Hacker News Reader

Comment by PieUser | Hacker News Reader

So Google Cloud is still losing money. Anyone know if Azure is profitable?

At this stage of cloud, all that's really important is revenue growth. GCP is only a quarter of the size of Azure and AWS - they need to gain market share regardless of how much investment it requires in the short term.

Are the cloud losses all real or is it an accounting artifact due to internally providing services without charging for them in full?

GCP runs on Google, but Google doesn't run on GCP.

I don't think there's any major production Google service actually running on GCP (which, IMO, is a problem and likely one of the reasons for their trouble).

Internally Google has platforms that support easy reproducible builds, binary verification, secure deployment, etc. out of the box. Those don't exist for GCP (or, for that matter, other cloud platforms). That means you need a strong justification for GCP over borg.

Many acquisitions and Other Bets do end up on GCP after migrating from AWS/Azure, though.

Another way to look at it is that Google has a batteries-included opinionated way to deploy internal services, it would be an incredibly tough sell to off that more directly to other users. "First rewrite your app in one of these 4 languages" doesn't fly. People want to buy a VM, or maybe a Kubernetes cluster.

(Plus external services need stronger tenant isolation which Google internal services don't deliver)

The big question is, does Google consider gcloud so core that it will never give up on it? We are not there yet but it will only take the smallest whiff and Google's reputation for abandoning products will utterly destroy their viability in the enterprise cloud computing market.

It looks like Google Cloud made $13Bn and had expenses/losses of $5Bn i.e., net positive $8Bn. Why do you think it's losing money?

Google lost $5 billion, that's not it's expenses.

Ah got it, $5Bn is the 'operating income' so although they made $13Bn, they ended up spending $18Bn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com