Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

#111

Post by kkielhofner » Tue, Feb 28, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

GreedClarifies wrote: post #96

kkielhofner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, sorry, slower than expected growth was the data point. In my defense I had a screaming toddler in the car! That said I think the point generally remains - one could argue slower than expected growth in cloud services is a revenue drop (in a way) vs expectations. The market responded accordingly[0] - "However, Azure growth is decelerating." Note that this is all including the explosion in "2023 AI hotness" whi…

In isolated cases companies can reduce costs by self hosting. Usually this is a combination of very specialized requirements or shockingly technically competent early employees or founders. However even in these exceptional cases there are hidden costs that will likely arise. For most companies the very concept of self hosting is comical. This is a one way train.

By it's very nature HN is pretty startup focused (you're talking about founders). When I say "greenfield" I'm mostly talking about a startup (and beyond) that's survived the ~first year of chaos/infant mortality - which should be well before the significant technical debt of the solution and Hotel California nature of cloud take hold.

For an established real business there's almost no question.

Do you have any experience with self-hosting and examples of hidden costs? In my experience with both and hybrid approaches cloud has substantially more dramatic hidden costs. From a cost and pricing perspective cloud has many more foot guns - it's routine at this point for people to report exceeding their monthly budgets and billing notifications literally overnight.

Re: Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

#112

Post by kkielhofner » Tue, Feb 28, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #92

kkielhofner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what would other wise be much more drastic retractions in growth. I would argue as the AI trend (eventually) wanes and many AI startups and projects within existing companies inevitably eventually fail to materialize the much longer and more general trend of…

> I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what would other wise be much more drastic retractions in growth. Can you share where you got this? Which numbers? I didn't think AWS (or any cloud provider) released details of their operation at that level of granularity.

While the clouds don't break-out revenue numbers at that level of granularity the communication from many of the big cloud providers (to the investment/financial communities at least) acknowledges lower than expected revenue growth overall while pointing to the explosion in "AI" (ML) as a rapidly growing area that will (hopefully, to them) turn that ship around - with already realized promise. I tend to agree with this (obviously).

As one example, the headline here is actually "Microsoft points to AI to drive the next wave of cloud, revenues"[0]. While not hard revenue breakout numbers Microsoft is investing heavily in OpenAI and rapidly (already) integrating it everywhere they can - search, Azure, etc. The investment, utilization, and published pricing are the numbers I'm talking about here.

The real hard numbers and position that supports my thesis (unsurprisingly) comes from Nvidia[1]. Since at least May 2022 Nvidia has been touting their revenues attributed to big cloud demand. Interestingly, Nvidia is rapidly moving to disintermediating big cloud in launching their own "AI cloud"[2]. It's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out...

Google has also been caught somewhat flat-footed and is simultaneously investing even more in "AI" with what will almost certainly be significant revenue opportunity with GCP. I don't follow AWS as closely but I don't see how they could be excluded from this trend - other than having first-mover advantage in cloud services with many more (at this point legacy) customers forever trapped in AWS.

I tend not to try to prognosticate on things like this but it's one of the rare instances I'm very confident in my thesis here. Obviously I'm just some random HN guy but like I said I'd make a friendly bet here.

People need to remember AWS is over 20 years old. There's not a good historical track record of any computing platform/architecture/approach maintaining a strangle hold much longer than that (except maybe Windows, which I'm not sure is comparable).

[0] - https://archive.is/tKLOz

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-forecasts-fourth-q...

[2] - https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/nvidia-tease...

Re: Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

#113

Post by kkielhofner » Tue, Feb 28, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #100

outworlder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO those building greenfield solution today should take a hard look at whether the default approach from the last ~10 years “of course you build in $BIGCLOUD” makes sense for the application - in many cases it does not. When one buys a house, they should take a hard loo at whether the default approach of paying for utilities makes sense, versus generating their own power. While that's a bit snarky, the reasoning…

> When one buys a house, they should take a hard loo at whether the default approach of paying for utilities makes sense, versus generating their own power. Yes, people do. They install solar panels and use them to generate at least some of their own power. Near future battery tech might allow them to generate all of it if they get enough sunlight, in which case this will become a genuine question to answer: how much…

> In a similar manner, cloud vs self hosting is a valid consideration that changes over time. We now have docker and similar tools which make managing your own infrastructure much easier than it was ten years ago. I fully expect even better tools will come out in the future so this consideration does change over time.

Excellent point. AWS is 21 years old. Docker (essentially the foundation for most self-hosting these days) is 10 years old. I think we're going to see many more self-hosted K8s control planes (as one example). This isn't considering even more modern tools built on these fundamental components that make self-hosting even easier.

Re: Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

#114

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 28, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

ranman wrote: post #108

kkielhofner wrote: post #76

As has happened many times throughout history (back to mainframes and thin clients of the 90s) there are swings/trends in how infrastructure is hosted. Listening to the “All In Podcast” yesterday even those guys were talking about revenue drops in the big cloud services and noting we’re currently in the midst of a swing back to self-hosting/co-location/whatever thinking and migrations out. IMHO those building greenfi…

The parent comment is neither factual nor advisable. You build greenfield in cloud precisely because it is greenfield and the utilization isn't well understood. Cloud options let you adjust and experiment quickly. Once a workload is well understood it's a good candidate for optimization, including a move to self managed hardware / on prem. Buying hardware is a great option once you actually understand the utilization…

[deleted]

Re: Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud

#115

Post by knorker » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

rcme wrote: post #78

knorker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue drop? Google Cloud is still growing 30-40% year on year.

AWS also had 20% revenue growth last quarter.

Yeah. Google Cloud was the only one I knew off the top of my head. I'm sure other clouds (not just MSFT) are growing too. Maybe the second derivative is going down, but it's absolutely not even close to a drop.

Public cloud will grow a lot more. I'd expect a slowdown when they're all ~10x what they are now.