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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#151

Post by halflings »

olimashi wrote: post #115
halflings wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ac…

I guess that's kind of my point about Ben's argument. Are pre-trained models going to be the "sustainable advantage" against AWS. I don't think so.

They definitely are for most customers: it is extremely expensive to gather and label enough data for a deep learning model to work correctly. It's very unlikely that you'll manage to configure and train your models + generate input data that Google lacks to make your model work much better than what Google already provide with their "generalist" API.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#152

Post by deadbunny »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #96
newjersey wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here. I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says: > Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511... It soun…

If we use Steve Yegge's famous rant for reference, it goes back to 2002. https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Great read, thanks.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#153

Post by eknkc »

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/

And they cost a smartphone / month. AWS has a 40$ dev support package which is great.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#154

Post by dekhn »

dgacmu wrote: post #101
vmasto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"It ended up cheaper because we did not account for employee costs".

You basically just proved my point: things aren't cheaper if you have to factor in employee cost.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#155

Post by jacques_chester »

daxfohl wrote: post #80
daxfohl wrote: post #70

Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. That seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It seems like they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their vi…

The article mentioned kubernetes multiple times and I think it's providers like Heroku that actually stand the most to gain there. With kubernetes in theory they should no longer have to make you choose between providers, and be able to run on spot instances of whatever provider is cheapest at the time. You just choose your max latency at certain geo areas and a budget to balance by, some AI to help you determine the…

Cloud Foundry is closest to this vision, in my entirely biased opinion. We're already able to mount standalone installations on AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere and others.

Distributing apps across multiple clouds is easy to say, hard to do. Each IaaS has peculiarities and wrinkles, different tradeoffs in performance and cost and so on. It takes a moderately tricky scheduling problem and turns it into a much gnarlier one.

What's easier is using high-level tools like Terraform and BOSH to manage installations on different IaaSes, and pushing apps to whichever one you like as you like. I can easily imagine setting up round-robin deploys.

That said: data has inertia. Any sensible architecture has to bear that in mind; typically apps will wind up living close to their datastores.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#156

Post by ranman »

obulpathi wrote: post #124
user5994461 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tunin…

(I WORK FOR AWS)

>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).

I mean... did they? I was trying to play for weeks and I couldn't even login. I loved the game when I was able to play but I don't think they scaled seamlessly. Maybe that had nothing to do with the cloud provider and had more to do with the application itself (I don't know) -- but I wouldn't personally use Pokemon Go as an example of successful scaling.

>Things like these are impossible to achieve with AWS.

Twilio, Slack, AirBnB, lyft, duolingo, FINRA, yelp, pinterest, foursquare, adroll, shazam, supercell, etc. etc. etc.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

I'm curious why you think these things aren't possible on AWS? They really are... and I can think of hundreds of examples.

Regardless, it's important to recognize that the cloud provider is only ONE piece in your ability to scale. I have examples of failures on GCE and on AWS. Your application architecture is far more important than the cloud provider you choose when it comes to scaling quickly like this. Sometimes it's not worth the dev effort to be prepared for these things.

>"Fraction of the time", "half of the AWS's price"

Nope. As outlined in my linked post above, the comparisons in the article are not accurate.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#158

Post by dgacmu »

dekhn wrote: post #154
dgacmu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"It ended up cheaper because we did not account for employee costs". You basically just proved my point: things aren't cheaper if you have to factor in employee cost.

Technically, that's a logical fallacy:. A&B->true does not mean !B->false.

But, really, I'm not trying to prove or disprove your point. Just noting that there was a situation for us where disk made sense, and we were satisfied with the outcome. Spending 4 hours of person time to save a thousand dollars was reasonable for us in a way it probably wouldn't be for many real companies, because we had comparatively little money and we're willing to work for peanuts.

(Note that I actually share your bias in this one. I both use GCP for my personal stuff and I'm writing this from a Google cafe. :-)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#159

Post by jsolson »

dxxvi wrote: post #139

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

Depending on how you use the services the AWS free tier is actually worth less than GCP's $300 free-trial credit: https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/

I will give Amazon that theirs extends out to a year, but summing up the costs of everything included in the free tier if you use all of it, I think it may still come out to less than $300 (or the equivalents on GCP would, anyway). For example, running an f1-micro for a year will cost you a bit under $60. If you add in another for Google Cloud SQL you're up to a total of about $150 over the course of a year. What they offer you in S3 is basically free (It's possible the other services are a better deal than compute and storage, if you have a use for them, but the GCP free trial lets you allocate that $300 however you like. You can scale up more in that 60 days than you can within the AWS free tier. To me, personally, this strikes me as more valuable if I'm trying to sketch out a new product — I'd rather not try to figure out how to fit inside the AWS free tier resource envelope and instead understand how my costs are scaling with the resources I'm using while not being on the hook for those costs (up to the $300 size of the credit, obviously) for the first couple months. Especially to absorb things like shaking out automation -- go ahead, spin up a GKE cluster, scale it out to 5x the size you currently need, run some quick load tests, and then scale it back down 30 minutes later (and only pay for that 30 minutes).

(affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#160

Post by jsolson »

dx034 wrote: post #149
tobltobs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't agree on the free trial. I think it lets you play around a lot more than the AWS free tier -- as I said in my comment up the thread, go ahead and move the slider to the right and scale up a bit (a little -- the free trial is still quota limited to prevent abuse), see how things perform, slide it back to the left and have only used a tiny fraction of your credit.

I think you get a lot more "kick the tires" flexibility with a moderately large up-front credit.

(affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)

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