Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud
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I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.
How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.
what? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/896458/64-bit-versi...
I have it installed on an old 2006 MacBook, so Microsoft was still providing updates for a 12 year old machine... one that Apple itself abandoned after just 6 years. It's one of my favorite examples of Microsoft's longer support for old hardware.
And for what it's worth, after 12 years and 3 Mac purchases, I've switched & just bought a PC again.
I considered the Surface Book 2, which has an excellent keyboard & trackpad, but the SSD can't be replaced by the user & tops out at 1TB. I was worried about the Surface Book hinge being fragile in my backpack while travelling & commuting.
My 2006, 2007 and even my 2000 Pismo G3 Macs all still work well. I used to love Apple reliability & recommended the Apple Store to everyone, I was that guy who queued for a day-one iPhone 4. But my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (bought in 2015) has been a lemon, the data flex cable keeps failing every few months, causing it to corrupt data & eventually lose the boot drive. (SuperDuper! has been a lifesaver.) Apple have replaced the cable 5 times now, each time with a week of downtime, but the replacement cables all have the same known defect & I just can't trust the machine anymore.
I'm not much of a Linux user, but I've been trying elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki via Parallels and like it a lot. Unfortunately elementary OS 5 Juno has been buggy for me (random black screens requiring a reboot), so I'm stuck on Loki for now.
I was tempted to put elementary OS on my 32-bit 2006 MacBook (the one that currently has Windows 10), but there isn't a 32-bit version of elementary OS anymore.
I'm pretty pleased with the X1E: it's not quite MBP-level thin, but it's still a great balance of power and portability. NotebookCheck has a review that's worth checking out.
elementary OS feels fast, familiar, and refined. It's not quite as fleshed out as other distros like Mint (or macOS itself, for that matter), but it's getting better with each release.
The 4K HiDPI screen on the X1E is vibrant. My biggest concern was that the HiDPI scaling on Linux wouldn't be up to snuff, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The scaling for GTK apps was perfect right out of the box. There were some extra steps to get Qt apps to scale properly and inherit the GTK theme, but they look great now. Wine and Steam basically just required checking a box to get the scaling to work.
Happy to answer any specific questions you have.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on battery life doing anything useful (not watching movies) with your new one. I'm debating an X1 Carbon, HP Spectre, or XPS 13 to upgrade to in the next few months.
I'm more worried about screen issues. I got the premium HDR Dolby Vision screen, and I love the 500 nits & the wide color gamut is stunning & very OLED-like. But the calibration is off, the screen has a red-tint that hurts my eyes and makes the rest of the world look sickly green when I look away from the screen. I fear I'll have to buy an X-Rite and make my own calibration. It isn't like my Dell monitor, which came individually calibrated & with a printout of the calibration.
Also, this X1 Yoga (or Windows?) does lots of dynamic screen dimming, which was messing with Sublime Text in Monokai (dark) theme. It would dim the screen so much that white text would become mid-grey & it was unreadable & low contrast. I was able to turn that setting off, but doing so has reduced battery life to the numbers you see above.
If having a large / replaceable SSD wasn't a priority (and battery was more of a priority), I think I would very seriously consider the Surface Book 2. But hopefully I'll like the X1 Yoga more as I get used to it.
What's the cost/benefit of that? How much would it cost to build it and how much could they make?
You can theoretically do ANYTHING... but a business exists to make money...
Why does Microsoft support 16bit? because - without a doubt - someone is paying them for that "extra" support.
As I said... there are many reasons - and a company exists to make money.
If they decide not to do something that doesn't make them money? It's not a hard reason to see why...
Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are
Oh, and Office 365 is a blessing. I never thought I'd actually like SaaS anything from Microsoft but it works really well Office. It's also much easier than selling a $6000+ purchase req for 15-20 new office licenses. Especially when the boss doesn't see why office 2003 is obsolete in 2011 if it "still works fine for me". ~$240 a month was an easy sell with "free" exchange email and upgrades. Yea small shops are fun to work at.
