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Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

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Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#151

Post by tpmx »

sdan wrote: post #142
maktouch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to use gcloud to ssh. Just add your keys in your projects' Metadata, and you'll have ssh access to all servers. Each member of your team can do it, and it works retroactively.

Yeah that does work (which I have managed to pull off)... but I feel like it's a bit more of a pain (very slightly) to change the metadata, open up the ports and whatnot to ssh. I think AWS just tells you to download a .pem file and ssh. In conclusion, I guess both ways aren't bad. I just seem to prefer AWS here because for me it was a bit easier than GCP because I ran into several problems when sshing to GCP initial…

So it was easier for you to use AWS initially because you were used to AWS. Gotcha. ;)

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#152

Post by q3k »

VikingCoder wrote: post #77
lacker wrote: post #43

I was working at Google when AWS launched in 2006. The internal message was, we don't want to build a competitor. We have the technology to compete in this area, but it is fundamentally a low-margin business, whereas reinvesting in our core business is high-margin, so we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. I wouldn't say the Google strategy was wrong per se - their stock has about 10x'd since then. But it's…

I would say the Google strategy was wrong. For every AWS API with significant adoption, Google should have implemented it. Make transitioning from AWS to GCE as simple as possible.

I'm really glad they took the opportunity to change the APIs and abstractions around. Some of the ones exposed by AWS are absolutely insane.

Not to mention some of the paradigms: regionalized dashboards/endpoints, the mess that is EC2Classic/VPC, lack of projects for compartmentalization/namespacing ... a lot of those APIs also leak internal implementation details of their products, and trying to match them would be silly.

And they did follow one API that everybody else has: S3. And that one is decent only because it's basically HTTP with some auth headers sprinkled in.

My overall experience with GCloud is much better thanks to these redesigns. AWS just seems like an underdesigned mess of loosely coupled components implemented by siloed teams.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#153

Post by rifung »

np_tedious wrote: post #144
exacube wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel they entered the business because they AWS showed the industry that it actually has pretty good margins. However, I think the sentiment is probably true that selling VPS is low-margin over the long-term, but i think the margins come from the other bits: global economies of scale, good infrastructure management & practices, and providing their proven internal technologies (ML/AI, managed distributed services).…

I think you hit the nail on the head with managed services. In 2006 Google probably wasn't thinking much further than EC2 and S3

But I thought Google's first offerings was App Engine? If anything I think they were overambitious

(I work for Google, opinions are my own)

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#154

Post by discodave »

echelon wrote: post #128
chillydawg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is today, but it won't last. As automation tooling gets better the barriers to entry drop and competition kicks in and lowers prices. You can see it already: Aws are constantly lowering their prices. It's not just to be nice, they're competing hard.

> barriers to entry drop Are more providers entering into the cloud space? I thought AWS and Azure had this on lock down, with Google a third fiddle. Are new companies able to enter this space now? I assume the capital investment required for allocating and maintaining tons of data centers at edge nodes that are globally distributed would be too steep.

Arguably the CDNs (Akamai, CloudFlare and friends) have made the capital investment, and are now in the cloud business.

But I don't see anybody competing with AWS/Azure/GCP anytime soon.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#155

Post by erikig »

partiallypro wrote: post #143
chillydawg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is today, but it won't last. As automation tooling gets better the barriers to entry drop and competition kicks in and lowers prices. You can see it already: Aws are constantly lowering their prices. It's not just to be nice, they're competing hard.

> the barriers to entry drop The barriers for entry on the Cloud will never drop. The Cloud grows more and complex and regional data centers across the globe are impossible for any company without gobs of money to compete with. The margins will drop, but only because the competition between the big 3 has barely even started; even that I believe is a decade away.

This is just history repeating itself.

The same thing happened with the underlying server/architecture/processor providers. For a while it a vibrant field with multiple competitors and high margins. After a while, competition and differentiation drove down margins.

When the margins drop only the best players will be left. Those players will buy out the competition until there's just 2 or 3 big players who will then ratchet up the prices until they reach a stable equilibrium.

And then another layer gets added to this tasty lasagna:

- Processor

- Architecture

- OS

- VirtualizationService

- CloudProvider

And then we start the process of innovation to margin squeeze again...

