Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
Google is currently building a massive $500 million datacenter outside of Reno as we speak, and has 10+ billion invested in their datacenter cloud offering buildout this year alone.
GCP and the entire physical infrastructure isn't going to get "turned off" if it isn't #1 in the market in 3 years, that's just silly.
https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/google-data-center-nevada/
https://www.rgj.com/story/money/business/2019/02/13/google-i...
But for companies picking a cloud platform tomorrow, that’s a fate as good as death! AWS and Azure won’t slow down development and new features, so a couple years after GCP stops being a priority, it’ll start also being a bad deal, and a couple years after that it’ll be a straight-up strategic liability. THAT is why anything other than full-throated support from Google leadership for indefinite GCP investment will lose them business.
Nothing has a guaranteed future.
> AWS and Azure won’t slow down development
As long as it's paying off, they won't, and AWS maybe for longer even if it isn't. But Microsoft is no stranger to making investments in offerings and letting them stagnate or outright killing them if they don't pay off.
Google is just too big as a company, and if they replaced every human in it with drones no one would know the difference. There is no human face or point of contact or any accountability and it’s becoming a problem.
The woman was still snarky to her and unhelpful but still a real human was available.
A lot of this has to do with our own perceptions and trust. Purchasing decisions are never fully rational or information complete.
In any case, its a free market, but buying from vendors who I can talk to if something happens, has way more value to me than a ‘free’ product.
They may have different revenue models, but there is little difference when it comes down to management killing services which aren't profitable.
If there is a difference, it is that Reader could be maintained at little cost, while GCE (when it gets the axe) could potentially be costing google hundreds of millions per year to keep running.
There have been plenty of other cases where google has burned bridges with the technical crowd which they should have embraced as champions for selling services. Killing off XMPP support was another prime one for me, and absolutely affected paid enterprise customers as well.
You simply cannot trust Google to do right by me, the user. That's it.
Aside from their bad reputation for killing products, they also have a bad reputation for providing next to zero human support services for their products - even if you do pay for them.
It’s somewhere in between and if Google started launching a bunch of new DB and other infrastructure products I’d be worried about adopting them individually - not worried that the entire data centres and business divisions getting shut down. Because Google will probably move on to another product without thought of the last one.
As a developer or a company, why should I trust Google as a platform?
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ecacki/gsuite_sus...
Money talks. Culture talks louder.
To be perfectly honest, i would rather go with a company that provides cloud as one of their main products rather than a company that has it as one of their many products.
Just have a look at "API" and also "Services"...
https://cloud.google.com/products/
If you wanted to make a comparison, you should compare Google Reader to Traffic Director or DialogFlow
All the cloud offerings are massively more expensive than owning/leasing unless you have large dynamic scaling requirements. There will be middleware in the future to allow cloud agile / hybrid operation, so maybe cloud compute will become more commodity, as opposed to the current Rolls Royce pricing. At that point will Google be interested? Depends how much marginal cost is involved compared to running data centers just for themselves.
These are big numbers to us, but it's about 1/4 of their quarterly revenue--i.e. they bring in 16 times that number every year.
Don't think they wouldn't sell it to Amazon or Microsoft in a heartbeat if they decided to exit the cloud business.
Personally, I don't think Google will yank the cord on this entirely, but they may just stop piling resources into it and/ or significantly increase prices to ratchet up profits. They don't have to drop the whole cloud to really screw up a developers life, just screwing with one API I rely on can kill a product and they've already done exactly that.
The problem is with Google you just don't know what's going to happen. Microsoft and Amazon are both known and neither plays games with their products.
I'd put it this way: Google has a reputation for turning things off, but its _problem_ is an inability to stop doing that, to commit to its users/customers. In other contexts this could be written in terms of addiction.
If I were Sergey and Larry, this would be the thing I'd be retiring over, and I'm not sure Suchar can change it.
From everything we have seen of Google's culture, working on new projects is exciting and is absolutely the way to get promoted.
Doing maintenance work, especially on products that aren't wildly successful gets you no attention, no staff, no funding, and probably more than a little tongue waging.
The CEO cant just change all that with directives, even if they do something extreme like a "No Depreciations" policy, products are liable to be depreciated in all but name (Joe the intern takes care of it every 5th Tuesday, technically not depreciated) by sheer corporate momentum alone, nobody wants to be stuck with a dead fish, even if its now illegal to openly comment on how much it stinks.