I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.
Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.
In the MS land, I get to completely rewrite my app, because I need the new hotness, which doesn't work with the old API.
E.g. there are still people writing WinForms and even MFC apps, because it works for them, and they don't need anything flashy. And that is a fully supported scenario - not just running the old stuff on new platforms, but even writing new code that uses the old frameworks in the latest-and-greatest Visual Studio.
I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.
Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.
Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.
"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."
Never again.
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...
I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.
> I frequently read worse on HN
Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.
The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.
I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)
Yes, totally. When I transferred to work on GCP, I was pleasantly surprised at how much eng/product cares about users/developers wants, needs, and feedback.
Also: Partner companies. They have more direct access too.
20% have been fabulous, so there's that. I'm also still very fond of GCP as I don't rely on support to operate my service.
However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.
It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.
In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.
Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)
Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
Yes, you are strongly discouraged from using some services (simple db) by them hiding it. Yes, new accounts can't use certain services (ec2 classic). Yes, some old features cost more than newer better features (rrs s3).
But I wasn't able to point to any AWS service that had been shut down.
Also, to be fair, I don't know of any Google Cloud Service that has been shut down (as opposed to consumer facing Google services), but haven't been paying as much attention to that service.
It's still the nicest and most productive way to build GUI apps I've seen. Maybe not the prettiest, but it just works.
actually, I'm wondering at current moment, what's the choice of framework / OS to make a productive GUI?
or just fire those claimed-designer guy (probally your boss) let engineer do there job?
QT looks interesting, if I ever had to care about supporting Linux, but that's not my world.
(.....And of course get cursed by your manager and boss)
They are also bringing WinForms and WPF forward to work on .NET Core 3.0; and its still supported https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/10/04/update-on...
Now watch as i consider them the same thing.
Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.
Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.
Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.
It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.
I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/08/03/1-microsof...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/04/30/cloud-r...
IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.
Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q4...
Got context? Are you referring to the (still ongoing!) deprecation of hardware search appliances as announced in 2016?
Incredibly stupid move.
I honestly cannot imagine the words ‘sales’ and ‘no suit’ together in a sentence anywhere in the world, much less Japan.
I’m not even Japanese and I think by now I’d consider it more or less an insult.
Amazon is so much better in my experience when it comes to supporting their platform.
[0] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.
With our scaled up SCCM environment, SQL alone increased licensing cost by a very significant factor, as you need to license SQL Enterprise when you exceed the core limits of the gratis SQL Standard license.
> 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.
The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.
Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.
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.)
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 relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.
Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)
But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.
I think we're mostly or entirely agreeing?
They can make statements about which things have promises and which don't, but it still causes worry until there's a really good track record.
To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.
Indeed! Just ~~~last month~~~ 62 months ago they shut down Reader.
(I see that you're hedging with the reference to Maps. But I'd love if this time, we wouldn't make a single event a 10-year talking point)
If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.
"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.
Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
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.
Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.
It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.
Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.
The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have some extra restrictions, but they aren’t some kind of clones of AWS software.
Unless I’m missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the other regions.
AWS-China is literally a different organization with a different service on a different URI and with whom you'll need to establish a different contractual relationship.
No experience with AWS China, but I taught a class to some folks who used one of the restricted AWS regions and the services and features were limited when compared to normal aws regions, according to the students.
Due to laws and logistics, AWS Classic -> AWS China aren't at full feature parity, but it's certainly not some watered down or different version of the AWS cloud.
Azure has a region in China which is not a baby version of its public cloud offering. It might not have some new SaaS products but for core offerings it's exactly the same feature wise.
Amazon “Consultants” are basically useless. The ones I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with only know the netops side and the best they can do is help you do a “lift and shift”. They usually know very little about how to implement all of the other managed services AWS offers.
