Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by redredrobot » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 2:56 AM UTC

maktouch wrote: post #98

whoisjuan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.

Well, UX means user experience. If some little features give you a better experience to me, a user, isn't that a better UX? They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance. They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first. They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance. One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and…

Making it hard to cross regions is deliberate - I would guess it's a learning from s3 being designed as a global service. And I think if you compared global outages across cloud providers, you would see that strong region isolation has substantial benefits.

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

#212

Post by redredrobot » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 3:10 AM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #199

madenine wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Azu…

One of my favorite resources is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ It's a rich set of articles about various system design patterns. It's not even really set in the context of Azure, it's just plain "Here are things you should learn about". It's really well done. I haven't seen anything close from Google or Amazon.

https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

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

#213

Post by solidasparagus » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #204

swedish_mafia wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should keep our infrastructure to ourselves. Hilarious, now that we know amazon builds better infrastructure. How they say it? „don’t buy your own hype“!

(I work for Azure, so I don't really have a dog in this fight.) Google's cloud seems pretty capable, they're just going through teething. They got to live migration extremely fast, and they seem to have nailed BigQuery and Spanner (albeit not the pricing model.) They will get more reliable. Internally though, Google was (and maybe still is) a decade ahead. With Borg they deployed their entire infrastructure as contai…

> They will get more reliable

The road to higher reliability is a slow one when we are talking about cloud-level 9s. I get the feeling they are still in the early stages of adopting a B2B culture and everything that comes with that.

For example, the June global network outage was caused by a software bug that had global implications. AWS moved away from building software that crossed region boundaries years ago, I would guess because they had an issue like this one. It feels like GCP is many mistakes behind AWS.

Cloud reliability isn't due to genius, it's just software+infrastructure that has been improved again and again in response to new failure modes. I think it will be several years before GCP has reliability that is comparable to what AWS has today.

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

#214

Post by donavanm » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

discodave wrote: post #154

echelon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maaaaaybe. I see the CDNs bringing on compute & durablish storage at the edge. And id buy the argument theyre positioning themselves for the next round of “cloud” ala Lambda + DynamoDB.

But I strongly object to the capital characterization. Akamai, the gorilla in the CDN room, to looks to have capital expenditures of $200M or so for hardware/colo/etc. Cloudflare was spending $20-30M IIRC. Conversely Amazon “Cash capital expenditures were $6.7 billion, $10.1 billion, and $11.3 billion in 2016, 2017, and 2018, which primarily reflect additional capacity to support our fulfillment operations and additional investments in support of continued business growth in technology infrastructure (the majority of which is to support AWS).”

Money alone doesnt buy success but the CDN guys dont seem to showing up to the game yet. As youve noted I dont really see anyone else on the trajectory to general competition with the big three.

Disclaimer: Im a principal at AWS and have worked on CloudFront. All my comments are based on my personal reading of publicly available data like 10K & S1 filings.

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

#215

Post by phamilton » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:56 AM UTC

redredrobot wrote: post #212

phamilton wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite resources is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ It's a rich set of articles about various system design patterns. It's not even really set in the context of Azure, it's just plain "Here are things you should learn about". It's really well done. I haven't seen anything close from Google or Amazon.

https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

That certainly covers operations in AWS, but take a look at the azure docs for cloud design patterns: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns...

For example, read Bulkhead, Circuit-Breaker, Queue-based load leveling, sharding. The level of detail around why you might want to do it this way is fantastic. AWS whitepapers and best practices never really get into the why, they just focus on the what.

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

#216

Post by notyourday » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

dwoozle wrote: post #160

notyourday wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Customer Acquisition Fund -- Google will spend its money to solve your problems using Google infrastructure if you spend the money on the Google infrastructure so you become a customer.

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

#217

Post by verdverm » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

redredrobot wrote: post #209

verdverm wrote: post #169

Google is dumping money into their enterprise programs. They hired some experienced people to run it. Their offerings are soooo much better quality than AWS. Try getting a GPU vm with a local SSD on AWS, does not exist... In GCP I can set custom values for CPU, MEM, GPU, SSD. Try to ssh to a machine, and then one without a public network connect. Google is the only provider with a good portal to their partner program…

> a GPU vm with a local SSD on AWS, does not exist I'm pretty sure that's not true. I believe you can get V100s or T4s with local NVMe SSDs.

I looked just before the T4 landed at Amazon a monthish ago, GCP has had them almost a year now.

You're right though, what I meant was a machine I could do a hypervisor with, which is any VM on Google Cloud. Need baremetal on AWS, and that type does not have GPU options.

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

#218

Post by llampx » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

gundmc wrote: post #41

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.

The chart shows the entire market value of select other tech Giants, not their cloud offerings. The purpose of the graphic was to say "Google Cloud is now worth more than all of Oracle", not to show Google's place in the cloud market relative to Amazon and Microsoft.

You can't say tech giant without mentioning Amazon or Microsoft.

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

#219

Post by justicezyx » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #186

justicezyx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever concluded that the margin is low is probably plain clueless about the enterprise IT, or they were looking at developer-friendly tech gigs or colo-providers, etc, not the IBM Oracle EMC Vmware NetApp etc. When I joined Amazon in 2012, the message is clearly that AWS competes with IBM Oracle EMV Vmware NetApp. I do not have proof if the original plan was that in the early days. But given my impression on Amazon…

I think AWS made a change in strategy between 2006 and 2012 because their early architecture and marketing were totally anti-enterprise.

Naturally you have to start with developer friendly marketing as a new comer, there is no direct to enterprise marketing workable for aws (which will be too expensive and an uphill battle)

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

#220

Post by tylerl » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

briffle wrote: post #126

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).…

Market share is measured in some very, very funny ways. Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer. If Google was to switch things around, and have Ad-words, Gmail, maps, etc, all pay a small, internal fee to google cloud to host their servers own internal servers, I think the market-share conversation would be very, very different.

>> Like Office 365 being part of their cloud division, including when people download and install office on their computer.

It's even sillier than that: Microsoft counts (a significant portion of) boxed copies of Office that you buy in a store as Azure cloud revenue. The justification being that buying a copy Office in a box gets you the right to the cloud-based version rather than the offline one you actually bought. Ultimately it's about flexibility.

And in this case, the flexibility to make your Cloud business whatever percentage of your total company revenue it might take in order to claim the market share numbers you want.