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

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

#61

Post by briffle »

twunde wrote: post #56

One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up datacenters) has helped them b…

I'm having a hard time finding something in Google cloud that is NOT covered by their BAA: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...

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

#62

Post by throwaway405 »

partiallypro wrote: post #6
Arqu wrote: post #5

Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an issue that is being ping-ponged around different…

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…

While Microsoft has undoubtedly been catching up, and there are always some specific products where one vendor has a leg up, there is no doubt the Azure cloud has been technologically far behind AWS and significantly behind Google.

First of all, I'd want to acknowledge that Google is behind AWS as well. One big technical reason is IAM. Few realize just how important AWS IAM is as a service federation infrastructure. If you look at the details, Google's IAM product is inferior.

Now, on to Azure. Three years ago I was involved with a high stakes effort to port an AWS-grown platform service architecture onto Azure. At the time, they had massive gaps in their understanding of what IaaS meant. Here are some concrete examples:

* They did not really understand what object storage was. Blob storage was not possible to use at scale due to trivially low bandwidth, storage, and API limits

* Software-defined networking was not available between availability zones

* Software-defined networking could not be used to launch mixes of instance types

* Software-defined Internet gateways were not available except in a config that resembled "AWS Classic" networking

* On-demand instances were effectively unavailable beyond one or two instances at a time (at least for the instance types we wanted). You had to reserve instance capacity in advance, by going through a support ticket

* Creating and using custom machine images was undocumented in the API

* Instance metadata APIs were not available

* On-demand instance launches would encounter weird behaviors, where upon hitting certain limits entire groups of instances would be terminated

* Many aspects of APIs for the above were undocumented and unsupported

Combined, these problems made deployment on Azure extremely difficult. I have prefaced this with the caveat that Microsoft has improved since then. Many of the problems above are no longer issues, I'm sure. But what I found was a gaping chasm between what Microsoft claimed and what was really possible on the ground. What I found since then is that Google and Microsoft are making an earnest effort to catch up, and that's good for us consumers, but Microsoft (and to some extent Google) often don't even understand the full feature set of what they are trying to catch up with.

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

#63

Post by jkaplowitz »

arctux wrote: post #41
jkaplowitz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform, despite now integrating with Google Cloud Platform's web console for purposes of managing billing and API keys. Yes, this is a branding and communication mess, but nevertheless true.

You seem to be correct. > Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform I have never felt that I have been confused by something so justifiably.

No argument here on that point!

I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.

They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.

(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)

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

#64

Post by manigandham »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #12
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…

The UI is, um, lets say, very unconventional for non-windows folks. It is extremely sluggish compared to AWS or GCP. As in, each page takes several seconds+ to fully load vs AWS/GCP. Maybe this is just for me, or an IE vs Chrome issue or something, I'm not sure. The horizontal panning in the UI is pretty strange for the uninitiated too. Everyone else, the entire internet pretty much scrolls up/down on a web page but…

I feel Azure has the fastest console. Everything is relatively consistent and loads instantly, even over slow wifi. The actual product line is messy, but it's all very usable, and has recently gotten much nicer looking.

GCP console and products are very consistent and well planned, but the console itself is slow to load because of their heavy UI framework and dumb animations. I much prefer ugly and fast over clean and slow.

AWS is messier than Azure but faster than GCP.

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

#65

Post by manigandham »

briffle wrote: post #42
thanatropism wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps left probably thousands of small, barely viable projects with their shorts down and no belt.

Funny how everyone here complains about Google maps changing their licensing, but nobody brings up MS changing changing from per socket to per core licensing a few years ago. That burned several medium businesses I know.

Are you talking about SQL Server? You can keep using old versions, and the performance improvements of modern hardware and new versions end up providing more value overall.

With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.

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

#66

Post by ygra »

thrower123 wrote: post #45
Pxtl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to talk about "mothball without formally announcing deprecation" Microsoft is pretty awful for that too. There are so many zombie libraries and frameworks and tools in the Microsoft family, and they never have the decency to say "stop using that". Even windows.forms was default in visual studio until like 2013 or so.

I'm convinced that as long as there is a Windows operating system based on the Win32 API, WinForms cannot die. It's still the nicest and most productive way to build GUI apps I've seen. Maybe not the prettiest, but it just works.

You should definitely give WPF a try. At least for me Windows Forms is way less productive and nice.

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

#67

Post by awad »

metildaa wrote: post #14
partiallypro wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also wraps GSuite into Cloud revenue, and Amazon wraps their competitor into Cloud revenue. So, it's not misleading.

What does Amazon offer for a cloud office suite though? I have never heard of one despite living in Seattle, where we see all kinds of failed Amazon expansions.

Here you go, all offered under the 'Business Productivity' umbrella of AWS:

Amazon WorkDocs https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/

Amazon WorkMail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

Amazon Chime https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

Amazon Alexa for Business https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/

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

#68

Post by ggm »

AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 explicitly to locations, because they didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What?

command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.

Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes.

I never got to a point I could test if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked.

GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.

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

#69

Post by ewhauser421 »

I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer.

We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.

We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services.

If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.

On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer.

In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name.

When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.

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

#70

Post by tdb7893 »

manigandham wrote: post #52

Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features, and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way". AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional, scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant stream of updates. They apply the iterative process…

Anecdotally I've met an absolutely crazy amount of recent Google Cloud hires in the past few months so I'm curious if the pace of updates will improve in like a year as they throw money at it.
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