I was the Dev lead at a previous company with no AWS experience and they brought in “consultants” to help us move to AWS. They gave no guidance on how to actually develop a product using AWS services even though I explained in high level my proposed architecture. I could have easily cut the cost by over 60% if I had known all I know about AWS now or the consultants could have actually helped.
As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:
GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.
- You get more compute power per core, while paying less.
- You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.
- You get the best "data processing at scale".
In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.
Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.
All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
People in procurement are often measured on the amount of discount they can get. Try getting that when you purchase online.
In the Nordics you can't compare the "salesforce" of AWS and Google with the army that is the Azure-team.
Around the Nordic countries at least, Google tries to outsource sales to participants in the Google Cloud Partners program.
If you want the " face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc", you go to a partner.
How one chooses a trusted partner, when ones decision is based on the Google brand, I have no idea...
I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there (now).
When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.
I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.
Like they literally came to the office sat at the table and talked to us.
Not sure that is a differentiator at all, except for the Support pricing model.
1: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...
2: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...
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.
Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those.
Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.
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 IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.
I don't have familiarity with Google Cloud though. And in fairness I used Azure for a feature AWS didn't have anything close to (service bus queues), I can see why having really well built things like that get them huge deals. Microsoft know what they're doing in those markets.
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.
I still don't know how Google can be so bad at creating responsive user interfaces.
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.
2) This is no longer a thing, though during that transition period it was slightly annoying.
3) This is also no longer a problem.
4) I've never experienced this, the "pay as you go" model has been with me since I started using Azure 6-7 years ago. Maybe they do this for some licensing models? I have only ever paid for compute time, storage usage and egress. I've have used plenty of licensed software too...so I don't know what yours relates to.
Back to #1 though, if the Azure team could figure out why Web App disk speed feels so slow (sometimes), my company would probably double/triple our spend on Azure and drop some of their competitors. This is genuinely my biggest complaint.
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 inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).
In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:
* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.
* They don't have as many features as AWS.
* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)
* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)
-
FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)
----
Digression;
I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;
Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Microsoft more than an even keel observer.
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.
Actually, that's precisely what -you- are doing, not me.
> I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.
I worked at a much larger company than that with over 20K employees that used Azure/O365 and AWS (but no GCS.) Your anecdote means nothing. You're on Hacker News, there are people here that work and have worked for massive media companies, industrial companies and tech companies. Many of which use Azure, AWS and GCS.
Do I wish Azure were better? Absolutely. I have a lot of ideas and complaints where things could be so much better. But I also have just as many numerous complaints about GCS and AWS.
FWIW our migration to office365 has been pretty great, but I don’t see it as being the same thing as using Azure for your product.
No it is not! Azure is not even in the same ballpark. APIs fail randomly, instances take a random amount of time to come up(sometimes similar to AWS, sometimes double digits) services are poorly integrated, lots of weird constraints and surprising behavior(their load balancers are nonsensical), lack of AZs (and support for them) in many regions, etc.
Can you make your stuff work on Azure? Sure you can. Is that a good experience? No way.
This is probably what people are referring to. The underlying tech may not be horrible, but the user experience is.
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.
Things change fast in these cloud services - so would be good to know specifically which parts of GCP IAM are missing.
Obviously, my experience is rather shallow here and wouldn't dare go into too deep discussions on that. And the shoving part can easily be avoided with some extra elbow grease.
Ideally cloud compute remains a commodity resource and all players earn a standard and pretty average return on their capex..
My anecdote is to Warren Buffet - buy commodities and sell a branded product. Don't get caught in a trap where you build your product with unique cloud resources which you can not easily migrate to other platforms when the conditions calls for it (price, performance, or even support.) Right now, there may be endless VC dollars, but there are some markets where the long term winners are going to win because they are paying commodity pricing on all of their compute.
Further you can use Powershell (from the UI, no less,) if you are all about CLI.
But every time I deploy a new AKS services, it takes 30 min for it to be ready. I luckily haven't had to do this recently (~4 months?) and I'm loathe to try again. GKE on the other hand is within 2 minutes.
