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Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

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Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#101

Post by Legogris »

blinotz wrote: post #97

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being importa…

Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#102

Post by barney54 »

wwn_se wrote: post #88
davedx wrote: post #43

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

Google is 100% renewable and is in my opinion the leader among the giants (AWS, Azure, Google, Ali) but there might be smaller companies that is even better. https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/...

Google is not really 100% renewable in any meaningful sense. Google (and others) buy renewable energy, but that doesn't mean their purchases match up to what their data centers actually consume for the simple reason that data centers have a pretty consistent load and wind and solar do not produce electricity consistently. For truly progressive companies in this area, they need to consider matching the hourly generation and loads, not not just annualized generation and load: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/27/100-renewable-does-not-...

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#103

Post by barney54 »

tedunangst wrote: post #79
f_allwein wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google found this: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-cl...

How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?

It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#104

Post by ocdtrekkie »

wwn_se wrote: post #88
davedx wrote: post #43

Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

Google is 100% renewable and is in my opinion the leader among the giants (AWS, Azure, Google, Ali) but there might be smaller companies that is even better. https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/...

Google is on the list of companies working to remain carbon neutral.

...Microsoft is setting the goal of being carbon negative (since the inception of the company in 1975): https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b...

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#105

Post by pinkfoot »

mcny wrote: post #98
bnt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for water cooling the CPUs?

Personally, I don’t understand carbon neutrality. How deep does this rabbit hole go? If Google only buys and uses fully electric cars for street view and use only solar and wind to power them is that good enough? Does the manufacture of the car, batteries, solar panels also have to be carbon neutral? If not, can a company become carbon neutral by simply letting another company do the dirty work?

Yes. It goes all the way down. That is what makes it very, very hard to fix.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#106

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

mohamedattahri wrote: post #90

Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.

Per this quarter's results, AWS grew at 37% while GCP notched up 54%. Microsoft claims 62%, but as discussed elsewhere in the comments that seems dubious (unless you also believe that Azure is already larger than AWS). MS "Intelligent Cloud" grew at 27%.

https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#107

Post by aikah »

ubercow13 wrote: post #61
sakisv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this add-on for Firefox that allows you to toggle js on and off and remembers your setting per domain https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/disable-javas... It improves the user experience by a lot on Techcrunch, medium and a bunch of other news sites.

Can’t you do this with just uBlock origin?

Yes, you can do that with uBlock, the icon blocks javascript, very handy.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#108

Post by mirekrusin »

brazzy wrote: post #86
pingyong wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out. But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them…

Cooling is a pretty big factor in the energy usage of datacenters, and there's a lot of room for creative use of technology there - or simply geographic advantages.

You can use steam from cooling to produce electricity just like nuclear plants do, right? :)

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#109

Post by sp332 »

tedunangst wrote: post #79
f_allwein wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google found this: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-google-microsoft-green-cl...

How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?

For now, company Y is probably doing better (purely from a CO2 emissions standpoint). But it's not sustainable, because some of those credits are from companies that just reduced their usage below some threshold. Most of the credits are not from "negative emissions" like planting trees. So as the thresholds decrease over time, there will be fewer credits available to buy and they will be stuck with either really expensive credits or a surplus of CO12 generation.

Re: Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate

#110

Post by mcintyre1994 »

blinotz wrote: post #97

Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down. Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform. Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being importa…

From what I've heard their customer service for paid customers seems to be fine. No first hand experience though because I've also heard that if anything goes wrong they tend to shut down and ban all your Google accounts - that seems to be the main thing people here seem to warn about anyway. And when that happens there's no way you're going to get to talk to anyone who can help you.
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