Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle
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Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity.
GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?
It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.
> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses
Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.
Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it.
We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along.
1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.
Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.
So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.
Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.
But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.
It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.
It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother?
Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.
I was in a team that worked on "another" :-). Some of the best memories of my professional life were formed during that period! At launch that was indeed as part of AWS. However it then came under Amazon Payments entity due to legal reasons. Felt sad to see it retired though[1]
makes me laugh that they think 1 year notice is enough. should be at least 5 for my business to properly consider it.
GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon)
I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support.
The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I understand.
They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.
If everything on a platform is an emergency, that vendor won’t be around in those businesses.
Amazon costs go down routinely. Google costs go up or the services go away.
Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam.
Fundamentally, as long as google offers free services funded by converting its user data into anonymous normal distributions to be sold, I don’t think google will ever be able to overcome its stigma as a non privacy focused company. I don’t care how many privacy menu settings or SPA control panels it offers. It’s like asking if fb is ever going to be trustworthy.. haha
When a new company scales out a better search algorithm updates as fast as google... on top of aws infrastructure.. that would be interesting
I wonder what is amazons weakness that will be its undoing
It’s been ten years.. still waiting for google to give me a reliable customer service phone number on the quality of amazons.. heck I’m still waiting for google to offer a user service where I know it won’t just die or change 180 arbitrarily. I think it’s a little too late by now. Does the general public even trust in google being a secure, reliable company? Doesn’t seem that way imho
I thought the core business was vacuuming up personal data for ad-targeting resale purposes?
I would love for them to actually a nicer tech company that offers services like GCP and leaves the rest of us alone. Cynically, one wonders how the idea made it past a whiteboard in a meeting, where probably someone was very interested in how they could do some ML on the data coming in and out. Not saying they do (or even could) do this, only that this seems the core business model.
Microsoft was one of the first major developers for the Mac when it came out originally.
Microsoft is happy for you to run Linux in the Azure cloud. Microsoft added Linux emulation to Windows. Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone (if only because Verizon and AT&T refused to approve new Windows Phones on their networks.)
A story that Microsoft honchos loved to tell was that some VIP dared to meet with Steve Ballmer and showed him something on his iPhone. I think the moral of the story is that Microsoft had changed at the time because Ballmer was insulted, but didn’t toss a chair at the guy.
The not invented here syndrome at that company is/was amazing. Microsoft wasn’t as bad as IBM, but they were on that path!
I've never had a client question GCP on the basis of Google's pattern of removing services. I think people can logically separate Google's consumer-facing offerings from their paid cloud services, the same way people logically separate AWS from the Amazon store. I've never noticed a GCP service removed in the nearly 10 years I've used them. In fact, the pattern I see with GCP is that they're slower to add services , but the ones they do release are very well thought out and solid. AWS, on the other hand, seems to add tons of services, some of which are incomplete or never get traction.
I would happily use either AWS or GCP. IBM Cloud and Azure I'm far less inclined to use, although I can understand Microsoft shops wanting to use Azure. IBM Cloud is pointless.
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability
https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2016/05/22/access-az...
If you think I'm wrong, imagine for a moment what life would be like if every RDBMS client in existence got written in terms of Oracle's wire protocol, back when Oracle's RDBMS offering dominated its respective market. Thankfully that parallel universe is somebody else's problem right now, but it could have happened.
Your Oracle example is flawed for many reasons. SQL standard pre-dates Oracle and I am not even sure what you mean by every RDBMS client got written in Oracle's wire protocol. Ingres also predates Oracle. Are you implying that S3 API is there because they were the first? Nothing else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)#Early_histor...
SQL standard:
Developer ISO/IEC First appeared 1974; 45 years ago
Oracle first release: Oracle v2 2.3 1979
And also, it is allowed and trivial to implement S3 APIs because it is well documented and available for anybody. You are also implying that S3 API is not a "properly abstracted storage layer"?
Yes, many RDBMS offerings have preceded Oracle, but none gained such wide adoption early on. Oracle has always had a strong sales team, so they've been able to grow their business rapidly. Good for them. SQL standardization has nothing to do with it either, because SQL is the user-facing language, not a wire protocol. What travels over the wire between an Oracle client and the server has about as much to do with SQL as the S3 API has to do with XML.
