Hacker News Reader

Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or this is just a culture mismatch, but are you serious about the one year warning?

For context, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Lifecycle has mainstream support dedication from 2009-2015. The extended support date is 2020.

View on HN

I'm serious in that:

a) That's what is written in the contract

b) I think you should be able to migrate off the platform within that timeframe, and you shouldn't join our platform if you don't think we're making it easy enough for you to leave again (I deeply believe in initiatives like Google Takeout)

I didn't make any comment, nor will I, on whether I perceive that time frame to be long enough. I think it's smarter to stick to the facts when it's my own job I'm talking about. I would like to continue engaging with the Hacker News community (which, you'll see from my history, began many years prior to my joining Google) and offering context and information. But I can't do that if I don't stick to facts, lest my opinions be bent around to imply something I didn't mean that could put the job (that I enjoy very much) in jeopardy.

Someone at Google is making a big mistake here then. Enterprise can take a year to migrate off their current coffee machine. Migrating off their infrastructure provider is not something they are going to accept having to do within a years timeframe. Some of the QA testing these guys do can take over a year.

The reason Google's whole cloud division doesn't take off in the same way as pretty much everything else Google releases is because it feels like you guys have no idea what you're doing. Which is incredible considering you obviously know what you're doing - you keep Google running! Would you give your Search team 1 year notice to migrate all of their servers off their current hardware and datacenters to AWS or DigitalOcean? Obviously not, they would probably fire the lot of you and run it themselves. Why do you think other enterprises would think any differently?

I think it is pretty clear that keeping Google running has not helped Google to understand most enterprise customers. I think part of the problem is that Google IS a company that could decide to (and spend all the money and time) to migrate from one cloud platform to another if they decided they needed to. The margins are so big, the market share so dominant, the workforce so resilient and compliant, that they could actually turn on a dime. But most companies are nothing like Google, and their infrastructure products have not caught on in large part because of this mindset problem.

Fair enough! Thanks for the information!

The Windows Server lifecycle comparison is interesting, but makes me curious about what Azure does, as a more apples-to-apples comparison. Is there some kind of guarantee of what notice you'd get before major changes or deprecation to services? I can't find one explicitly in some quick searching.

Azure in it's entirety doesn't (1 year notice of changes coming), but Microsoft has a separate "private cloud" IaaS offering, which has a similar lifecycle to server. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but the word I've heard is this is pretty attractive to the big businesses that are most worried about that.

For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud.

>For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud.

until they run a private fiber [which don't also have NSA's splitters attached] directly to the MS datacenter, they are being sold a snow in Antarctic [ie. mutually exclusive dichotomy between "100% never let anything onto the public Internet" and "use of a Microsoft private cloud"].

I work in Azure.

We are happy to talk about the actual location of your data for privacy purposes: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/priva... I don't know how often this is actually done, but it's not out of the question that a large customer might prefer to run their own fiber to our datacenter(s).

The reason it's called a private cloud is because it's hosted at the client premises, not in the MS datacenter.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/a-sysadmins-view-of-...

As a Microsoft cloud services user, I know what metropolitan areas our services are hosted out of, and I believe that we can request a physical tour of one or more of those datacenters can be arranged. If you are a large customer, you can also arrange for dedicated connectivity to the Microsoft network via a peering connection.

Re the NSA splitter issue, that's just a reality of life. If you've run a large email, backup or similar system for a length of time, you've inevitably come across requests from law enforcement or litigating attorneys for data. So don't assume that nobody is accessing your stuff because it's in a room in your building.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com