Live data from Hacker News

Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

bloomberg.com

101–110 of 295 posts

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#101
post #72

Snap and Spotify account for 13.7% of Google Cloud: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-nearly-45...

And when anytime both of these services go down at the same time, it's obvious who to blame (it happens way more often than you see the same on AWS).

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#102
post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

Product has their lifecycle. Nothing lives forever even for AWS/Azure. In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there. Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabe…

> Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing.

Now watch as i consider them the same thing.

Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.

Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.

Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#103
post #61
post #56

One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up datacenters) has helped them b…

I'm having a hard time finding something in Google cloud that is NOT covered by their BAA: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...

That lists 38 hipaa-compliant services. Azure's is close to 80ish hipaa-compliant services. AWS' list is fairly large too. I haven't used GCE in a long time, so maybe GCE just has that many fewer products/services.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#104
post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

The inability to connect with a real human when escalating Google Cloud issues seems to be recurring theme on HN.

About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.

I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.

Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.

Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.

"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."

Never again.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#105

The last company I worked for used Azure. I had never used Azure before and the thought of using a Microsoft product was a bit off-putting during my interview, to be honest (yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s). After using it for a few days, I had a change of heart. The documentation is pretty good and their tech support guys were extremely helpful. They would eve…

> yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s

I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the 2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes.

It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their products in this period).

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#106
post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

[deleted]

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not) Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their…

It's been a while (~2 years) since I last had to tangle with it, but off the top of my head: 1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass. 2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI…

I'm curious if PowerShell Core made any difference wrt #3. I haven't personally used it, but it sounds like it can run Azure cmdlets.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inability to connect with a real human when escalating Google Cloud issues seems to be recurring theme on HN.

About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice. I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective…

It was bleeding edge tech; that happens.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#109
post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

The inability to connect with a real human when escalating Google Cloud issues seems to be recurring theme on HN.

What are you talking about? Just make sure you are someone important on social media and create a tweet stir such that some Google execs look at your problem. That's how you get support.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#110

I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer. We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure. We had been running ou…

> Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.

Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.

For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.

It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.

Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.

Post reply on HN