In your rush to defend AWS you seem to be falling into the same trap of immaturity as the people who have assumed that S3 will always remain the one true storage layer. It is not your fault, just a sign of the times. You're part of the generally apparent downward trend in level-headed, long-term thinking among the software cadre. For your next project, I recommend that you keep in mind that proper abstractions and clearly defined interfaces are crucial for maintainability of software over the long term. Good luck!
both look like third party projects rather than something by Google/msft. saying that "gcp/azure has a s3 API" would be like saying "Linux has a win32 API" because there's WINE.
My experience is that Google services are often an order of magnitude harder to use than competitors.
For example I did a shootout between the visual recognition APIs from IBM, Amazon, clarif.ai, Google and some others.
I had the other ones up and running in under ten minutes each.
Google made me go through a sign-up and authentication process that looked like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWEvp217Tzw
and then installing their Python SDK trashed my Python installation and forced me to reinstall anaconda.
I think Google is used to hiring people with 130+ IQs and wasting their cognitive capacity and they would love to make you waste your cognitive capacity too.
Huh, I think most people feel the exact opposite, especially with the comparison between AWS and GCP. GCP has lots of services that are really easy to get set up and running easily by a small Dev shop (Firebase is pretty fantastic in my opinion), while with AWS unless you have some DevOps/networking experts it's a lot harder to do things correctly and securely.
If anything, I think the biggest issue with GCP is they still don't have the "DNA" to do enterprise support at the level large companies expect, while AWS does.
You nailed it. Coming from 8-years of AWS and working on GCP for the last 4, enterprise support is the BIGGEST differentiator IMO between AWS and GCP. GCP's services are usually technical advanced sooner (encryption architecture, various of compliances certification, etc.) and more developer friendlier, their support is absolutely the worst in the industry, opaque, slow and hard to reach, just like the support from any other Google consumer facing products. Google has never been a consumer friendly technology company, probably never will. This is in dire contrast with Amazon, which Bezos claim it always has been a customer focused business.
What about Google support? Nada. They don't even have a direct phone number to reach (requests are sent via email). There are issues that they completely dropped the ball on and provide no updates whatsoever or reluctant to look into or to put a closure on. Day and night difference. (We weren't a $1MM account in terms of total annual GCP spending just yet, we very well could be in the next years I hope.)
If anything Golang is a counter-argument to your thesis about why GCP isn't taking off. You're right that Google has done abysmally with its commitment to keeping services running for the long haul. But Go itself has been remarkably stable and compatible over the years since its introduction. Far moreso than Python, Rust, or JS in the same time period.
Could you give me an example of something you had trouble looking up? I am genuinely curious.
As far as experience - the Cloud hasn't lived up to the promise for me. We often use Azure function apps and debugging them is a pain. Sometimes the function doesn't load at all when you change one thing, etc.
AWS was a bit of a better experience, and I think almost everyone knows what "S3" is. That is to say that AWS immediately springs to mind when you need to store BLOBs.
I have also read about people having a lot of problems with GCPs BigQuery - infrequent, but random downtimes with support not being able to figure out the issue.
Edit: As someone else said below - I do agree that all Google's services have a clear use, whereas AWS and Azure tend to have a lot that you just kind of ignore.
AWS is closer to "copy paste this big blob and modify it a bit". A lot less work for people trying to implement. I'm not planning to read all the documentation, I just want something that works. Google almost forces you to in many cases
If I’m looking at a doc I’m here because I want to do a specific task. The documentation should be task centric like the instructions for a university homework assignment. Imagine you want 30 people to practice a novel task in one evening. You taught them theory in class. Now you want them to try it out. Give them step by step instructions they can use to apply general knowledge to this specific case.
When I’m reading about load balancers and certs I don’t need a textbook. I need examples of specific commands. Instructions on using your tool to do my specific task.
In Google's case, I see a few major issues constantly with their documentation.
All of their documentation is focused around "use-cases", so to speak. Finding complete API documentation is a pain in the butt for many of their services; instead, they present sections like "Here's how to do X" "Here's how to do Y". More often than not, these pages are structured like help wizards, beginning with a "pull this example repository", which is the laziest possible way to check a "write documentation" checkbox.
