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Microsoft and Amazon don't even need to do anything. Knowing that there might only be 3 years of service remaining, I definitely won't use Google Cloud and I'll tell everyone I know not to use it too.

Microsoft Azure: The cloud service that wont abruptly close out of nowhere with no transition plan leaving you stranded, and a service that actually comes with that thing you call when you need help and support.

The marketing writes itself.

They already wrote that marketing 8 years ago. Only gets more and more true over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4

Half of that criticisms applies to Microsoft now. :/

I enjoyed that more than I thought I would :)

Mostly all you need to know about Microsoft's support lifecycle is that my Windows Mobile phone just got a security patch on Patch Tuesday, and apparently Microsoft also extended its support an extra month into January just because.

Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.

Like the Microsoft Azure "German Cloud", assured to be GDPR compliant. We spent quite some time and money to migrate from AWS to that solution in 2017.

Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019.

We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).

??

They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/germany/germany-welco...

Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)

> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today, which we’ll maintain with necessary security updates.

No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-is-discontinuing-the-germa...

https://hackernoon.com/microsoft-announces-the-end-of-the-ge...

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/14944

If you still don't believe me, please provide your public key or email address so I can publish a response.

Maybe it doesn't stand out: Microsoft Germany delivered the promise that US authorities are technically unable to access stored data. The "new" data centers were without that promise, making the USP obsolete.

This is precisely my point:

> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today.

> Existing customers are not affected by this and can continue to use the Germany cloud without restriction.

You don't see any Windows Phones being sold, but they still years later being supported with security updates.

No one can possibly fault a business for stopping continuing development of an unpopular offering. It's when it becomes unsupported and leaves people stranded that the the real problems happen.

Microsoft have plenty of platforms and products that were abandoned overnight. It’s hard for me to even think of Windows Phone, for example, without thinking of what happened to WP7 buyers when they abruptly pivoted their mobile OS/runtime strategy with the incompatible WP8. The most they got was a WP7.8 update that skinned the immediately-dead platform to look like the new one.

It’s a matter of visibility and what kind of customers own the products being shut down. From a PR perspective there’s a big difference between killing an enterprise product with few large customers, and killing a consumer product with many small ones. Even if the few complaints are louder, the many complaints around the latter would still totally drown it out. I’m sure they have analytics to know how many people still use Windows Phones and weighing the possibility of an outcry e.g. if all their unsupported phones got 0wned and they collectively took to Twitter about it.

Windows Phone was like the opposite of Microsoft's strategy over the last several decades. They decided to move fast and break things like we're all told to do and they were roundly punished in the marketplace for it.

> At least a non-cloud service will work after it has been officially declared dead.

They just lost my business. I was planning to use them over AWS for a new project. Now that I know they might cancel it like the other Google experiments, I'm not going to risk that investment. I'll stick with AWS.

They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.

If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible

The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.

The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill

It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'

I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.

There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure".

Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.

So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).

And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.

Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...

How many FTE's worth of savings are you incurring with the enormous overhead of colocated server maintenance?

Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for less than my hourly bill rate at this point.

I don't know what your company is but knowing it's sensibly renting rack space rather than jumping on the cloud bandwagon because it's the path of least resistance would give me confidence if I were a potential customer.

This is a ridiculous interpretation.

If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not.

Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?

Google has a well established track record of killing things that aren't working out.

Worst than that. Google only seems interested in huge successes.

Things like Google Reader had healthy user bases when Google came for them in the night.

They could even sell most of the products they murder to someone else for millions.

They could even sell most of the products they murder to someone else for millions.

It would have cost Google more money to sell Reader than anyone would have bought it for.

That's a statement that cries out for analysis, although I'm not doubting you could be right still - it's not the kind of thing one just states without backing it up.

Reader was written using a bunch of proprietary Google tools, deployed on proprietary Google infrastructure and used a proprietary Google system for authentication.

It's hard to even imagine how it could have been split apart from the mothership at all.