It would require change at every level of Google to place value into fixing/improving existing projects, rather than all the glory going to greenfield development.
Considering the kind of "kingmaker" culture Google's mentality breeds, ie what gets me ahead is gathering resources to focus on my project, changing things to a setup where contributing to other peoples silos is welcome and common is going to be an extremely difficult prospect because virtually all the people with power inside Google got that way by carefully tending their fiefdom, they aren't just going to throw that all a way, no matter what any executive says.
You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world.
To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke.
Edit: spelling.
Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance.
In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source.
Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.
I'm one of those persons who upsold friends, families and at least one boss on to use Linux.
I'm not a business analyst but I can say that Microsoft has transformed. I still prefer Linux as does a number of fellow sysadmins and developers, but Microsoft has changed to the point where they are not a problem to us anymore. Azure portal works equally well from Firefox on Linux as from Internet Explorer or Edge on Windows.
> as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance.
The best reason for transformation in fact: because the subject realizes it is in their own best interest to change and it improves their situation.
> Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues.
I don't know.
> This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
I've used Amazon (two years, narrow experience) and Google Cloud (two years, broader but possibly shallower experience, certified) and now Azure lately.
So far, inferior is not the word I would use. I'd possibly stick with different or something neutral.
Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend.
That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it.
I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications.
The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure.
Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts.
Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years.
Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.
Also .Net is synonymous with microsoft so there is no reason to trust AWS, it's not their priority, they are a Perl and Java shop in general.
AWS a Perl shop?
All of AWS services treat C# .Net Core as a first class citizen.
- CodeBuild has prebuilt C# .Net Core images for building apps. For licensing reasons they don’t have prebuilt Windows/Framework containers but their instructions are so clear that I was able to build one before I knew anything about Docker
- Lambda has native support for .Net Core 2.x and the C# SDK for AWS has a template to build a custom runtime for C# 3.x
- Speaking of which, the AWS SDK and plug-in for C#/Visual Studio and the corresponding Nuget packages are excellent and fully featured.
- The CloudFormation Developer Kit supports C#
- There are CodeStar and ElasticBeanstalk getting started templates for .Net Framework and .Net Core
What are they missing?
Regarding support for .NET whatever AWS does microsoft will always be way ahead of them. Microsoft is not elastic.co that AWS leech on and put the original guys on the side and don't contribute back. AWS is really like a leech on open source now trying to leech on Kubernetes.
They can do this with small open source project, not with the projects supported by google or Microsoft. Like when it comes to Kubernetes AWS is playing catch with Google. So AWS Fargate and other services are still inferior to Google managed K8s. Indeed microsoft at present is ahead of AWS in managed kubernetes services. Its just the initial head-start and developers who are familiar with AWS proprietary API's find it hard to believe that in such a short time the skills they learned is no longer cutting edge and google or microsoft proprietary API's overtaken them in performance and ease of use.
All of these things are widely believed myths that have little to no basis in reality.
It certainly was not designed as some kind of Perl hosting environment.
It didn't even host Amazon.com at all until many years after the fact.
Can you give one concrete example of where MS has a feature for .Net that AWS doesn’t have?
The only one that I can think of is that their lambda equivalent works with .Net Framework.
Amazon doesn’t care about EKS, it’s just a check box option to say they have it. Elastic Container Service is far more integrated with AWS.
Have you actually used AWS? Care to enumerate how it’s “inferior”?
I have yet to see any good open source project by AWS team in the wild like Kubernetes, Linux Kernel Namespaces and Cgroups, Map Reduce from Google or .NET from Microsoft. So far what I have seen is that AWS just leech on other open source like PostgreSQL to build Aurora and RDS service without really contributing back to PostgreSQL, because postgreSQL comes with BSD license AWS can just leech on it. Same for elastic search and many other open source they leech on. I am still waiting if they are really just leechers or giving back to the open source community. Like Amazon Redshift is based on an older version of PostgreSQL 8.0.2, and Redshift has made changes to that version [1], but nothing is made open source because BSD license do not require it. This is just one big example but there are many. For open source community and contributions I feel Google and Microsoft are much better than Amazon and AWS by miles. It's just that due to early start AWS is reaping benefits by leeching on open source.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-an...
How does open source help an end user who is deciding which cloud provider to use?
AWS does not develop .NET SDK, as I mentioned in my earlier post there is no contribution of AWS in development of .NET, so they just provide infrastructure support of what ever Microsoft and the open source community releases.