Barring pulling those example repositories, they often put code snippets in-line with the documentation. As far as I can tell (at least for Go), these code snippets are auto-generated from comment directives in the source code which enclose blocks to paste into the documentation. What this means is that its ALWAYS missing crucial things, like import paths. So, its basically useless; you need to look at the example code to do anything.
Overall, I'd take AWS's documentation any day, though it does have some very bad areas (specifically once you start treading out of the SDK and into service libraries, like aws-xray-sdk). No one is perfect, but AWS is the gold standard of any cloud service provider documentation I've used IMO.
Take for example a fundamental usecase: working with a blob storage service through a client library.
Googling "gcp cloud storage java example" and "s3 java example" returns these as top results:
https://cloud.google.com/java/getting-started/using-cloud-st...
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/...
The AWS doc is clear and gives me exactly what I want: Java code snippets for doing common actions with buckets.
The GCP doc is about a sample bookshelf application? And it starts off by creating a bucket through a terminal command followed by a couple of massive code snippets specific to the example app?
Changing the search terms a bit reveals this:
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/creating-buckets#stora...
That's a bit better, but seeing options for the various arguments requires me to copy and paste a non-clickable link from the code snippet, which brings me to another attractive but minimally helpful page.
Another example: renaming a bucket. I find the link easily enough..
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/moving-buckets#storage...
But only the first code snippet has code samples of any kind. The remaining steps only have instructions for the console and terminal (and the JSON API if you want to curl against that..)
To me, GCP's documentation just doesn't surface information in a way that's conducive to getting work done quickly.
I’ve been thinking about building a 10yr hosting plan for my own want. I thought designing static and then hosting on RasPi behind CDN would be great, just stock enough spares and keep Internet service live... 3G or better sufficient.
This doesn't necessarily detract from your point, but this hasn't been true since the release of module support in go 1.11 last year.
IBM Cloud is a slowly sinking ship with the only brightspot being Watson, but nobody seems to be able to describe that clearly so there's that.
Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups.
AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a certain spend .
AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4 consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.
I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their entire sales org is broken.
For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues
You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information.
There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...
So in my mind, GCloud is more figure-it-yourself-dont-call-us . AWS is more dependable. They have scaled their sales/devrel/support ops so that a small startup can access it.
Google only does this for the Snapchats of the world.
Perhaps a contentious point that I feel is true is that AWS tech is less-dependable, hence they need more support to compensate.
How so?
I have had a 100% success rate. For example I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to configure a cross account CodePipeline work flow, the support guy did what he could while we were on chat, but eventually, he just asked me to export my pipeline definition, spent the next day researching, called me back and walked me through it with a screen share.
You basically can’t do it via the console.
You definitely don't have to be Snapchat-sized to get access to the support console where you open tickets. The base plan is $100/m, which is admittedly more expensive than Amazon's $29/m but should give exactly what you're looking for.
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.
Thanks for highlighting that!
Unfortunately it starts at $100 per user per month and that tier won't get you a number to call, just a ticketing system, and in my experience response times are in a minimum of hours. For actual production systems you're going to want the $250 per user per month option that gives you a number to call.
> I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service.
I couldn't agree more with you about this. A lot of people love to knock Azure and AWS but their support, in my experience, is in a completely different league to GCP.
> (...)
> Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.
I'm not an Enterprise IT expert, but looking from the outside, it doesn't seem like AWS and Azure got to where they are today by following that playbook...
My personal take on it is that AWS was first-to-market with a 21st Century-ready cloud offering (i.e. you could pretty much hear developers shouting "Yes, THIS is what I'm talking about. Finally!") and Azure got to where it is by responding quickly and aggressively, with an additional pull for certain customers due to the synergy with MS / Windows, as well as being the next best choice for those directly competing with or not willing to sign up to Amazon.
If that's true, then unless Google / IBM can really differentiate themselves, they will always lag far behind. I don't know what other plans they have in store, but opening up Watson to other platforms or hiring an Oracle sales guy are not quite what I'd call differentiators.
They completely ignored the fact that the big companies with huge budgets are full of people who don't give a shit about SmartOS resource grids and just want easy and similar enough to what they already know/run.
