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Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#41

Post by nulltype »

slashink wrote: post #36
boulos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have paid support tiers ( https://cloud.google.com/support/ ) with explicit time-to-response targets. Which were you using? Disclaimer: I work on GCE.

Well tbh we got answers but they usually were; nope not offered, cannot be fixed. 3 weeks later I met a Google engineer working with GCE at a party who fixed it for us the day after hearing about our issue, which means it probably was able to be fixed from the first time.

I will admit that the party support plan is a bit pricey.

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#42

Post by alexatkeplar »

nulltype wrote: post #28
alexatkeplar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pub/Sub is pretty meh. The Google Cloud team still don't seem to understand the need for a Kafka-like unified log service, unlike AWS (Kinesis is 2 years old this week) or even IBM Bluemix (who just launched Message Hub, which is true hosted Kafka).

What's meh about it versus Kinesis?

Cloud Pub/Sub is really a competitor to Amazon SQS, not Kinesis. It's more helpful to think of Kafka and Kinesis as databases containing first-class, immutable streams; writing to the streams and reading from the streams are completely decoupled, unlike in a traditional pub-sub system. Jay Kreps' blog post explains it better than I can:

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#43

Post by pinkunicorn »

boulos wrote: post #38
pinkunicorn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about ECS? Lambda? Role Based Authentication? EBS snapshots?

GKE is miles ahead of ECS, and being based on Kubernetes is huge. We don't really have an equivalent to Lambda (yet?) but classic App Engine isn't actually too far off 'technology-wise' (pay per use, containerized, instant start). Our lack of IAM is beyond painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it. PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"…

Haven't had a chance to try GKE, but I'll give it a whirl for my upcoming project.

With Lambda, its the whole ecosystem around it which makes it better than App Engine. A file changes in S3 and you want to do something? Lambda, in a few simple lines of code.

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#44

Post by pinkunicorn »

GlennS wrote: post #40
pinkunicorn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about ECS? Lambda? Role Based Authentication? EBS snapshots?

Reading this I just want them all to drop the incomprehensible acronyms.

Even the terms wouldn't probably make sense unless you've used them. Elastic Block Storage - I surely didn't get what it was supposed to do when I read it loud the first time.

Elastic Container Service - "Why the heck is it Elastic!?" was my reaction the first time I read the term.

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#45

Post by nulltype »

alexatkeplar wrote: post #42
nulltype wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's meh about it versus Kinesis?

Cloud Pub/Sub is really a competitor to Amazon SQS, not Kinesis. It's more helpful to think of Kafka and Kinesis as databases containing first-class, immutable streams; writing to the streams and reading from the streams are completely decoupled, unlike in a traditional pub-sub system. Jay Kreps' blog post explains it better than I can: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

In my limited Pub/Sub experience, this seems to be how it works. You publish to a topic (an immutable stream), and then create a decoupled subscription that reads messages from the topic. Am I missing something?

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#46

Post by boulos »

slashink wrote: post #36
boulos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have paid support tiers ( https://cloud.google.com/support/ ) with explicit time-to-response targets. Which were you using? Disclaimer: I work on GCE.

Well tbh we got answers but they usually were; nope not offered, cannot be fixed. 3 weeks later I met a Google engineer working with GCE at a party who fixed it for us the day after hearing about our issue, which means it probably was able to be fixed from the first time.

Sounds like we should throw more parties ;).

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#47

Post by wstrange »

notatoad wrote: post #23
IBM wrote: post #8

In 5 years will AWS still have 25% operating margins?

I suspect yes. AWS seems to be pushing hard towards more managed application services (things like lambda) built on top of their core AWS services like EC2 and S3, and they can maintain their margin on those services even if competition drives down the prices on EC2.

Those services are incredibly proprietary to AWS. I really question why companies would want to tie themselves to a single cloud provider.

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#48

Post by alexatkeplar »

nulltype wrote: post #45
alexatkeplar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Pub/Sub is really a competitor to Amazon SQS, not Kinesis. It's more helpful to think of Kafka and Kinesis as databases containing first-class, immutable streams; writing to the streams and reading from the streams are completely decoupled, unlike in a traditional pub-sub system. Jay Kreps' blog post explains it better than I can: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

In my limited Pub/Sub experience, this seems to be how it works. You publish to a topic (an immutable stream), and then create a decoupled subscription that reads messages from the topic. Am I missing something?

I think this sentence [1] helps to explain the difference:

> When you create a subscription, the system establishes a sync point. That is, your subscriber is guaranteed to receive any message published after this point.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/subscriber

With Kafka or Kinesis, I can write events to a stream/topic completely independently of any consumer. I can then bring as many consumers online as I want, and they can start processing from the beginning of my stream if they want. If one of my consumers has a bug in it, I can ask it to go back and start again. That's what I mean by an immutable stream in Kafka or Kinesis.

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#49

Post by vgt »

nulltype wrote: post #35
pinkunicorn wrote: post #33

I don't understand why the reporters hold Google in such high regard, particularly in the cloud business. Here is a statement from the article: > "At the same time, analysts say, the company’s offerings in cloud development services — computing, storage, data analytics and others — are already comparable to Amazon’s." AWS is far far ahead of GC and it is in no way comparable. Plus the ecosystem around AWS has evolved…

In the ones they mentioned, GCE vs EC2, GCS vs S3, and BigQuery vs Redshift, they seem pretty comparable to me.

I like to think that BigQuery is far far ahead of Redshift in terms of performance + scale + manageability + cost (but i may be biased).

Re: Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business

#50

Post by vgt »

alexatkeplar wrote: post #22
obulpathi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just Compute, Google Network, Cloud Storage, Container Engine (Kubernetese is OpenSource, so you can run it internally too), Cloud Shell, Pub/Sub, their new Cloud Console, are awesome.

Pub/Sub is pretty meh. The Google Cloud team still don't seem to understand the need for a Kafka-like unified log service, unlike AWS (Kinesis is 2 years old this week) or even IBM Bluemix (who just launched Message Hub, which is true hosted Kafka).

One thing you gotta remember is, PubSub charges per volume, regardless of speed (in other words, scaling is free). AWS will charge you varying orders of magnitudes for varying scales, in addition to volume.
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