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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#121

Post by origami777 »

There's always the simpler explanation to why Google is getting traction:

- Price/performance is better in some/many cases for VMs

- It's easy(ier?) to use

- Clear technical advantage with some of their other services e.g. Load balancers

- Customers prefer when there are multiple companies competing for their business

I get that there are long-term strategies that involve the likes of container services. But just the fact that they are better in some areas will help them get traction. Plus they have a fantastic brand name.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#122

Post by ranman »

dekhn wrote: post #47
vmasto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Amazon currently offers this as a service (two different services actually, snowball and snowmobile for exabytes), i wonder what gives? Is one less informed than the other or what am I missing something? Why such disparity in opinion?

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…

Do you have any references / examples of people underestimating the effort of working with snowball?

I've actually only heard positive things about snowball. I would be very interested in negative feedback.

(I work for amazon)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#123

Post by thr0waway1239 »

lmickh wrote: post #97
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…

Those Azure gains only exist within a small space. Once you step outside the C# ASP.net sphere, their picture is no where near as rosy. Much of their offerings are minimal products for checkbox comparison sake. When the answer to your tech problem is not ASP.net/SQL Server, you are going to find their services much more difficult to put up with compared to the competition. Before someone jumps in with ".Net is huge i…

And I will also add this - as a software developer today you are probably thinking about learning stuff like Solr, Hadoop, CoreNLP, NLTK, Spark etc., as you try to learn more about data science and related stuff.

As you do this, I personally think that you are much better off getting the JetBrains all-in-one subscription (if you can afford it) over continuing to use Visual Studio. There are a lot of things happening on the data science front which are just that much harder to do within the MS stack.

Actually I really love the C# language, and wish there were .NET ports for Solr, Hadoop and NLP libraries etc. But it just makes more sense to get into the native ecosystems for these libraries (Java, Python etc.) with the most convenient IDEs for those languages (e.g. IntelliJ, PyCharm) and not struggle with trying to get all your NuGet ducks in a row.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#124

Post by obulpathi »

user5994461 wrote: post #61
dekhn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).

Author of the polemic post here! :D @ranman: You could start by disclosing that you work for AWS ;) I'll stand by my word. I can present the pricing comparison at reinvent 2017 if you'd like. 1) The equivalent instances are cheaper on Google. 2) Automatic discount is significantly superior and more customer friendly that reserved instances. 3) Google is faster or more flexible, usually both. That means that when you…

I completely agree with this. But, what I found more impressive about Google Cloud is that it requires a far fewer number of people to get things done compared to AWS. AWS believes in providing fundamental building blocks rather than frameworks. It takes a lot of time, money, skills, expertise and people to make it work. Google Cloud provides frameworks which are easy to use, secure by default, does not require tuning or turning knobs, high performance, scale automatically (or automagically) and are ready to use. It is an impressive feat that Snapchat, a 25 Billion dollar company, runs on Google Cloud with 2 part-time DevOps engineers and recently Pokemon Go was able to scale to facebook level user engagement in a mere month time period with 4 backend engineers (and of course with lot of help from Google). Things like these are impossible to achieve with AWS. Bottom line, if you want to get something done, Google Cloud will get you there in a fraction of time compared to AWS and can scale way better than what AWS can, at half of the AWS's price.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#125

Post by amaks »

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.

To be fair, Amazon has developed a Silk browser for their Kindle Fire tablets.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#126

Post by iainmerrick »

acdha wrote: post #92
iainmerrick wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it really just "too early"? I always thought App Engine was a fantastic idea, and I wondered why it never seemed to catch on. Choice of languages -- initially just Python and Java? Fiddly APIs, different from competing platforms but not actually super-simple for simple tasks? Lack of a straightforward way of running background tasks (still a bit of a mess)? Lack of management support? Maybe just underpowered at f…

App Engine seems to me like the classic Google product: some cool ideas but the initial experience was clunky and the pricing model scared people, especially since you were locking yourself into a proprietary architecture. Google engineers could point to various things it did to help with future scaling needs and took the advantages of things like the NoSQL data model for granted but everyone I knew who didn't work f…

I just realised there was another problem: no internal customers. If there had been an important team inside Google keen on using App Engine, that might have helped them figure out the right feature set. But instead they were just guessing at what users outside Google might want. (Compare to Gmail, which was and is very heavily used inside Google.)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#127

Post by vacri »

btilly wrote: post #52
seregine wrote: post #25

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matte…

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…

Apparently Amazon also puts developers into the customer support rotation. If you want to improve customer experience, this is a great idea. I've worked small-medium business support before, and you're generally treated like chaff by the devs, who don't get to wear their own cut corners and bad decisions.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#128

Post by solatic »

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…

So, when is Google going to buy JetBrains?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#129

Post by mdani »

seregine wrote: post #25

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matte…

This is changing - I got a call from Google Cloud sales/support today. I am just using the GCP for prototyping so I have spent maybe $50 on it so far. Looks like they're stepping up their gane and really trying to be helpful and willing to listen to customers.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#130

Post by paulddraper »

st3v3r wrote: post #111
brassic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

That's not really an OS level thing, though. That's an application level thing. Finder was chosen not to be extensible, and Explorer was. There are Finder replacements that are.

OS is usually taken to mean kernel + core applications.

Are Explorer and Finder "core"? Probably.

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