People tried to label Amazon Lightsail as a "DigitalOcean killer", it was really a way to lower the bar of intimidation for the IT guys at paper mills and car seat factories.
Repeat for Random windows server to Azure and again for Office Live.
Ohh, you can ru Linux too and do most things people are doing with AWS.
It’s a pretty easy sell to me (and worked pretty well on the F100 company I work for).
The migration from on-premise WSAD and Exchange to Azure AD and Office 365 is pretty painless - and once you've done that why wouldn't you use the rest of Microsoft's cloud based platform. That's the big advantage Microsoft has for most enterprise customers.
Still doesn’t change the fact that Azure isn’t a great platform to use, though.
Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are the cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook.
Right now, nobody gets fired for using Amazon.
I'd be interested to know about the number of:
* Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers
Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku.
If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room for error) the ~20% would be .NET's share on the backend.
Am I missing something obvious?
When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have.
I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.
Presumably they're making a profit on selling the linux VM's. I think MS have more or less accepted that windows has been outcompeted in the server OS market over the long term. It's hard to compete wih free...
AWS delivers most of Amazon’s profit despite Amazon having no proprietary software story to speak of. Well, MS can do that too.
EDIT to add that MS does not even sell consulting services, their partners do. I’m sure the “lift and shift” story makes sense to long-standing MS shops, and MS may have even included that in their Azure pitch to them. But ultimately one of the best things about Azure from MS’s perspective is that they don’t need consulting partners to make money from it. They can reach directly into the product and ops teams at major enterprises and sell them raw capability with a spend that auto-scales.
Of course, that leaves it open what they mean with "VM" here. Are they including all the VMs running in Azure, including those powering Microsoft PaaS offerings (like App Service and Azure SQL) or just customer deployed VMs.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/
The resource group concept in Azure is, in my opinion, much easier to use and understand that VPCs in AWS.
[1] https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/microsoft-azure-...
As for GCP, I think it seems easier, because by default it uses public IPs for each instance. That doesn't necessarily mean that one you set up an instance and it runs, you did it correctly.
One nice thing though is that Google uses SDN for their internal networking and that made some things easier. Particularly seamless communication with other regions.
It's not that businesses actually fear that Amazon will look at the data they have in AWS, but AWS props up other Amazon businesses, and who wants to help prop up their competitor?
why did this hurt them? I thought appengine was great when i used it (granted, i never paid them for it - the free tier was way too generous).
It gave a lot of developers for a long time an impression that Google both very much wanted proprietary lock-in (App Engine APIs were extremely distinct to other libraries commonly used for those tasks in those languages), but didn't have the dedication to support a lot of backward/forward compatibility and were happy to change those proprietary APIs seemingly on a whim?
Second, App Engine was the original Google Cloud product, it came out years before Compute Engine and never took off like they expected but for awhile it was all they had to offer.
Thirdly, in 2011 Google changed the billing model. Datastore requests were no longer free and CPU billing was switched from CPU time to wall time [1]. The old billing model did not account for how some developers were actually using GAE and it was not sustainable, so Google had to make a correction and some apps saw a massive cost increase. This further tarnished the GAE reputation.
[1] https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/The-Unofficial-Goog...
Modern cloud devrel seems very similar to big pharmas marketing to doctors.
Nowhere close to what Cloud Formation is, even though from design it is less powerful.
I was a bit skeptical why terraform is popular, doesn't feels like it brings anything new to CF, but could make a lot of sense to use instead of DM.
Now, as an aside, rumor has it that even MS's Azure numbers are a little inflated, a big part of their cloud sales is just Office 365, but I think MS does some marketing and accounting gimmicks on the side by "attaching" Azure to these Office 365 sales.
The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.
But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone?
Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a use by date that is only known to Google.
It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly.
But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their market so much better.
It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.
I don't think we ever offered $500k, but have consistently done $100k for up to a year. There were definitely lots of startups that would chase credits across us, AWS and Azure (who at least at one point would do $300k).
While I think it's great to ride free credits while you can, it's probably a mistake if your company is changing infrastructure each year in search of free dollars. And even worse if you do so at a huge hit to your productivity and ultimate product success.
