Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#231

Post by takeda » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

avip wrote: post #76

airstrike wrote: post #7

> Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. > (...) > Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer,…

I think aws also did a great job keeping competition "under fire". They release so many new services, so quickly (and in amazingly alphaish-at-best quality), that they are always perceived to offer the most complete cloud infrastructure.

I was playing with gcloud, particularly with deployment manager and have feeling that there are still many bugs in gcloud. DM seems like it has a good design and could be more powerful (especially ability to use templating and injecting Python code), but still feels buggy, error messages are very cryptic, and not feature full around updating (there is some rollback and preview functionality, but it is essentially useless).

Nowhere close to what Cloud Formation is, even though from design it is less powerful.

I was a bit skeptical why terraform is popular, doesn't feels like it brings anything new to CF, but could make a lot of sense to use instead of DM.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#232

Post by aqwsedopl » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

hylaride wrote: post #192

PaulHoule wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Microsoft's bias towards Windows?" Microsoft was one of the first major developers for the Mac when it came out originally. Microsoft is happy for you to run Linux in the Azure cloud. Microsoft added Linux emulation to Windows. Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone (if only because Verizon and AT&T refused to approve new Windows Phones on their networks.)

Microsoft does all of that now, but ~6-8 years ago when the initial cloud pushes were happening they most certainly weren't.

Playing half a decade to a decade of catchup built on a war chest of windows and office b2b sales does not instill much confidence ...

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#233

Post by eikenberry » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

rincebrain wrote: post #128

bad_user wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal. Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decis…

FWIW, [4] appears to be at least unverifiable, since OP never posted again, and when support tried to reach out or find something that matched the listed details, they never heard back and couldn't find something that fit? [1] (Not trying to claim that there's not a problem, just that the particular story seems to have a number of things that are suspect without further details.) (I work for elgooG, not on anything C…

The fact that it was a single, unconfirmed post and yet people still believe it may say more about the trust issue than whether it really happened or not.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#234

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #142

snarfy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support is the main reason I wouldn't use GCP. Production is down and the only response I get is an automated email? No thanks.

Honestly that was my experience with Amazon. GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon) I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support. The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I under…

I paid for GCP support. It was laughable. I’d send a question like: I’m using feature A to do XYZ. The documentation does not include corner case XYZ. Please advise.

They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#235

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #215

ohaideredevs wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN. Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious. As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps…

GCP's documentation has an aesthetic quality but is lacking practicality. Take for example a fundamental usecase: working with a blob storage service through a client library. Googling "gcp cloud storage java example" and "s3 java example" returns these as top results: https://cloud.google.com/java/getting-started/using-cloud-st... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/... The AWS doc is clear a…

I agree with this 100%. GCP documentation is not useful when attempting to solve specific problems. It’s good for gaining a general idea of how things work. But how specifically does one bind an ssl cert and key to a load balancer? How specifically should one create a service account to read a secret encrypted with kms? GCP documentation is pretty, it reads well. It’s utterly useless for the intended purpose which is helping people use the google cloud platform.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#236

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

spricket wrote: post #189

ohaideredevs wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cute shitty documentation" - reading the GCP docs has been nothing but a pleasure for me. I genuinely hate most documentation (I am looking at you Microsoft), but GCP is up there in quality, almost standing next to MDN. Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious. As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps…

It really comes down to having code I can copy-paste. Google's documentation tends to be minimalist, like a research paper. One small example for everything, just enough to cover every feature. AWS is closer to "copy paste this big blob and modify it a bit". A lot less work for people trying to implement. I'm not planning to read all the documentation, I just want something that works. Google almost forces you to in…

It’s more that copy paste. It’s a philosophy of what the documentation is for.

If I’m looking at a doc I’m here because I want to do a specific task. The documentation should be task centric like the instructions for a university homework assignment. Imagine you want 30 people to practice a novel task in one evening. You taught them theory in class. Now you want them to try it out. Give them step by step instructions they can use to apply general knowledge to this specific case.

When I’m reading about load balancers and certs I don’t need a textbook. I need examples of specific commands. Instructions on using your tool to do my specific task.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#237

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

landa wrote: post #223

spricket wrote: post #87

The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground. Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. T…

I find it much easier to use Google Cloud Platform compared to AWS. That's why I use it over AWS.

Where do you find documentation?

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#238

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #63

ernsheong wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community. For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information. There's also a User…

I also recently found out there is slack channel ! But look, this is not what people want. We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can respond to. GCloud does have it at the Gold level support. So in my mind, GCloud is more figure-it-yourself-dont-call-us . AWS is more dependable. They have scaled their sales/devrel/support ops so that a small startup can access it. Google only does this fo…

Yeah gcp model is not user friendly at all. I hope they’re working on improving it there’s no way to win if they keep on how they’re going . I personally like support via slack. Scaleft had it and it was amazing. I only joined the gcp slack yesterday so I don’t know if there are answers as well as questions.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#239

Post by true_tuna » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #201

keerthiko wrote: post #70

I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are significantl…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this... Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their u…

I’m ex google. I still have friends on the cloud team. I’ve built on aws and gcp.

If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon. The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION IS NOT.

Re: Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle

#240

Post by boulos » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

true_tuna wrote: post #239

boulos wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this... Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their u…

I’m ex google. I still have friends on the cloud team. I’ve built on aws and gcp. If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon. The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION I…

To be clear, I didn't suggest all ex-Google people go with GCP. I just said that the ones that do are basically saying "Eh, I'll be fine".