Thanks!

Where is RSS now? Are there products that filled the niche left by Reader?

No. The technology died. Isn't this clear evidence that the product was dead in the water?

It's literally in a <link> element on the very website you're posting on, dude

> Things like Google Reader had healthy user bases when Google came for them in the night.

I wonder if anyone in Google management ever looks back and regrets that decision?

It's still always being brought up, even 6.5 years later.

It was the end of the halo effect for Google amongst the prosumer crowd, definitely.

I'm guessing that the current revenue of GCP vs. Google Reader tells management that they made a smart decision.

I always see google reader talked about on hackernews, but has a comparable product not have been made by someone else yet?

There are plenty, actually. But RSS itself is essentially dead. At least compared to what it was.

How is it dead? Everything still exports RSS feeds.

The last time I tried RSS again (I was a big reader user), every feed had a on paragraph summary and link to the full article on the website.

I couldn't actually read the news in it anymore.

So I just counted my RSS feeds via Live Bookmarks (dang you Firefox for killing them shakes cane) and I have 60+(! I expected like 30 tops) RSS feeds that I check regularly.

Most sites have RSS feeds, even the heavy hitters like YouTube.

Nothing that is widely used, because as it turns out, RSS is not the web technology of the future. Or the present, really.

Side note, I remember the next 5 or so most popular alternatives to Reader being overloaded for weeks after the shutdown.

I still use feedly almost daily.

I wouldn’t say that, they also kill things that are working out.

What was Reader's revenue? Were literally thousands of people working on it?

These are not really comparable worlds.

How is it ridiculous? The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. It's a bit hard to grow without investing, so it smells to me like a precursor to sustained engineering.

Google is dumping billions into GCP right now.

Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.

> The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met.

And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?

Google has built a strong reputation as a company that shuts down any product or service that isn't #1 in the target market. it is not unreasonable to believe that might extend to their third- or fourth-place GCP product.

If he sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023 or we will decrease our investments in the retail parts of the company" I might be worried that the retail parts of the company were going to enter into a death spiral given Amazon's problems with quality control already.

If I also thought it was unlikely that they would hit their target I would be really worried (assuming of course I had any reason to actually worry about how Amazon's business was doing)

If we were talking about a company that had a history of shutting down successful divisions because they were not successful enough I would think "hey 2023 is when the shutting down process is likely to start"

It's a punishing leak. Akin to publicizing the pull out dates of troops. Amazon and Microsoft will sit tight and enjoy their duopoly.

Rest assured they will not sit tight but rush to get customers migrating off of the Google Cloud.

Of all the comments about damage in this thread I think this is the most damaging. In other words if I were AWS and Microsoft sales I would be calling all the big clients on Google Cloud and scaring them about their future prospects and wooing them with some sweet deal. Even if Google does an about face in tomorrows news cycle the time for MS and AWS to strike is now.

There's no reason for anyone to preemptively colo their workload now in anticipation of higher prices.

You can't predict the future.

Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time.

Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.

>Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS

That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well.

We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy.

Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.

You don’t have to use multiple clouds day to day, but forcing yourself to design your applications in cloud-agnostic ways makes it worthwhile.

We finally have a technical definition for what a professional software engineer is: someone who doesn't recommend "cloud-native" workloads.

Indeed. It's a self fulfilling prophecy now.

I don't really understand why its a duopoly, if you restrict yourself to a few basic services surely you can easily switch?

"The Cloud" is just managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS. There are literally thousands of such providers in the world, and until everything about providing managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS becomes impossible to compete on, there always will be.

The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones!

I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.

That's not the modern cloud at all.

There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.

My job is managing infrastructure, services and products for large corporations in the cloud. It is managed hosting, and SaaS/PaaS, and yes, there are plenty of providers who have alternatives that we regularly use, in addition to being able to build our own with mostly open source tools. It's part of my job to find alternatives so we don't get into a jam when the one solution we use becomes unusable.

The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.