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Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

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Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google forward deployed engineers on-site. The trouble is that their customer service is terrible. We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existe…

Cloud Dataflow is also vastly more expensive than using pyspark and Apache Beam is 10 times slower for most operations than Flink or Spark. I have to try the new flexible scheduling but DataFlow the last time I tried it 2 years ago was a massive rip off. Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But la…

$25 for cleaning a relatively small dataset does sound a bit high but not outrageous.. given the process abstracts out all the infra tweaking and setting up various systems. $25 an hour is probably a good estimate of how much a data warehouse like snowflake costs for a reasonable cluster as well, so unless you spin up your own spot ec2 instances and set up a spark cluster and perform the operations the cost savings are going to be marginal at best?

Do you need to run this pipeline more than once a day? Is it sufficiently important for your business case? I feel like 25 is a very small sum if any of them are remotely true.

On a related note, how practically reliable is the DataPrep->DataFlow workflow? Could a reasonably smart analyst with zero programming experience set them up and run them? Feel like that's who this workflow is built for, but I've not had the best of experiences with Trifacta demos in AWS with reliability.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#662
Never used Google for anything important.

You're cattle to Google. Their lack of customer support in literally every one of their offerings shows their approach to making money. They will shut you off in a heartbeat and you have no recourse except to email a bot. Ultimately your puny little shop doesn't matter to their bottom line.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Dataflow is also vastly more expensive than using pyspark and Apache Beam is 10 times slower for most operations than Flink or Spark. I have to try the new flexible scheduling but DataFlow the last time I tried it 2 years ago was a massive rip off. Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But la…

Oh wow thanks for the info! Had no idea Beam was that slow.

Check this reference out: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.08302.pdf

“ Our benchmark results show that Apache Beam has a noticeable impact on the performance of DSPSs in almost all cases. Programs developed using Apache Beam suffered from a slowdown of up to a factor of 58 in the worst case. At the same time, there is one scenario where the query developed using Apache Beam is about as fast as its counterparts using the APIs of the corresponding DSPS. However, for most scenarios we observed a slowdown of at least a factor three.”

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#664

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If the metric for success is revenue then, no, they are not by any sensible measure super successful. Their revenue combined it’s a small fraction of search/ads.

By that standard, practically all other companies are failures, since practically all other companies pale in comparison to Google search. So I would say your claim is absurd.

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Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost seems like it would have people looking for the eject button.

Man my firm was looking into going ahead GCP and now this

We're fully adopted and couldn't be bigger fans. After about 2014 I feel like AWS just got into a "how many services can we launch" game but most (if not all) of them have poor reliability and poor docs. Google has fewer options, but what they ship works as advertised.

I agree the cloud (pun intended) of doubt is unsettling when you're considering a switch, but I'd consider risking it anyway. They do have a tendency to kill projects, but killing a capital investment of this size is a bigger pill to swallow than not supporting xyz software anymore. So even if they do exit, I imagine it would wind down slowly.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#666
post #629

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I suspect this is down to how it's phrased by someone who may not be familiar with strategic planning. It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios. So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios: 1. Invest More + High Growth 2. Invest More + Low Growth 3. Maintain Investment + High Growth 4. Maintain Invest…

I can’t imagine Amazon execs having a discussion about getting out of the cloud business. But Google doing it seems totally believable. See the problem?

Google has offered cloud computing with the release of app engine almost a decade ago. They kept it running this whole time and have only added to the platform.

The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.

Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Google has a credibility problem wrt supporting their products over long periods of time. Even if this particular report is wrong, it's still "true" in that sense. For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?

If they'd even make some sub-brand explicitly for "shit we're serious about and promise we'll continue to invest in for a really long time"—and then actually stick by that—it'd go a long way. I think it's having no reliable indicator of their level of seriousness or commitment to a given product or service that's the main source of irritation for people. It's all just "Google" and who knows what the hell that means,…

In theory, they use the "beta" label for this. In practice, they've been sloppy in both directions, with Gmail being in beta way too long.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did just that with G+, Hangouts, Checkout and a whole raft of others. Even if you don't become #1 you owe it to your customers to plan ahead and to ensure a business is 'unit cost profitable' at the scale at which you offer it so that you can sustain it. Going for broke on projects and then canning them when they fail to attract the kind of success that a smaller company would be more than happy with is in the…

None of those are enterprise products. Consumer businesses given away for free are very different than directly selling infrastructure and services.

Hangouts was a GSuite (enterprise) service. Customers were forced to move Chat & Meet when they shut down Hangouts.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a laundry list. The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes. You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there…

To change the vnet of a VM, you still need to deallocate it and restore it into the new vnet. Anything they don't offer directly, they offer a pile of canned VMs authored by Bitnami, who adds their own layer of management scripts to them, which (in our case) corrupted the filesystem on restarting from the great Shellshock cloud reboot. Azure is, in part, an ad-hoc cloud offering made up of services offered by mutuall…

Just to add to my previous post... this is stuff that has irritated me in just the last few minutes:

* When selecting a VM size in the new-VM wizard, it silently resets it to "DS1 v2" a bit later. You have to go back to the first tab and re-select the size you really wanted.

* This then promptly resets my "Already have a Windows Server license?" setting so then I have reapply that too.

* The default VM template suggested is Windows 2016, not Windows 2019.

* The selection box for the region keeps resetting to US East, even though that's the worst location for me. There is no default location setting in the portal that I can set for myself. This is an Enterpise-wide setting only.

Re: Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Can you describe what you are referring to here? I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.

You can’t utilize anything in their tech stack without spending days going back and forth with the licensing department.

What are you talking about? Can you give some examples? Many of their things are licensed under MIT.
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