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#156

Post by milesward »

paulddraper wrote: post #131
superfrank wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I have zero information about how they came to that conclusion, but it sounds to me like they looked too far into the future. With basically every major tech company (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM) now having some cloud offering and so many companies switching their on-site infrastructure for the cloud, it seems like it's only a matter of time until compute time becomes a commodity. Once that happens prici…

> compute time becomes a commodity The cloud is enormously expensive if people are buying it for "compute time". But that's the miscalculation: thinking people buy cloud for "compute time". By and large they do not. They buy cloud for flexible provision, robust management, easier deployment, and better monitoring. And those are differentiated qualities.

I see a very different list of core benefits: more of ops, compliance, procurement is someone else's problem; capital conservation; and it's what the kids use to go fast, familiarity.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#157

Post by filmgirlcw »

adventured wrote: post #54
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of telling how the chart has Oracle, Adobe and Intel as "peers" but AWS is nowhere to be seen. I didn't even know Intel or Adobe had cloud offerings.

Adobe's market cap has gone from a stagnant $20-$30x billion, to being as valuable as SAP, in five years, solely due to their booming cloud subscription business. Previously the stock hadn't net climbed higher basically between the dotcom bubble in 2000 and 2013. Here is their chart back to 1986: https://i.imgur.com/lVeAGHQ.jpg Sales were hardly moving for years and have soared since fiscal 2015, from $4.7b to $10.6b…

And for Adobe, cloud is way more than just Creative Cloud and the subscriptions for Photoshop or whatever.

When Adobe bought Omniture, that was I would argue, one of the best acquisitions since DoubleClick, and Adobe has taken that and built out this very high-margin, very lucrative “marketing cloud” business for agencies and small businesses and large enterprises.

It’s genuinely impressive and brilliant to see how Adobe has turned its business around.

And as an end-user, I may dislike that it’s harder to pirate Photoshop (and if we’re legit honest, that’s what 95% of the complaints about Creative Cloud’s pricing comes down to), but if you’re a creative professional who relies on those tools, $600 a year is a worthwhile investment, especially since the updates have been higher quality and more frequent. My employer pays my sub but I’d pay it myself if I had to — just because it makes my life easier — and I’m not even a designer or video editor by trade (I do edit a lot of video, however).

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#158

Post by outside1234 »

chillydawg wrote: post #68
frostyj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought margin on the cloud business is pretty high...

It is today, but it won't last. As automation tooling gets better the barriers to entry drop and competition kicks in and lowers prices. You can see it already: Aws are constantly lowering their prices. It's not just to be nice, they're competing hard.

You forgot storage and the huge lock-in that storage has.

It would cost $850,000 to move 10PB of data out of a cloud. People aren't going to do it. They aren't going to be able to afford to do it.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#159

Post by madenine »

ehsankia wrote: post #75
outside1234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More. A lot more. Azure is growing 20 points faster than GCP and from a much higher base too (and I will point out that it is in Microsoft's DNA to run this sort of business, unlike Google's).

How is it in Microsoft's DNA? They've always run the software, not the hardware. And for Azure, they just took all their Office customers and rebranded them as "Azure" customers, pumping their cloud numbers.

Enterprise Sales, Support, Training, Certifications, Deals for packing services/software/etc, Incentive programs, Extensive partner network, etc, etc, etc.

There's an entire realm of software development and consulting in and around Microsoft enterprise products - and that has extended to Azure as well.

Personally, I've worked with AWS,GCP and Azure in a professional capacity (data science consulting) - and while Azure has its fair share of warts, the level of integration and "it just works" between Azure and MS Enterprise products is fairly impressive.

For example, I'm big on postgres - but working with SQL Server on Azure is such as breeze. There's nothing I can do with it that I couldn't do on other platforms, but the combination of tooling (SSMS, VSCode) and smooth azure integration (Blob Storage, AzureSQL, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, etc) made it easy to make things that 1. worked and 2. could be mostly supported by a BA instead of a dev.

Re: Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

#160

Post by dwoozle »

notyourday wrote: post #79
dwoozle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise CIOs get an entirely different experience from Google than you or I do. It’s like the difference between flying Concorde and flying as a stowaway in the nose wheel landing gear.

If that's the case I absolutely hate to know what is the experience that you have. Google is absolutely clueless in sales to enterprise. The only thing that they throw at enterprise is CAF and everyone has CAF, it is just called something else.

What is CAF? My relationship with Google is basically like my relationship with Mount Everest. It exists and I spent about $10,000 with it but never got a response from it on anything.
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