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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

#711

Post by gesticulator »

zippygoogler wrote: post #642
zwily wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Dude, You're comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare GCP in 2017/2018 which is when the article refers to this conversation to AWS which predates it by 10 years. You don't think that AWS execs and Amazon execs had conversation about profitability in 2006?

AWS started 13 years ago, in 2006, with S3.

GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.

No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...

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

#712

Post by jacques_chester »

zwily wrote: post #629
jacques_chester wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Again, having the option numbers crunched is not the same as discussing it or seriously considering it. "Quit" and "Do Nothing" should always be included in scenario planning. Especially the latter, because by ordinary momentum it's usually what happens.

I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".

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

#713

Post by Scramblejams »

manigandham wrote: post #613
jussij wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity. Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.

Cloud computing is massively profitable.

Is it for them, though? Sounds like it isn't, unless they can get to #2, hence the urgency.

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

#714

Post by choppaface »

ramraj07 wrote: post #661
faizshah wrote: post #468

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…

$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 a…

In my experience $25 for 1TB of ETL is outrageously high. That’s 100 cores of GCP or AWS for 4-5hrs. I have some very very CPU intensive jobs that would take about that time for 300GB of data. But if it’s just parsing CSV / JSON and doing some joins then I’d think $5/TB would be more reasonable.

I agree a warehouse could get more expensive, but that’s where Athena or BigQuery is supposed to come in? BigQuery is rather expensive though. It can’t support reading Parquet natively (of course Google insists on their own format) so you have to pay their heavy tax versus just object storage and elastic compute.

Also the classic BigQuery UI is way less buggy than the new one, and the PMs won’t take bugs for the new UI.

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

#715

Post by tsimionescu »

dragonsh wrote: post #675
jbigelow76 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if…

I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story…

Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing.

Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend.

That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it.

I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.

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

#716

Post by stingraycharles »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #710
jacquesm wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023. No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.

> Google's well documented and long history of killing products How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.

What you’re describing is actually the sunken cost fallacy. It’s entirely reasonable to assume Google execs treat the investments as sunken costs that cannot be recovered with GCP, because they rationally should.

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

#717

Post by manigandham »

Lammy wrote: post #690
res0nat0r wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd. Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone. GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly. https://9to5g…

The issue for me isn't Reader itself but what it says about the disconnect between Google management and us, the users of Google products. That seems to have happened around the time Google went from _having_ a "user base" to being effectively ubiquitous. I can't speak for others, but Google of the 2000s "got" the hacker/nerd mindset in a way that was the closest thing to empathy I've ever felt from a corporation. Th…

Free consumer products are not the same as paid enterprise services. The markets are entirely different, and ascribing the fate of Google Reader as a sign of anything on the B2B front doesn't make sense.

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

#718

Post by satyavelMS »

jiggawatts wrote: post #362
rzmnzm wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure has a pretty nice tech stack in my experience, what issues are you experiencing with it?

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…

Thanks for providing us your specific feedback. I am part of the ARM Deployments Team. We are looking to support export for resource groups(RG) with more than 200 resources. One of the top customer requests with regards to export was the ability to multi-select individual resources in a RG to be exported which we added a few month ago.

We have renewed our focus on ARM Template deployments(our infra as code offering) and have a dedicated team working on addressing the pain points described in the thread as well as other deployment issues. We are not going to solve all the problems instantaneously but we are consciously working on it.

Would love to get your input on other ARM Deployment related feedback and areas of improvement. If you haven't had a chance you can check out some of the deployment improvements we announced recently in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D-JIKShrws

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

#719

Post by hvidgaard »

res0nat0r wrote: post #672
QuinnyPig wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…” Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.

The issue is that folks here think GCP is the same thing as Google Reader. That's absurd. Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone. GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly. https://9to5g…

On the other hand the, in comparison tiny, cost that Google Reader and other was in the budget, would have given Google so much good will. It was in other words cheap positive PR.

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

#720

Post by manigandham »

retpirato wrote: post #641
gerash wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this seems to be a narrative that exists only inside the HN bubble. The fact that a multi million dollar business decision is being made not by running numbers and future roadmap but by one guy in the meeting saying "wait! they shuttered Reader, my favorite RSS reader. Oh no, these other guys killed Zune, my favorite music player. Wait a minute, don't tell me these are the same people who killed Firephon…

you're missing the point. Google has a bad habit of shelving services that people use. If it's never happened to anything you use, good for you, but if I was in a position to make a choice like that I'd be very hesitant to go with a company with such a history of shutting down services.

If people can't tell the difference between free consumer products and paid enterprise services (appengine has been running since 2008) then they have bigger problems when it comes to decision making.
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