How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#1

Post by dwynings » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 1:54 AM UTC

How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud
businessinsider.com

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#2

Post by manigandham » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there are definitely changes happening both in product and culture.

As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail which is what we saw as well. [1]

I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all the hiring at Google.

1. https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#3

Post by ktamura » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless, Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible.

Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in the last 6 months.

Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes, AWS still "gets" enterprise better than GCP.

And yes, GCP is back in the cloud infrastructure game and will give AWS and Microsoft a run for their money.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#4

Post by bootload » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

Diane Greene talking at Startup School in 2013, VMWare ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#5

Post by williadc » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

tl;dr - Greene convinced Google to get serious about providing cloud services to enterprise.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#6

Post by pm90 » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:12 AM UTC

> When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API, translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers weather data and language services, and so on, Greene's got a comeback ready.

"We have Chromebooks."

Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than others. Am I missing something here?

Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete information in this article at all. Sounds like a fluff piece/advertisement to me (IMO).

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#7

Post by bitmapbrother » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#8

Post by bitmapbrother » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:23 AM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #6

> When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API, translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers weather data and language services, and so on, Greene's got a comeback ready. "We have Chromebooks." Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than others. Am I missing something here? Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete info…

Like she said - Chromebooks are very secure and easy to administer. They're also the ideal choice for running Google Apps in the enterprise.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#9

Post by msravi » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:24 AM UTC

I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region) a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM flexibly to a point, which is important for me.

Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year. And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#10

Post by harshal » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 4:32 AM UTC

bitmapbrother wrote: post #7

GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?

Geographic reach is the significant thing holding GCP back at this point - despite being ahead on the tech. Not having a Singapore presence (or anything closer to India) basically kills it as a serious option for many Indian companies. I personally know of a couple of startups personally who would have loved to use GCP since they actually want to use things like BigQuery, but went with AWS due to this.

They have so far just mentioned they are adding two regions soon - but nothing about where. I fear its just additional options in Europe or something ... 2017 is still too far out for a startup considering options today.

Edit: Oh .... looks like I missed the announcement that the two new regions are Tokyo and Oregon. Looks like India is out of luck for now.