Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud • Hacker News Board

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

#741

Post by erik_seaberg » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

dwaite wrote: post #725

manigandham wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.

> Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable. If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running. There h…

Reader could only be maintained at little cost if its dependencies were stable. But stable infra doesn't get you promoted, so every service needs to be staffed indefinitely (to keep it on the upgrade treadmill) or killed gracefully before prod explodes.

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

#742

Post by yc_2345 » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:54 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #651

susijdjdjxa wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy this claim that Microsoft has good support for all their products. If my Windows machine is running slow will Microsoft support help me? Why do my family members keep asking me for help with their computers if Microsoft support is so great? To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.

Because there aren’t a lot of stories of businesses struggling to contact Microsoft over a product they’ve paid for. Yet every other month there’s an article on the front page of HN of some paying business struggling to reach Google and the only way to do it is to go viral on social media.

The upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 had similar consequences, but this could also be a reflection of the different types of audience the two companies serve.

For example, the person who wrote this book is probably never going to post a complaint on social media:

https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Against-Windows-10-Microsoft-...

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

#743

Post by jiggawatts » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:04 AM UTC

satyavelMS wrote: post #718

jiggawatts wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for providing us your specific feedback. I am part of the ARM Deployments Team. We are looking to support export for resource groups(RG) with more than 200 resources. One of the top customer requests with regards to export was the ability to multi-select individual resources in a RG to be exported which we added a few month ago. We have renewed our focus on ARM Template deployments(our infra as code offering)…

Jesus wept.

* Comments in JSON -- the standard explicitly bans this, making ARM templates no longer JSON, and hence not processable by standards-compliant tools. Including, hilariously, PowerShell. ConvertFrom-Json barfs, as it should. The correct approach is to have an explicitly non-JSON format like TOML or YAML that allows comments.

* "ARM has this whole time been secretly case insensitive" -- Someone clearly hasn't been notified about the harmful consequences of the Robustness Principle. [1]

* "People say that nobody authors ARM templates from scratch" -- Well, yes. This is because the template format is barely more than serialised RPC and wasn't developed like a proper programming language.

* The tab completion suggests strings that are too long for the dropdown UI and are cut off, making this feature unusable for a lot of ARM fields, such as the resource "type" values, which have long prefixes.

* "This shows as something different in the Portal" -- You have to memorise internal project names, aliases, or other difficult-to-discover names for things instead of simply using the display names. This is not user-friendly.

* A general issue I've seen with JSON-style configuration files is that things that should be side-by-side (e.g.: a bunch of related VM names) are scattered and separated by a lot of repeated "ceremony" text. Take a look at Altova XML Spy, which has a hierarchical grid view that moves such text fields into adjacent columns and rows, much like Excel does. This makes it far easier to spot mistakes or to make bulk changes.

* The "WhatIf" support is hilarious. I updated my Az module yesterday and I don't have that command. In the demo, it did something terrifying and the presenter had to close it. The output looks hideous, not something that looks useful to me.

This is what it boils down to: I don't want color-coded output that is almost-but-not-quite-JSON. I want tabular output. I want to see what happens if I pipe in 1K rows from a spreadsheet into a template. I want ConvertFrom-Json to work. I want to be able to validate things before deploying them. I want to see WhatIf support in the Azure Portal, with the final look. I want more than one tool to be able to process ARM templates. I want ARM templates to default to 2019, not 2015.

Tooling isn't going to fix this.

I want a language designed for humans.

This demo video to me felt like putting lipstick on a pig. Sure, it's better looking, but... still a pig.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....

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

#744

Post by dragonsh » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #715

dragonsh wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story…

Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing. Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and r…

This licensing does not apply to enterprise editions and volume licensing, I believe you are still looking at consumer market which Microsoft already lost to a Apple and lately google chromebooks.

The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications.

The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts.

Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years.

Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.

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

#745

Post by bcheung » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

People want to develop their tech on an open platform without vendor lock-in. If they pushed an open source platform on top of Kubernetes I know I would be more interested and comfortable using them. Right now I just don't see a strong benefit over others.

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

#746

Post by Angostura » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

cek wrote: post #648

Angostura wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noorda’s problem was that his product - a file server was swiftly turning into a commodity

What about WordPerfect? Noorda's problem was he was completely, utterly, obsessed with his competition.

I interviewed him a few times and I don't think that was strictly true. Perhaps near the end where Windows NT and OS/2 were taking chunks out of Netware

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

#747

Post by dana321 » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #672

QuinnyPig wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd. Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone. GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly. https://9to5g…

It doesn't matter, a datacenter can always be repurposed for their own internal product lines.

To be perfectly honest, i would rather go with a company that provides cloud as one of their main products rather than a company that has it as one of their many products.

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

#748

Post by kkapelon » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:46 AM UTC

antoncohen wrote: post #286

I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page. You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS. We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have…

>Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team

This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?

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

#749

Post by ragerino » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

altgoogler wrote: post #414

Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic. I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. > said people with knowledge of the matter. As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw som…

In regards of profitable, I hope you also consider internal cloud computing usage as it were used by an external party.

E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.

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

#750

Post by dana321 » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:59 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #613

jussij wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For amazon maybe, with their thrifty leader JB but i don't think Google's datacenters are exactly cheap.