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Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

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Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#111

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE. In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently)…

> They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually something much more basic: trust.

Trust is not the issue. Google wants to sell "management" while AWS (et al) are selling raw resources. To use Google Cloud you have to change or build your system for it, using new APIs, configuration systems, other managed services and even programming languages. Todays announcement was: you can have raw VM control with our management too! I don't see it being any easier now (even MORE options!) but I think they're on the right track. They need to make it simpler rather than cheaper.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work on the Cloud SQL team, but everything here is a completely my own FWIW, the Google products that are subject to the deprecation policy [1] will give a year's heads-up before they are shut down. We aren't doing our job well enough if you can't easily transition off Cloud Platform (at least for the components that have obvious competitors... something like BigQuery is necessarily less simple). You sh…

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or this is just a culture mismatch, but are you serious about the one year warning? For context, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Lifecycle has mainstream support dedication from 2009-2015. The extended support date is 2020 .

I'm serious in that:

a) That's what is written in the contract

b) I think you should be able to migrate off the platform within that timeframe, and you shouldn't join our platform if you don't think we're making it easy enough for you to leave again (I deeply believe in initiatives like Google Takeout)

I didn't make any comment, nor will I, on whether I perceive that time frame to be long enough. I think it's smarter to stick to the facts when it's my own job I'm talking about. I would like to continue engaging with the Hacker News community (which, you'll see from my history, began many years prior to my joining Google) and offering context and information. But I can't do that if I don't stick to facts, lest my opinions be bent around to imply something I didn't mean that could put the job (that I enjoy very much) in jeopardy.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#113
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@bcantrill is the SVP of Engineering at Joyent. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm guessing he would say that Joyent is trustworthy. He would then tell you to use DTrace.

Ha! So, I guess my disclaimers have been made for me. ;) In terms of trust, I would tell you that trust needs to be earned -- and that it can only be earned one day at a time and that it can be frivolously spent away with a single bad decision. (Trust me that Joyent has learned this the very, very hard way.) So I would say that you should force anyone to earn your trust. That infrastructure is such a trust business i…

Really appreciate the open source software, but I recently had some trust issues with Joyent the service. Cloud servers switched from tiered transfer rates (with a generous free tier) to on-demand pricing, with only a month of notice. It wasn't possible to monitor one's own bandwidth usage before the switch, so we were caught off guard by our bill jumping by nearly 30%. It would have been more trustworthy to grandfather in servers started under the old pricing plan.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#114
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work on the Cloud SQL team, but everything here is a completely my own FWIW, the Google products that are subject to the deprecation policy [1] will give a year's heads-up before they are shut down. We aren't doing our job well enough if you can't easily transition off Cloud Platform (at least for the components that have obvious competitors... something like BigQuery is necessarily less simple). You sh…

Wow. A member of the team addresses the longevity fears by assuring that a years notice would be given if the service were deprecated. It's ... 12:55 PST ... do you still have a job ?

a year's notice in enterprise space. That shows one more time how deep Google's [mis]understanding of B2B business is.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or this is just a culture mismatch, but are you serious about the one year warning? For context, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Lifecycle has mainstream support dedication from 2009-2015. The extended support date is 2020 .

I'm serious in that: a) That's what is written in the contract b) I think you should be able to migrate off the platform within that timeframe, and you shouldn't join our platform if you don't think we're making it easy enough for you to leave again (I deeply believe in initiatives like Google Takeout) I didn't make any comment, nor will I, on whether I perceive that time frame to be long enough. I think it's smarter…

Fair enough! Thanks for the information!

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#116

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE. In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently)…

This is absolutely infuriating. Every time someone hijacks a Google announcement thread doom crying about potential shutdown it gets under my skin, especially in this case when these “arguments” are so intellectually bankrupt. If you are suggesting that GCE or the whole Google Could Platform endeavour is in anyway similar to any of the appendage service or features Google shelved over the years, then that calls into…

But google reader!

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#117
post #65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very much our view. Google products are fine for home and non-critical use, but it's far too risky to rely on them when building something that one expects to have a long lifespan. Unless there's clear money in it for Google's advertising revenue, the chance of it being pulled is too high.

Has Google ever pulled a paid product?

Yes, Google Commerce Search

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows Server lifecycle comparison is interesting, but makes me curious about what Azure does, as a more apples-to-apples comparison. Is there some kind of guarantee of what notice you'd get before major changes or deprecation to services? I can't find one explicitly in some quick searching.

Azure in it's entirety doesn't (1 year notice of changes coming), but Microsoft has a separate "private cloud" IaaS offering, which has a similar lifecycle to server. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but the word I've heard is this is pretty attractive to the big businesses that are most worried about that. For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let any…

>For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud.

until they run a private fiber [which don't also have NSA's splitters attached] directly to the MS datacenter, they are being sold a snow in Antarctic [ie. mutually exclusive dichotomy between "100% never let anything onto the public Internet" and "use of a Microsoft private cloud"].

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#119
post #114
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. A member of the team addresses the longevity fears by assuring that a years notice would be given if the service were deprecated. It's ... 12:55 PST ... do you still have a job ?

a year's notice in enterprise space. That shows one more time how deep Google's [mis]understanding of B2B business is.

Google understands on some level how B2B works ... for a while, they only made money through B2B channels, especially via sales of the Google Search Appliance.

I think that the people directing the App Engine lack a clear vision. They should know that price isn't what's stopping GAE. It certainly makes a statement about Google's vision for the App Engine if they have all of their good product people working on something else.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not touch this with a 10-foot pole. A few weeks ago Larry Page was asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at the expense of everything else) Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and g…

"joebar" -- I don't know who the fuck you are, but you're not joebar@google.com, I am. Who are you really?

Like he's going to admit that after violating his nondisclosure agreement discussing Q&A at TGIF and disparaging GCE in public. Of all the things to discuss outside of work, the meeting that starts with a "everything you see, hear, and taste here is confidential as shit, man," slide...

Speaking from (direct personal) experience, someone that malicious needs to be identified quickly and removed, because that's without question not the only thing he's doing due to his disgruntled attitude. Nothing against him, just clearly Google has wronged him in some way and the responsibilities of his legal agreements are no longer important. That means it's time to move on before he harms the company.

Whenever I've spoken about my employment at Google -- even though I was fired inappropriately -- I'm careful not to divulge information that I promised to protect as it's important for my own integrity. And that's even when I have a pretty legitimate gripe with Google. Now that I'm with Apple, a company that ostensibly takes secrecy to an entirely different level than Google, I don't even discuss Apple in public. Ever. I know better.

I'd talk to Global Security about this if I were you since a case could be made that he tried to throw your LDAP under the bus.

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