Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Google Is Challenging AWS

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 175 posts

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#141

Post by tokenizerrr »

brilliantcode wrote: post #77
daxfohl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?

Yes so deploying on Azure is right clicking the VS project and hitting deploy, it walks me through all the setup steps in one spot without leaving the IDE. This takes a huge cognitive load off the developer who won't have to do context switching between portal.zure.com and VS. But portal.azure.com is a much better, smooth, streamlined & intuitive interface than AWS, and I find myself wanting to work with Azure more a…

> But portal.azure.com is a much better, smooth, streamlined & intuitive interface than AWS, and I find myself wanting to work with Azure more and more.

Ah, the interface that makes you scroll in all 4 directions on a small screen. I get slightly dizzy using it.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#142

Post by dx034 »

dxxvi wrote: post #139

Nothing can beat the 1 year free for AWS free tier.

Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#143

Post by dx034 »

paulddraper wrote: post #131
mvitorino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-will-truck-your-mas...

> All this power fuels one terabyte per-second of data transfer speeds across a 40 gigabyte per-second connection.

How is that supposed to work? Do they mean several 40gbit/s connections? Or did I misunderstand sth here?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#144

Post by crb »

iainmerrick wrote: post #126
acdha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Thousands of internal Google apps (most of the important ones we use day-to-day) run on App Engine. Many external apps do too - https://plus.google.com/107043289104010976501/posts/VYybt1BC... talks about developers.google.com, for example.

That doesn't help though, as Googlers learn to write apps the Google way (massively horizontally scalable, managed NoSQL data service), which looks very much like App Engine. Outside, people still wanted to run their relational databases and large VMs, and App Engine didn't let them do that. That's why we came out with Compute Engine.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#145

Post by tyingq »

iainmerrick wrote: post #84
user5994461 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow. App Engine was a precursor that came 5 years too early. The hype about serverless is only starting now.

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…

I'm sure there are other reasons why App Engine didn't catch on, but the deal breaker for me was support.

They had an issue where outgoing emails just disappeared, without errors, and no way to debug what was happening. Support denied the issue for quite some time. Wasn't fixed for 2 or 3 weeks.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#146

Post by tomascot »

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.

I'm not so sure, if Amazon develops it's own logistics solutions I would say that those are a bit more complicated than Chrome.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#147

Post by tobltobs »

dx034 wrote: post #142
dxxvi wrote: post #139

Nothing can beat the 1 year free for AWS free tier.

Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.

The AWS free tier is useless imho. If the thing you want to test fits into the AWS free tier then a AWS or GCloud solution would be overkill anyway.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#148

Post by spiderfarmer »

skynetv2 wrote: post #55
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…

as a long time Google user, I find it pretty ironic to use consistency and Google in the same sentence. If consistency exists internally at Google, none of it made in to their products unfortunately.

It's improving, but you still run into some of the interfaces that were designed 8 years ago.

But Microsoft is far worse in that department.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#149

Post by dx034 »

tobltobs wrote: post #147
dx034 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.

The AWS free tier is useless imho. If the thing you want to test fits into the AWS free tier then a AWS or GCloud solution would be overkill anyway.

But it's good if you just test a bit as a developer. Not to check if a project is valid, but to gain some experience. That way, if you hire as a company, developers more likely have AWS experience than GCE/Azure experience.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#150

Post by Pigo »

jonwayne wrote: post #120
ben_jones wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your comment and I want to say, though my comment was rather pointy, I respect the work all of you are doing and I do see a lot of improvement in the platform. I keep a local branch of the python-docs-sample repo and just took a gander to refresh my memory. Specifically I see a quite a few examples using class based views based from the webapp2 package. I don't think it's unreasonable to have this as a maj…

We are indeed working on creating a standalone Task Queues service that will work across all hosting platforms. You can sign up for the alpha here: https://goo.gl/Ya0AZd (I work on the Python developer experience for Google Cloud Platform)

This is why I come to HN. Where else can you read an article about a high profile company, then find comments from people who work on what the article is about? Unless you guys are a brigade, it's pretty cool you happen to be browsing where the rest of us browse.
Post reply on HN