> only for Google Cloud customers
for which there's no payment required as far as I can tell—just creating a Google Cloud account.
for which there's no payment required as far as I can tell—just creating a Google Cloud account.
Google is pretty famous for their nonexistent customer support, so I can't expect satisfaction there. And a chargeback would risk getting my entire account blocked.
Google cloud billing doesn't use google pay, so...nothing?
You gave them permission to bill for a reason. They decide the reason and amount and you pay. Seems risky without support.
Centralization with no accountability besides blaming things on AI is problematic.
They've changed free things to not free things many times in the past. Or started restricting features once it gets popular. Don't depend on it for anything you want to last a while.
LE is great, but their SLO is significantly below our customers’ expectations. For us, Google wouldn’t replace LE, it would supplement LE for higher reliability.
Seeing more providers conforming to ACME at a price point of “free” is great for the ecosystem.
The recommended renewal cycle gives you a 30 day lead on failure becoming a problem, plenty of time for multiple retries or recovery processes to use an alternate.
The only issues I've ran into, have stemmed from DNS for wildcard certs, where a client's DNS provider is... pretty crap about updating records despite low ttls being set.
On AWS, the equivalent is "We no longer recommend this, and it's not visible in the AWS console unless you are already using it or have asked support to enable it, but it will keep working indefinitely".
The traditional way a big tech company becomes the dominant provider is to embrace an open interoperable protocol to minimize the friction of switching from another provider. Later, when they have captured enough of the market, they extend the protocol to gradually reduce the de facto interoperability with other providers to increase the friction of switching to any other provider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...
Even traditional host providers are raising their costs for the same mysterious reasons, although hardware costs are historically trending lower over time.
That's one way to put it.
Solving your customer's problems and making it more likely they will keep using your main offering is another way to put it.
As the adage goes, if it's free you are the product, not the customer.
As well, post-paid providers rely on credit-card billing information to deduplicate/KYC users. Without this sort of information, an, er, "ingenious" user could just sign up for a million free-tier accounts and lash them together into a quota-evading resource-sucking behemoth.
And probably far less, actually. As many GCP users as there might be in the world, most of them are IT staff working for some-or-another enterprise; where that enterprise only has a single GCP billing-account administrator. Nobody else in the enterprise has their card on file. (And that billing-account administrator's card-on-file is just a corporate credit card, that tells you what the corporation buys, but tells you nothing about the individual. And their email is just a group/alias — billing@ or somesuch. Impossible to log into; impossible to browse the web as; no way to target ads at.)
You'd think the long tail of individual accounts could have more value, but those are the same users who GCP is least interested in recruiting to their platform, and the ones whose entered data is least trustworthy, because of all the spammers and crypto-miners attempting to use stolen credit cards to pay for service. You want to bind some poor random Joe's card-hubbed ad-profile to a spoke created by the person who stole their identity? That's negative average ad-targeting ROI!
Edot: Absolutely zero surprise this is getting voted to nowhere. CHEERS
The pattern you're referring to really doesn't apply to this business. If anything it's the opposite: Kurian's goal is to make Gcloud more like Oracle, and part of that involves making sure enterprise customers don't need to be skittish about the kinds of concerns you seem to be thinking of.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/02/with-a-22b-run-rate-does-i...
The fact that the current run rate is $22bn compared to the $13bn revenue in 2020 suggests that they're succeeding - that's some pretty significant growth.
It's a completely different business model from the consumer/ad side, and confusing the two is a mistake.
The counterfactual question one should be asking here is: Would gCloud exist if it were an independent company and not a bet?
Full disclosure: Xoogler here.
Independent companies like that are funded by investors for years, all the time. The cloud market is expected to hit close to a trillion dollars by 2026. Gcloud doesn't have to take away a single existing AWS customer to win big.
> Xoogler
So what's your take? You think Google might just decide to shut down a fast-growing business with $13-20bn revenues and huge upside potential as if it were a free product like Reader? Or you think they somehow aren't able to make it profitable so will just give up?
Neither of those are really how these things work.
All I'm saying is that this business isn't a monopoly like search or a near duopoly like ads. The competition is stiff. There are two players who are well ahead of them and the ones behind aren't sitting still. I don't expect any miracles with run of the mill management consulting leadership at the helm.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/wal-mart-is-reportedly-telli...
So you can both do this (silently) and "not" do it (because it's impossible to detect), and it would thus be stupid to not actually do it because it's free data.
Zooming out I think this and the opposite view are equally possible. Just articulating what this perspective looks like.
That's a pretty huge data point though. It puts you into a very specific market segment.