The easiest mechanism is via a firm who has funded you, and they just "nominate" your company via a simple portal.
https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u...
https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/8w9shu/help_goo...
Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to even find out what the hell happened [2].
I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or content on Play or to access your email archive.
And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire company of 100-150 people banned [4]?
So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down products over night.
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[2] https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-u...
[3] https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-wi...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
Cloud is not a core product, the chance of it being killed is higher than its market share I'm certain.
(Not trying to claim that there's not a problem, just that the particular story seems to have a number of things that are suspect without further details.)
(I work for elgooG, not on anything Cloud or otherwise related to this, this is just my own $0.02, etc.)
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banne...
That’s a big difference when it comes to actually doing business.
And at this point IBM is basically starting from scratch. You have to be an enormous company, with existing IBM contracts to even consider them a cloud provider. They also made a mistake with Watson and focusing too much on that one product. Right now it's hard to see that IBM cloud offering doesn't necessarily involve Watson.
I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something, but selling to startups is relatively easy: They are starting from almost zero, so making changes and trying new things is cheap. When selling to enterprise can be a one or two year process, you can get a startup to sign up in an hour.. and that's if they don't just discover your product and sign up without sales!
But the real kicker here is that if your product bills more to larger companies for good reasons (like, say, you bill by the server, or by the transactions they process), then their growth is your growth, without needing more sales. Fortune 500 companies that aren't cloud providers themselves aren't going to grow fast at all. And while some startups fail, the ones that don't make up for that loss: You get a lot of baseline growth without having to grow your sales team. And if you do catch a future unicorn or two, you will then get to understand large company needs from an existing company, instead of having to waddle through complicated sales processes.
Amazon didn't start selling their cloud offering to Fortune 500 companies either: Those came around many years later, and in practice rely on hiring people that are familiar with the technology. Unless you have some sales gimmick that works really well with large companies (and nowadays, neither Google or IBM have one), getting startups, and a wide array of individuals that get practice on their offerings for free on their spare time, is the best way to go, and it's not even close.
I got the impression that’s the deal with Pivotal. Some ex-Googlers recreated Borg as BOSH (Borg++). Since then they push GCP as their premier public cloud integration despite most customers being in AWS. Their docs on AWS integration blow chunks, and they took their sweet time delivering a (broken) version of PKS for AWS.
Our internal development environments mostly run on GCP, after migrating from AWS. We chose it because (a) it performs much better and (b) Google would give us the time of day, unlike Amazon. As it happens BOSH made that process manageable for most individual teams because of its design.
We do however spend significant amounts with Azure and AWS, to test our various systems on this platforms.
PKS came to GCP first because the opensource feedstock, CFCR (née Kubo) was co-developed by Pivotal and Google and was first developed on GCP.
As for chunk projection, I can put you in touch with relevant teams for feedback -- jchester@pivotal.io.
I'm sure there is an example, but I don't know of one when AWS has ever raised prices on a service.
[1] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
I ended up using CloudFront in front of Google services just last month to hit a performance need.
The main challenge with "remote origins" is ensuring that it's legitimate to do so (so that we don't allow folks to use our network as a weapon), and that most of our load balancing / GFE-based systems have historically only known how to point at Borg jobs (this is why it took so long to add the GCS bucket support!).
We hear you.
Nearly all VCs and Accelerators are on our list of partners at cloud.google.com/startups where that up to $100k in credits offer lives. You would not believe how contentious it was in the early days of GCP to fund this...
Unicorns take a while to grow, but I still think Snap was one of the most fascinating stories, as they were entirely on App Engine and Datastore well into their unicorn days. Is Niantic interesting? Shopify? Presumably Spotify stopped being a unicorn startup and is now just a successful company.
To your other point, lots of ex-Googlers choose GCP, which I mostly put down to "I don't worry the way others do". If you've been at Google, you already know and trust a lot of the underlying systems and people. Adopting BigTable, Spanner or Dataflow doesn't sound scary to you, or make you worried that you won't be able to hire people that "know GCP" the way that "everyone knows AWS". Similarly, you "know" that Google isn't going to shut it down. Others don't necessarily feel that way, and frankly we just don't even get considered.