Provisioning instances take quite a long time. The response I received from a product manager was, "how long should it take?"
Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners.
Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.
Google has done an excellent job with their Cloud documentation, including many useful howto sections. When we raise issues with them, they are quick to update the documentation with "gotchas" so there isn't tribal knowledge about this floating around in every company.
> These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.”
You don't even have to host your own ad servers! They just appear on your website like magic!
MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.
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/
For reference, we've seen a variety of failed attempts by Amazon to expand, like Amazon Register.
I am not sure about https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ (sort of an office suite?)
Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.
Pretty sure Google does this too to a lesser extent with including G-Suite in their 'Google Cloud' revenue.
Solutions/answers to most basic roadblocks you might encounter when working with AWS offerings are a quick google search away but that's the case for gcp offerings. They also need to ramp up their evangelism (for the lack of better word) to get some mind share.
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 of startups to the cloud, and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster.
We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100% of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.
Snap also has a huge contract with AWS, for what it's worth. Other large customers like Apple also split their ticket between Amazon and Google.
I would argue on many points GCE is clearly significantly superior to EC2.
The Google billing model is far better, they bill on straight CPU and Memory, which you can combine in any desired ratio. Amazon has well over 100 different instance types.
Google gives you an automatic sustained usage discount. Amazon requires you to commit to reserved instances up front for 1 year minimum, and those have to be specific instance types, so as your workloads change you can't reallocate capacity.
GCE has workload live-migration. If the underlying hardware that your VM is hosted on begins to fail, they will migrate you to new hardware in REAL TIME without any downtime other than a sub-second pause in processing.
Amazon will notify you that your hardware is failing and give you a deadline usually a week or so out to reboot your VM, if you don't they just terminate it.
I could continue for several more points if interested.
I've never done any kind of enterprisey user access management before so I don't know if it's actually that easy or even if it's any different from migrating to AWS/GCP. Or if AD sucks and enterprises hate it. Would love to hear from people who have more experience there.
"GCP’s security practices allow us to have a HIPAA BAA covering GCP’s entire infrastructure, not a set aside portion of our cloud. As a result, you are not restricted to a specific region which has scalability, operational and architectural benefits. You can also benefit from multi-regional service redundancy as well as the ability to use Preemptible VMs to reduce costs.
The security and compliance measures that allow us to support HIPAA compliance are deeply ingrained in our infrastructure, security design, and products. As such, we can offer HIPAA regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, including sustained use discounts. Other public clouds charge more money for their HIPAA cloud, we do not."
https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...
Its been about a year since I last checked out everything you need to be HIPAA compliant to run AWS services, but IIRC it required running dedicated instances for nearly everything. That can make running on AWS way more expensive.
EDIT: Apparently the limitation of dedicated instances was removed in May 2017. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/
I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the 2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes.
It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their products in this period).
I don't think its fair to judge cloud platforms competency with just the market share since there are players like Microsoft/Oracle who have lot of enterprise foothold. I have used all other major cloud providers and as a power user, have found GCP to be rock solid.
Paid support is the only option with all major cloud platforms if you want faster response. I think all of them need to get better at it.
Cloud providers can literally break your business with a price hike so be very careful when you build your stack. Don't tangle yourself by consuming vendor locked features. Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel.
Changing infrastructure over a small increase in price (which rarely happens) is a one of those dreams that techies have but hardly ever happens because the risk of regressions is too high.
The minute you don’t use managed services and you host everything yourself on EC2 instances you have the worse of all worlds - you’re paying more than baremetal, you’re paying the same amount for supporting your infrastructure, and you’re not developing any faster than you could on prem.
I don't think price is the main motivation to use cloud. Ease of use, vast resources to provision without any significant delay and pay for what you use are the main factors.
If your infra is not mission critical and if you have deep pockets you can afford to be tied to a vendor. Otherwise - having skilled expertise and designing your architecture in vendor agnostic way is pretty much essential.
