Google has lo…

Amazon have been on HN recently for poor customer service with respect to billing for cloud services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.

Having said that, AWS also have a long track record of reversing charges where a dev fucked up and ran up a huge bill accidentally.

I am _extremely_ dubious you'd ever even get a person on the phone to talk to at Google if your CI/CD pipeline or platform automation had a bug that resulted in thousands of dollars of charges racking up over a weekend. I know people who've done that on AWS and had the entire bill waived, and then had AWS technical people call and help them debug and fix the broken (non Amazon) systems.

I'm not sure there's a company on the planet with a worse reputation amongst devs for "customer service" than Google. Pretty sure they're not going to be winning any developer mindshare on _that_.

If your 5-6 figure ad buying team get a say in which platform you deploy on, maybe _their_ experience with Google's legendary "customer support" is different. Buy the only known avenue for developers to get problems with Google accounts looked into by a human being is pretty much to make as much noise on Twitter/HackerNews as you can and hope some random Googler steps in to help...

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#617

Post by tazjin »

Qub3d wrote: post #450
dralley wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extent to which Google and Microsoft have switched places from where they were a decade ago is hilarious. https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...

Hah, I love that comic. Here's the full one: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

That comic, by the way, is one of Manu Cornet's Goomics (i.e. originally Google-internal comics).

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#618

Post by linsomniac »

This reminds me of Google+. I remember one year where they got very serious about G+, tied bonuses to the growth, and otherwise tried to take on Facebook. G+ is shuttered now, but at least I have a cool green check mark next to my name I'm my YouTube comments... :-)

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#619

Post by bigiain »

1MoreThing wrote: post #545
dragonsh wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor customer service is not exclusive to Amazon, google directly shut the product down which cannot earn search scale revenue. If you see comments below being downvoted by google PR for examples. I believe all these large cloud companies be it amazon, google or Microsoft deploy army of PR people and campaigns to downvote or try to remove comments which are critical. Especially I have seen this on HN, earlier when I…

This is the same logic my extended family uses when they tell me that their phones eavesdrop on their conversations to target advertisements. Just because it's possible and fits your narrative doesn't make it true. No brand or PR team that I've ever been near has the capacity to monitor and then manually downvote this kind of thing, even on major sites, let alone a niche news site like HN. Who has the budget for this…

> Who has the budget for this?

Ummm, Google(/Alphabet)?

You might have heard of them? Fourth biggest company (by market cap) on the planet? They have budget to do all this shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

Pretty sure they wouldn't even notice the costs of downvoting every single negative comment about them on every single website they're already crawling and mining for keywords and sentiment...

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#620

Post by scarejunba »

Terretta wrote: post #575
scarejunba wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was genuinely not a factor when we signed a 1E8 deal with GCP. What was a factor: (non-exhaustive) * Access to their developers for core services * Discounts available * Quality of support * Access Controls / Audit / Budgeting * Dev Tools around Infra * Future Roadmap Not one of us ever would have chosen the shutdown of Plus/Reader/Wave as a factor. As a startup we hard pivoted in order to succeed. No surprise t…

“Confident will play out in your favor” ... Do you mean you’re confident this choice will be a decisive competitive advantage vs. having gone with AWS or Azure? Or simply confident they won’t be gone before you have options?

I intended to mean "It will have been the right decision to not weight the loss of Reader/Wave/Plus highly."
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