I personally think that's an interesting signal for a startup: if they do a technical evaluation and choose GCP, rather than sticking with AWS as the default. The ex-Googlers choosing it because they still have friends at Google isn't a particularly great business plan for us, but they do provide great feedback! (Particularly people who say "Umm, I used to work on < X >, can't you just enable that for the public version? I've got money").
If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon. The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION IS NOT.
The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need.
That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It can't be done later.
If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away credits on street corners. Driving out at least IBM and Oracle by just drowning the market with data centre capacity. Buying my way into existing relationships. Finding folks in consumer-facing divisions who've trashed the brand ("how long until this service is canceled, ha ha ha") and pulling them up sharply. Doing whatever can be done.
I don't think Google really gets, at the highest levels, that this is the first business they have that can truly diversify them out of advertising. They seem to see it as a nice extra source of cash, rather than an existential imperative.
But then, Google hasn't got the DNA to be afraid of existential threats. It's just not something they've dealt with since they switched on the cash pumps. Meanwhile, everyone else in this fight gets it.
It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of Google's ad products.
They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development, AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.
As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the buzzwords).
There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have failed.
To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: https://cloud.google.com/support/
Too many horror stories to even think about moving there.
This is coming from an org which spends 10M/Yr on Azure/AWS.
But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google, especially in comparison with Amazon (which makes basically all its profit from AWS) and Microsoft (which is obsessed with back-compat and keeping old products working as long as possible). Basic risk management and the huge cost of abruptly switching clouds will be the albatross around GCE's neck.
But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers, and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent feature creep).
This is something all cloud providers suffer from. What assurance do I get that pricing and quality of service remains stable? Amazon has the same problem. If I look into my billing console, I see an increase of used computing resources. From inactive projects. They still managed to use significant CPU-time. I would not be able to claim otherwise. As long as the costs remain low, this is not a problem. But you have to believe your cloud provider...
Still using my own server for anything in development or for personal stuff or file storage (have you looked at prices? It is basically free now). I mainly use cloud services because people want it fast and cheap but still need an option to scale the solution.
I am content with the services Amazon delivers, but I heavily expect some kind of bubble burst in the future. Development of infrastructure and management interfaces probably isn't cheap either.
So does Google have a better backend than Amazon or Microsoft? I couldn't tell. Only that Microsoft tends to be slower than the competitors, Google tends to ban random users and some of their own services, and just with that Amazon comes out on top. But the fear that a service is deprecated at one point is a permanent undercurrent.
You sound quite certain of that, so can you share your sources?
I tried very hard to contact anyone about my issue and naturally got nothing
We went with AWS
Two years later I've left the company now valued in the billions and spending several hundred thousand dollars a month on AWS
Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication, file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.
Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely need, like for signing Stripe payments.
Pretty certain any large enterprise cloud workload that gcp/azure/AWS is interested in is a lot more than that. Data warehousing, Kafka stuff, identity management, document storage etc
https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019....
Two new services introduced and one in GA, plus multiple solid innovations like the Elastic Inference Predictors API. And this doesn't include roll-outs of existing services in new regions.
Also, Office 365, Exchange, AD, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Flow, and other platform lock-ins are not to be discounted.
Now it was possible their IBM contact was thinking of some sort of older managed hosting but he said they were talking about "cloud" for the entire meeting ... at that point it seemed IBM just thought of managed hosting as "cloud".
> the market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie
In my circles people only talk about AWS and Google Cloud. I know there is going to be a massive segment of the market that just defaults into Azure because Microsoft .... but it seems to me that beyond that the race is pretty much over. IBM, Oracle all the others are not going to succeed beyond niche applications.
I seriously doubt a company with any significant fraction of income tied to DoD is going to ever allow it to appear that they might have ever even considered GCP.
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-hybrid...
I'm more than a little skeptical on their ability to execute on this, given that they've let a lot of their top-talent go.
They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states then sticking to the monoculture.
Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud option.
We're leaving Softlayer, but to an acquirer's infrastructure, not to Amazon.
Maybe they still are and I'm just not paying enough attention, but Softlayer was essentially the _top_ choice for dedicated hosting for the large number of customers that wanted something more reliable than OVH without having to go to Rackspace.