We had one such case but in the end it worked out positively. We realized GCP had 100 service account limitation when we exhausted it. We have had our quotas bumped for many different things sometimes instantaneous or max in a day or two. We needed more than 100 service accounts but it seems GCP wasn't even designed to handle that request. After two weeks we got it approved but still we can't go to service account page on the console to see the accounts since its not designed to list that many. We have to use gcloud to view and to handle them. What if GCP said no?. There are players who aren't anyway big enough like netflix but still are powers users but without deep pockets.
Amazon will gladly let you spend all of the money you want to spend.
In your specific case, not being able to view but a maximum amount on the website is normal that’s what the CLI/APIs are for.
The first company where I was the Dev lead and at the time didn’t know the first thing about AWS and neither did the infrastructure guys and we brought in consultants. Yes it was much more expensive. We didn’t reduce the number of people, didn’t increase automation from the netops side and we developed just like we did on prem. So yeah they should have stuck with the colo and from what I’ve heard, they kept my system on AWS but stopped there.
On the other hand, I’ve worked for a company that started off on AWS from day one. They outsourced most of the netops to a Managed Service Provider, they have one person in house that manages some of the EC2 instances and does some other projects, and they used as many of the managed service offerings on AWS as they could. They were more concerned about focusing on their core business than worrying about the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”.
I have seen many big companies move out of cloud and onto bare metal after realizing how much they could save. But all of them had the expertise to handle the migration and continue the ops with ease.
Microsoft is known to throw brilliant discounts into bundling cloud along with its other Office stuff. Not sure if they are using this as leverage.
In India, I know for a fact that the banks that are moving to the cloud are doing it on Azure, because Microsoft is not afraid of heavy compliances. It's hard to speak to a human in Google Cloud.
But here's some stuff that's really missing. In Google's dashboard (and their API), you can add ssh keys after creation of an instance. Its a fairly basic functionality made possible by the "accounts daemon" (which is opensource https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-package...)
Azure doesnt have this, etc.
Google simply can't sell to these customers, because... They aren't Microsoft.
The weird part is that a large number of these companies will outsource their operations, their own staff will never use Azure services directly. It would make zero difference if their applications run on Amazons, Googles or Microsofts cloud offering, but they have a "Microsoft Strategy", so it has to run on Azure.
Yes, there are lots of people criticising Google. But for a business using GCP, my impression is that they have been pretty good crossing their t's and dotting their ö's during, for example, the recent introduction of GDPR. They have contracts and model clauses for different scenarios and products. And while I can't judge how good these are, I would assume they will be tested in court pretty quickly.
Long before that, they have reacted well to criticism. For about a decade or so, Analytics has had the option to only collect anonymized IP data, a requirement from a couple of court decisions categorizing IP addresses as PII.
I don't disagree that Google's size alone is reason for scepticism, and to keep an eye on them. But please don't go around claiming to speak for some imaginary European consensus when no such thing exists.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-be...
While I’m a huge G cloud fan , there is too many things that frustrate me with GCloud.
Whether it’s Firebase that doesn’t have a way to limit user bandwidth or Google Staff taking you for a dummy because the guy is a « Google Engineer » or the performance of European Datacenter... there is a just countless stuff that makes GCloud overall an « okay » experience but nowhere similar to what AWS or’Azure offers
Amazon's dominance is massive, Azure exists because Microsoft gives it away for free with big Windows and Office purchases, and GCP putters along last due to perceived bad customer service (which is kind of true)
A year ago I did a shootout between visual recognition APIs by the like of IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google, Clarifai, etc.
Every API other than Google took less than 20 minutes to get logged in and running API calls.
To log into Google cloud services I had to install complex proprietary code just to be able to log in. Then when I installed the Python GCS API it destroyed my anaconda installation even though I wasn't working in the base environment.
I was able to get it to work but it took 10x longer than competing APIs.
