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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#101

Post by dgacmu »

vmasto wrote: post #76
dekhn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also offers this as a service; I've work on high performance networking file transfers. my experience is that most people who move data get very low utilization compared to the actual throughput of the network. People typically use one TCP connection, one process. high performance data transfers use thousands of TCP connections and thousands of processes. Many other people underestimate the time/labor effort o…

So the question then is what are those services for?

We used a box of disks to get about 20 terabytes out of Amazon to CMU. It ended up being about 50℅ cheaper (from memory - may be off a bit) because we did not account for any employee costs. Startup, running on fumes, none of us drawing a salary, etc.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#102

Post by dekhn »

vmasto wrote: post #76
dekhn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also offers this as a service; I've work on high performance networking file transfers. my experience is that most people who move data get very low utilization compared to the actual throughput of the network. People typically use one TCP connection, one process. high performance data transfers use thousands of TCP connections and thousands of processes. Many other people underestimate the time/labor effort o…

So the question then is what are those services for?

Many customers want to dual-host their data to not be beholden to a single cloud provider. Or to have redundancy across providers. or to put their data closer to the compute.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#103

Post by jptman »

trautlein wrote: post #86
brilliantcode wrote: post #46

If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost. If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as the…

Only a few months ago Amazon bought Cloud9, arguably the best online IDE. [1] Perhaps they might beat Google to the punch? [1]: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/07/14/amazon-buys-cloud9-aws/

Doesn't Google already have a web based, but internal only, IDE? I don't know if that'd be easy to make external, but my understanding is that they've got a lot of internal users on it.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#104

Post by naner »

rrdharan wrote: post #62
naner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if Google's commercial products are as bad as their consumer-facing offerings, but if we can't get someone on the phone when a support issue arises then we'd never consider using them for any cloud services.

[Disclaimer: I work on GCP at Google] GCP Gold and Platinum support packages include phone support: https://cloud.google.com/support/

Thanks rrdharan for pointing that out, I should have spent a couple minutes researching first.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#106

Post by jpatokal »

brilliantcode wrote: post #46

If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost. If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as the…

Google Cloud Shell plus App Engine plus Stackdriver Debugging is reasonably far along this path:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Goo...

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#107

Post by brianwawok »

paulddraper wrote: post #100
brianwawok wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Because slack is IRC with a nicer UI. There are many examples of this. Executives love slick UIs and flashy dashboards. Executives have a lot of power.

Are your executives launching servers? Do they care about their IDE's UI too?

Executives play with all kinds of tech and have all kinds of power.

What world do you live in that a random dev picks the cloud provider for a company?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#108

Post by halflings »

olimashi wrote: post #74

I think Ben (who I generally think is right on) in this post misapprehends the effectiveness of generalized data for machine learning services and thus the effectiveness of this approach in Google’s strategy here. Perhaps the slide makers in Mountain View have the same misapprehension. 1 - Prediction API - you provide your own data there, so no data advantage from Google there. 2 - Cloud Natural Language API - the ef…

I don't think Google is marketing their Cloud NLP/Vision APIs for big enterprise customers that have very specific needs. Those APIs are meant for people that have common needs ( = want to identify which items or people are on a photo, understand queries in commonly used languages, etc.)

If you have specific needs, then you can use TensorFlow running on the app engine (as they will soon be providing hosted and GPU-accelerated instances), which at worst makes it equal to Amazon offering... but something tells me the vast majority of Google Cloud customers will be satisfied with pre-trained models that can be applied on a very large swath of problems.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#109

Post by i_are_smart »

brianwawok wrote: post #34
hueving wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI doesn't really matter for people with enough instances to care about money. Nobody is going to blow $1,000/mo because the interface is nicer.

Really? Because slack is IRC with a nicer UI. There are many examples of this. Executives love slick UIs and flashy dashboards. Executives have a lot of power.

I disagree with this, in my opinion slack has a lot of features on top of IRC (offline messages, webhooks, etc) that make it much more usable for its target audience.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#110

Post by jknoepfler »

serge2k wrote: post #68
btilly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would state the tradeoff very differently. Amazon gives each team independence. Therefore it is virtually impossible to insist on consistency between what different teams do. Each team makes sense on its own, but the whole can be very, very confusing. Google has a process that results in much greater internal consistency. It may not be a great UX, but it is consistent. Inside and out. For small systems, Amazon is g…

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

you mean like the Amazon retail site?
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