Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 295 posts

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

#71

Post by retbull »

throwaway405 wrote: post #62
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…

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.…

Which particular GCP IAM features are missing?

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

#73

Post by VikingCoder »

lalos wrote: post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

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

#74

Post by Dylan16807 »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #35
puzzle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably from the AppEngine change of almost a decade ago or the double Maps bumps (the big shrinking of the free tier years ago, then another one in 2018). Usually those are adjustments to make prices match reality.

Google also puts a lot of weight in certain nuances that get overlooked and then quickly forgotten in the Internet's memory. Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use. Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only rela…

Yeah, that stuff isn't part of Google Cloud Platform.

But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.

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

#75

Post by sfifs »

VikingCoder wrote: post #73
lalos wrote: post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

Because businesses fundamentally run on Outlook and Office and support for that has been pretty amazingly consistent.

Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are

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

#76

Post by paulryanrogers »

VikingCoder wrote: post #73
lalos wrote: post #8

Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft tal…

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

Like GDI? (Honest question, not much of a graphics coder myself)

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

#77

Post by volkadav »

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…

It's been a while (~2 years) since I last had to tangle with it, but off the top of my head:

1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass.

2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI but didn't reliably work, old was cruddy looking but did. The set of features present in them was not congruent either ("new" had some some "old" didn't and vice versa). But wait, there's more! see #3

3) Not every operation was possible via the admin consoles. Some things you had to use their powershell cli tools to do, which is great fun when you have no windows machines around to run powershell on. This was for something stupidly obvious like "assign an IP to this instance" or something; mercifully I've forgotten the details but it was something you'd think would be trivial.

4) Whoever designed their payment model was ... to be charitable, extremely set in their ways. Instead of being able to set up a payment method and pay by the hour (or whatever), you had to buy "entitlement packs" at $X per license and apply those to your account, sort of like the boxware model but awkwardly shoehorned into cloud billing. Woe betide you if your "microsoft bucks" ran out in the middle of an extended compute run!

All these were for comparatively simple and straightforward uses of their infra (i.e. pretty much just compute and block storage, no fancy database or machinelearningAIwhizbang-as-a-service stuff). I can't imagine the more complex features were better off if the foundations were so haphazardly implemented.

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

#78

Post by AlexeyBrin »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #76
VikingCoder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned. I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

Like GDI? (Honest question, not much of a graphics coder myself)

You can use GDI and GDI+ on Windows 10 from VS 2017 without a problem.

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

#79

Post by dijit »

partiallypro wrote: post #23
dijit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (hint: it's not) Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst. Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally incons…

How exactly is saying Azure isn't based on "horrible tech," "harmful?" None of the big cloud providers are based on "horrible tech." Your statement provides anecdotes but no data that proves this as "harmful." Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Microsoft more than an even keel observer.

I don't really care enough about microsoft to hate it as a company, there's some good and some bad. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's around. And Windows itself has some really good ideas underneath (like IOCP). But it's fair to say I'm not a fan of Windows itself.

My bias is purely on the technical merits of the provider. My company had a pretty large discount on Azure so it was under strong consideration.

My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.

I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.

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

#80

Post by somethingwitty1 »

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…

AWS has a bunch of services that are HIPAA-compliant: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-re...
Post reply on HN