It seems to be the same way for other GCS services. I think people at Google think they are so smart that developer ergonomics doesn't matter.
i have been using AWS for many years across multiple companies now. Over the years i got the feeling that the quality has degraded. New services are half-baked (ES, EKS), some newer API's are overly complicated (VPC peering is overloaded for cross-account AND internal instead of 2 abstractions on top of it - why do i need to get confused about all these extra API args which are not needed for internal VPC peering and have to spend hours to finally understand it). Overall AWS feels that they got more sales focused.
i just started to get nightmares with Azure recently, luckily i was able to get rid of almost everything of it (only keyvault remains, since azure does for now have the best offering for HSM). The UI is absolute terrible from front-end caching bugs to strange permissions. MS seems to have to invent their own vocabulary for everything instead of using terminology that most of the rest of the internet uses (which makes finding things very hard), same goes for their API's, its almost impossible to use their API's without these super huge and often buggy libs (try to use REST API auth without a lib...). I am personally also having a hard time to read their documentation.
I did not had the chance to try GC yet but i want to. I know that google services sometimes can be a bit complex to start with, but there is good documentation and reference docs - its usually very easy to just use REST api if you dont wanna use some heavy libs. We recently moved to k8s (i am loving it - continues deploying apps with autoscaling and 0 downtime was never that easy), so as we move more into k8s i hopefully get the chance to try out GC
If you are using the cloud and the GUI to spin up resources you are doing it wrong. Period.
AWS/Azure seems cool too, but that promise of "you'll always have a custom VPS you can SSH into forever" is wildly underrated imo.
It's not a money issue, it's more about someone handing you a swiss army knife and saying keep it.
Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals.
The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capitalize on any expanded and growing market if you're just a niche player catering companies under 10MM ARR. That doesn't mean you can't build a great company that caters for SMBs, but you just won't be a significant player in the market (Think Digital Ocean).
You can try to capture all that theoretical mass of small and medium businesses which in theory looks larger and more profitable when seen as a block, but you will burn yourself harder and get less return over those deals. It's simple math. It's better to go after an account that will spend 20MM on your services (for instance Netflix), than trying to close 200 accounts that will spend 100K on your services.
The logic here is that by earning the trust and loyalty of the enterprise clients you can slowly capture the other segments of the market. Not the other way around.
If Google's plan for their cloud is to focus on SMBs, they will get crushed even harder and potentially disrupted by niche companies which ironically will build their own offerings on top of more feature-rich public clouds like AWS or Azure.
SMB (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses) 0-100 Employees with ARR of $5-$10 million
SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) 100-1000 Employees with ARR of $10 million to $1 billion.
Large Enterprise Over 1000 employees with ARR of over a $1 billion.
Of course, there are always going to be outliers or companies that can't be classified exactly in one category because they may have unusual large IT spendings and Infrastructure needs. That's probably the case for Snap and Apple, but that doesn't mean they are not enterprises by definition.
As an IaaS, the bulk of your revenue is not coming from Snap anyways. It's coming from companies with those arthritic speeds you mention and that are just starting to realize why it makes sense to move their huge workloads to the cloud.
It's also just lame. It's 2018.
My opinion on your question: Not much. The interesting question is: How much the good will (VS Code, .NET Core, Linux support,...) of the last year's pay out
Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers.
I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be uploaded.
2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed. Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted.
We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android SDKs.
Give it 2 years, 4 tops.
Those are some of the things that Apple already does in the cloud. I anticipate it will expand significantly as they grow their services business.
Whether they build a “server” is irrelevant - the “service” however, is key.
Further, they also have a long history of playing suppliers against each other in order to get the best terms.
Finally, Apple occasionally works hard to move away from companies it fights with - Adobe and Qualcomm are two notable ones there, as are the social media firms like Facebook.
As for evidence, I’d offer up this report on future data center spending that they are planning. You don’t have as many data centers and add to it in this magnitude without having a solid strategy.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/apple-will-spend-mor...