I feel like they just walked about from that. Or, more to my point, that they're neglecting driving business to it to a point where it's actually helping AWS grow.
When I think of this I first think of Digital Realty Trust (DLR), Global Switch, China Telecom, AT&T, Equinix, NTT, Tata Communication, China Unicom, Telefonica, ....
True, a lot of their customers must be cloud vendors. At one point, I'm pretty sure AWS was a customer of Equinix in some parts of the world (and they might still be). But still, who's bigger? AWS or the folks who consider AWS another (although no doubt important) client?
No one is giving out detailed data, but DLR has 200+ data centers and 30+ million sqft of space. And while it is probably the biggest, they're just one of many. And I think they and their customers are mostly into more traditional hosting.
Then you have more direct to consumer companies that run their own data centers. OVH, Hetzner, Softlayer, PhoenixNap, HE, Rackspace, ... Worldwide? Hundreds of these. Maybe thousands.
Gartner once wrote that AWS was 10x larger than the next 14 cloud providers combined (2015). I don't know how true that was (or still is). But if "the cloud" is essentially "AWS", then it's probably safe to assume that most of DLR or OVH's or XYZ should be counted as "traditional" and not "cloud".
If it's mostly just AWS + 14 other _much_ smaller companies vs thousands of companies worlwide, some of which are bigger than AWS, many of which are in the same ballpark, is the cloud even 1% of hosting market?
(I worked at a large bank, we had our own datacenters (not buildings, not cages, but floors). I don't know if we actually owned everything though. If we did, this would probably add up to be quite a lot. If we didn't, then this capacity is already included in the above providers).
Now, if you're talking about where the money is at, I have no preconceptions. You might be right. There's no doubt cloud margins are higher.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...
> For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits.
Best-case scenario, IBM / Google have 9% each, so with this still leaves 36% of the market in the hand of smaller players that both these companies can steal market share from
But it isn't.
Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go down and customers don't get that upset.
Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.
With the cloud market still relatively new, a lot of the adoption decisions, especially in small and mid-sized companies, are not made at C-level, but driven (directly and indirectly) bottom up from the technical teams.
And a major driver there is familiarity with the platform. And familiarity is driven by how easy it is to quickly set something up and play around with to see if it fits your needs. Even appeal for developers' private projects could tip the scales here.
And while Google isn't so bad on the technical end of this, they certainly are when it comes to signing up and to pricing. So, ultimately, AWS has a kind of bottom-up push that G can't match and certainly won't by playing the enterprise playbook.
Add to that their track record with killing services, and their generally less than approachable support, and it's no wonder they're single-digit.
For years AWS was the cloud, and the only viable option.
At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first) companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are alternatives for the first time ever.
Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery and digital media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the opportunity for competitors lies.
Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933
As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud.
(And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)
The tools provided by GCP itself will help you get the job done. AWS never really clicked for me, terrible UI/UX, too many steps to get things done. GCP is the opposite when it comes to ease of doing most things. When I started using GCP, I had a "wow" and "aha" moment: this is how a cloud should be.
Give GCP a shot ;)
They have their own strengths and weaknesses. What jumped out to me is when I tried Google is I believe that Google has superior network infrastructure that lets them do some things that are hard to do in AWS, especially seamless integration of networking between regions, internal IPs also don't seem to be tied to individual zones etc.
On the other hand, some services are just awful. I tried Deployment Manager, and while looks like it is a nice design that makes it more powerful than Cloud Formation, it is still buggy. Seeing that I'm now not surprised that terraform is so popular. I don't think it is that much better compared to CF, but if you use DM you must be a masochist.
Maybe both should team up?
I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support offered.
It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams for sales and support.
Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation, and account closures without recourse.
Our experience with Azure is a bit better, but they are still more expensive than any average cloud. Our company uses cloud infrastructure service with a smaller cloud - https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html - and they are pretty good and inexpensive, compared to the major clouds, in terms of technology (VMware Cloud computing) and in terms of cloud storage.
I'm sure if you look at Compute, Storage, and Networking cloud spend, AWS has a much higher marketshare.
Digital Ocean UI also awesome if you consider them a player in the field.
From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not, but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the cloud yet.