In general microsoft acts as a steward to develop .NET and related infrastructure on Azure, then AWS copy and launch it as .NET infrastructure as service. They play catch up with Microsoft in this area.
I will stand corrected if you can show me that AWS (i.e. Amazon) has active open source .NET framework core developers in their internal team developing and enhancing .NET SDK or CLR open source versions.
They do the same with AI and ML Services. It is built using TensorFlow, sci-kit learn, pytorch, CNTK and various python and C++ open source libraries. Again I have yet to see example of AWS (i.e. Amazon hiring core developers of these libraries and release open source versions). They don't develop these libraries just leech on it to create it's own API's. I have yet to see any framework from AWS like TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch and CNTK.
There is nothing to copy as far as .Net. Microsoft releases a new version of .Net, all AWS has to do is make sure that its SDK’s support it. But there usually aren’t any breaking changes.
As far as the other services that I could see needing to support, the only ones that I can think of is CodeBuild and lambda. For those two, you can create custom Docker images and runtimes respectively.
And the other question, are you a .Net developer?
.Net Core is open source and available for Macs and Linux. It’s almost 5 years old now.
“All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
Thank you; have a nice day!”
I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.
I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit.
So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.
Apple - look at Apple’s revenue and profit mix over the past 10-15 years its apparent that they were able to change. Of course the change after Jobs came on is well known.
Microsoft - was “Windows first” during the Balmer era.
Facebook - was in danger of being made irrelevant after mobile. They were making a lot on games hosted on their platform.
Amazon: AWS and their move toward services even internally.
Netflix: went from shipping DVDs and had to become a tech company in the era of streaming.
And then there is Google....
But there still seems to be a fight going on in the cockpit.
Honestly, and I'm more of a Google side-eyer than a hater, but I'm not sure they're capable of this, it's just not in their DNA. I've been saying "Google is bad at product" for a long time, like a "high PR" long time, and this mindset has been greeted with continual killoffs and usability stumbles (current Android is kind of a mess UI-wise, e.g.).
I simply don't think they're capable of putting a division together that could be relied upon. Heck, Alphabet might simply kill that off after a few years!
... where one of the few ways of rectifying the situation is to get a top posting on HN in the hope that a Googler will see your plea for help.
I mean, that's probably mainly related to Android dev but I've seen plenty of stories to support that feeling:
E.g. (just a random example) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
My perception might be misguided / influenced by being in a perception bubble, however that is my reality and AWS or AZURE just seems a whole lot safer. So, why should I as a developer invest any time in GC? I did attend a Google dev day re machine learning++ in Melbourne a couple of years ago, and the products seem nice and all, but the competition isn't exactly lagging behind.
My recommendation would be to really address this issue of human support and trust.
Developers these days say "Chuck it in S3" or "Run it on EC2". I feel they have a strong advantage because they've kind of come to own the language of the cloud.
Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services.
When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.
Try using apache-libcloud to make your deployment and programs cloud agnostic. Also try using smaller alternatives like hetzner or scaleway.
Once you go down this cloud rabbit hole you will be hold hostage to whims of these providers, where they can shutdown any service at their will or ask to pay an arm and leg. Also try to have non USA cloud providers as another backup option in the long run.
After many years of working with AWS almost exclusively, I recently started a new $DAYJOB where our primary public cloud provider is Azure. A couple of days ago I was chatting with a co-worker about something, and he literally says "I think we should just chuck it in S3 and call it good" (paraphrased slightly, due to my imperfect memory).
It struck me as odd for a few seconds, and then I realized that exactly what you are talking about has taken place. S3 is so dominant that it's become the default label for object storage in the cloud.
I’m by no means a AWA or Azure fanboy, I’m on the team that hopes we get a solid European alternative, but until we do both Amazon and Microsoft are leagues ahead of Google.
Contrast this with AWS. They have expert engineers, pre- and post- sales, helping you find good ways to solve your problem. I could ring a senior guy on his cell right now if needed. The only problem with AWS is cost and complexity, it's the fast path to developing a $20k/day cocaine habit. But the AWS dealer will definitely come to your house to deliver at 11pm.
(It is a bit of a change from 10 years ago though, when everything had to be paid by credit card. Gave the accountants a heart attack. Gave me an ulcer from thinking about everything halting because the fraud control might reject the bill without warning...)
Azure definitely isn't in that league, still want to sell to the whole enterprise, getting promo stuff requires them to sign off at five levels, lawyers are involved in everything. In short, their dev relations are shite.