Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#181

Post by partiallypro » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

dijit wrote: post #79

partiallypro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is saying Azure isn't based on "horrible tech," "harmful?" None of the big cloud providers are based on "horrible tech." Your statement provides anecdotes but no data that proves this as "harmful." Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Microsoft more than an even keel observer.

I don't really care enough about microsoft to hate it as a company, there's some good and some bad. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's around. And Windows itself has some really good ideas underneath (like IOCP). But it's fair to say I'm not a fan of Windows itself. My bias is purely on the technical merits of the provider. My company had a pretty large discount on Azure so it was under strong consideration. My p…

> My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.

Actually, that's precisely what -you- are doing, not me.

> I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.

I worked at a much larger company than that with over 20K employees that used Azure/O365 and AWS (but no GCS.) Your anecdote means nothing. You're on Hacker News, there are people here that work and have worked for massive media companies, industrial companies and tech companies. Many of which use Azure, AWS and GCS.

Do I wish Azure were better? Absolutely. I have a lot of ideas and complaints where things could be so much better. But I also have just as many numerous complaints about GCS and AWS.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#182

Post by sgift » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #170

markbnj wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a pretty small fish as Google Cloud clients go, but we have honestly not had this problem at all. We get very fast response to support tickets, and on the rare occasions where we've had to escalate they have gone as far as setting up hangouts with senior engineers.

Google, for all their faults, does seem much more interested in soliciting product feedback. I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)

If you are above a certain size you don't go through that. The big ones all have more direct access.

Also: Partner companies. They have more direct access too.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#183

Post by partiallypro » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

volkadav wrote: post #77

partiallypro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not) Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their…

It's been a while (~2 years) since I last had to tangle with it, but off the top of my head: 1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass. 2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI…

1) I agree that Azure storage is possibly my biggest complaint about Azure; ESPECIALLY on Web Apps/App Service Plans. I think they are trying to solve this with the new "bring your own storage" model. But we'll see, the latency on the disks when the queue length gets too high is not excusable, imo.

2) This is no longer a thing, though during that transition period it was slightly annoying.

3) This is also no longer a problem.

4) I've never experienced this, the "pay as you go" model has been with me since I started using Azure 6-7 years ago. Maybe they do this for some licensing models? I have only ever paid for compute time, storage usage and egress. I've have used plenty of licensed software too...so I don't know what yours relates to.

Back to #1 though, if the Azure team could figure out why Web App disk speed feels so slow (sometimes), my company would probably double/triple our spend on Azure and drop some of their competitors. This is genuinely my biggest complaint.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#184

Post by jpatokal » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #161

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the same thing, it was also IBM's cloud services pitch that they "understood the enterprise" better than Google or Amazon does. It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annua…

IMO AWS is the true king — the Microsoft numbers are spiked by Office 365 licenses, most of which is renting Office itself. Amazon is the only one not playing games with definitions. IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components. Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely an…

> truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers

Got context? Are you referring to the (still ongoing!) deprecation of hardware search appliances as announced in 2016?

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#185

Post by pier25 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

sxp62000 wrote: post #122

If Godaddy can provide decent support, why can't Google?! The only think I use on Google Cloud is Firebase, love Firebase. But even then, I never know who/where to ask if I have questions.

I've had my ups and downs with Firebase. The dev experience is generally good, but reliability hasn't been so great.

Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers.

I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be uploaded.

2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed. Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted.

We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android SDKs.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#186

Post by pier25 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

AWS may be the better service, but the console is a huge mess.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#187

Post by brazzledazzle » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:38 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #75

VikingCoder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

Because businesses fundamentally run on Outlook and Office and support for that has been pretty amazingly consistent. Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are

They burned people with their original on-prem OneDrive bullshit.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#188

Post by jpatokal » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #132

rhexs wrote: post #119

Interesting. Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena, they had a chance to integrate with Red Hat's customer base and lost it to IBM. I suspect IBM will handily pull into third unless they manage the acquisition like most of their other acquisitions.

> Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena. Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals. The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capi…

You're incorrectly conflating "enterprise" with "large" here. For example, Snap and Apple are very large companies in terms of Cloud spend, but they're very much not an "enterprise"/Fortune 500 company that moves at the speed of an arthritic sloth and needs to be sold on the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#189

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

shittyadmin wrote: post #84

VikingCoder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartph…

Not to mention that windows still sticks with carriage return + line feed to maintain compatibility with the 1960s.

Re: Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

#190

Post by cjhanks » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #73

lalos wrote: post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

I am not often a Windows programmer, but I followed that saga. I think it was the result of poor internal communication and was fairly anomalous for Microsoft.