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Comment by Artemis2 | Hacker News Reader

Something I appreciate very much with AWS is how much dogfooding Amazon does. In contrast, Google has said in the past that GCP is not used by Google engineers (and it shows, occasionally GCP goes down but actual Google products do not!). There is also no clear indication that Microsoft is actively using the public deployment of Azure.

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Part of is because gcp became a product much later in google's history. As a result, most of the products that were used were tied to internal google infra, and was hard to put on gcp.

I think this will gradually change. Kubernetes came out of all the internal learning after all, I would be surprised if they aren't putting new greenfield stuff on GCP and other Google Cloud products.

This is true for smaller projects.

Big projects are still built out of GCP mostly for cost reasons - google doesn't give itself a discount on gcp

Did you mean to say 'still not built out of'?

Microsoft employee / Developer Advocate for Azure here.

We run a lot of services and applications on public Azure. This trend is only increasing.

Some examples?

I would guess at least number of backend services for Xbox One titles. I remember seeing an advert for Titanfall being run on Azure. That was a few years ago so my memory may be flawed.

I suspect 343 Industries (Microsoft Studio behind the latest Halo games) also uses it. They are one of the big users of Project Orleans https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/, a C# distributed actor framework. Most of their documentation and samples are shown using the framework in Azure.

Visual Studio Team Services.

> In contrast, Google has said in the past that GCP is not used by Google engineers (and it shows, occasionally GCP goes down but actual Google products do not!)

Amazon (the shopping website) is generally online when AWS goes down, so that doesn't really indicate anything.

Also, GCP is directly modeled after the infrastructure that Google uses to develop internally. I don't know if it's actually the same exact infrastructure that they sell as GCP, but it's not like they're developing GCP fresh and selling it.

This is on point, GCP is modeled after Google's infrastructure not how Google itself is run. Whereas Amazon runs on the same technology just not in the same datacenter.

(My impression is that Amazon operates out of a different region than the public AWS. Much like GovCloud isn't the same as the public regions. Hence an AWS region being impacted doesn't necessarily impact Amazon itself since their separately operated.)

The idea that Amazon uses a different / secret AWS region is false.

However, not all of Amazon.com has migrated to AWS.

Netflix is also generally online when (parts of) AWS goes down, because they've architected their services to be resilient underlying failures (as Amazon and Google have too!). Netflix has blogged quite heavily about this, for example in a relatively recent blog about multi-region redundancy[0].

[0] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/global-cloud-active-acti...

AWS never went down. What goes down occasionally are subset of its services in limited regions. And sometimes that does impact the amazon.com website also. Just not every aspect of it.

>dogfooding

The term "dogfooding" is a tech slang for the use of one's own products. In some uses, it implies that developers or companies are using their own products to work out bugs, as in beta testing. One benefit of dogfooding is that it shows that a company is confident about its products.

I didnt know what the term meant so had to look it up. Yeah, I agree.

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