Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of enterprise.
> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.
How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.
> I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.
I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.
I guess enterprise trust them because they speak the same language. Also under Nadella's lead Microsoft has shown it can eat it's own dog food and turn it into profit.
Turning from a software house into a full cloud business, the so called "digital transformation".
Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.
I am not often a Windows programmer, but I followed that saga. I think it was the result of poor internal communication and was fairly anomalous for Microsoft.
About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.
I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night.
CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.
Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.
Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.
"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."
I can’t speak to Azure, but with a business support plan, it’s really easy to connect with a human on AWS. My experience is that they won’t give up until they resolve your issue. They’ve even gone as far as creating a simplified CloudFormation stack to duplicate the issue and then talk to their developers and get back to you.
We're a pretty small fish as Google Cloud clients go, but we have honestly not had this problem at all. We get very fast response to support tickets, and on the rare occasions where we've had to escalate they have gone as far as setting up hangouts with senior engineers.
I've gotten a prompt response from Google Cloud every time I've filed a support request. Then again, my company pays for a support contract with an SLA.
I've been a gmail/drive/GSuite/Chrome/Android user for a long time and of course I use Google for internet searches. I am getting kind of tired of their bullshit though.
However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.
It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.
Yeah. That has been my experience. AWS has way better customer interaction and will refund "small accidents" with credits. Google makes it hard to reach a person and won't budge at all on similar issues. On the flip side, the documentation on Google Cloud seems a lot better than AWS.
What are you talking about? Just make sure you are someone important on social media and create a tweet stir such that some Google execs look at your problem. That's how you get support.
Product has their lifecycle. Nothing lives forever even for AWS/Azure.
In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.
Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)
Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
I would add that AWS seems to moth-ball projects, where Google would officially announce an end-of-life. For example, I strongly regretted using AWS OpsWorks after I realized the only priority for AWS seemed to be keeping it running under SLA.
> Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing.
Now watch as i consider them the same thing.
Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.
Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.
Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.
I see the same thing, it was also IBM's cloud services pitch that they "understood the enterprise" better than Google or Amazon does.
It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.
I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.
IMO AWS is the true king — the Microsoft numbers are spiked by Office 365 licenses, most of which is renting Office itself. Amazon is the only one not playing games with definitions.
IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.
Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.
Don’t forget the rapid and severe Google maps price increases. These are the gift that will keep on giving for Microsoft and Amazon in the mindshare of developers and business leaders.
Do most enterprise companies care about the price of Google Maps? My company hosts on AWS, Azure and GCP, and I couldn't tell you how much Google Maps costs (or indeed, that there was even a paid tier, though it makes sense for embedded maps and such).
I've created an account to try Azure last weekend, it took me 2 hours to sign-up due to issues in the registration on their end, and then once it finally worked, I copied an example from their documentation. 5 minutes after, I received an email that I was banned for "security reasons", so yeah if they can't even handle a sign-up properly, I wonder how they want to reach the top spot of the cloud market, I'll for sure try to avoid Azure in the future for any company I go.
The AWS console is far from being great but last time I used Azure’s it was terribly slow and full of little bugs. The UI was kind of flashy and hip and combined with the bugs it made them seem silly, especially contrasted against the AWS console’s utilitarian look. It was painful. I’m not saying I’ll never try it again but I’d need to be convinced.
I remember seeing Google folks in Japan coming to sell their products in T shirts and jeans in a business world where everyone wears suits and knows it. I have nothing against the casual style, but knowing the etiquette is primordial in business.
That and the fact you can speak to engineers at Microsoft will relative ease. Recently had an Azure support ticket open. The whole process was beyond my expectations to the point I'd have difficulty putting anything big anywhere else. Could be personal preference, but the way they manage introducing new services and grandfathering old ones is also very good.
Where are you getting this "price hike" narrative for Google from? Google's presence in the cloud market is instrumental in across the board price drops.
The Google Maps API is a good example. They increased prices by an order of magnitude while simultaneously decreasing the free tier with one month's notice. [0]
Probably from the AppEngine change of almost a decade ago or the double Maps bumps (the big shrinking of the free tier years ago, then another one in 2018). Usually those are adjustments to make prices match reality.
Google Reader is like "the one that got away" because the landscape changed so fundamentally with it, that no other product could take its place.
If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.
I know I'm unlikely ever to trust Google's cloud offerings simply because of their track record of support/service, or rather lack of it. Yes, even for paying customers who paid them payments by paying.
"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
If you pay for their enterprise level support for GCP you can get human responses very easily (and quickly on high priority requests) though they tend to have to escalate and complicated issues to their engineering teams. We also have weekly meetings with their CRE team where we can give general input, make feature requests and get support requests/etc expedited as needed.
Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.
I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer.
We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.
We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services.
If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.
On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer.
In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name.
When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.
> Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.
Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.
It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.
Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.
Ssh'ing into China AWS boxes is like 300 baud modem days born again. I work across from people trying to setup AWS China infrastructure and the curse words fly with alacrity and frequency.
The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have some extra restrictions, but they aren’t some kind of clones of AWS software.
Unless I’m missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the other regions.
There are laws and regulations in China about who can own the physical infrastructure, but that doesn't mean that it isn't AWS. The implication that the only benefit is that the name is retained is simply false.
Due to laws and logistics, AWS Classic -> AWS China aren't at full feature parity, but it's certainly not some watered down or different version of the AWS cloud.
> Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
Azure has a region in China which is not a baby version of its public cloud offering. It might not have some new SaaS products but for core offerings it's exactly the same feature wise.
When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions.
Amazon “Consultants” are basically useless. The ones I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with only know the netops side and the best they can do is help you do a “lift and shift”. They usually know very little about how to implement all of the other managed services AWS offers.
I was the Dev lead at a previous company with no AWS experience and they brought in “consultants” to help us move to AWS. They gave no guidance on how to actually develop a product using AWS services even though I explained in high level my proposed architecture. I could have easily cut the cost by over 60% if I had known all I know about AWS now or the consultants could have actually helped.
From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure.
As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:
GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.
For every dollar you pay:
- You get more compute power per core, while paying less.
- You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.
- You get the best "data processing at scale".
Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me,
In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.
Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far.
Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.
All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
... and you get what you pay for. Whenever I've had a problem on AWS, I've spoken to a human being, and had a detailed information on what was happening and how they were fixing it.
I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there (now).
When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.
I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.
I have no idea how you are getting someone to talk to from AWS without paying. I have had 10k/mo spend with both and without a support plan you get absolutely nothing, and with they fall over themselves to help, calling you immediately after filing tickets.
Caused by a bad BGP route announcement [1]; this is outside of the control of Google. However, they do seem to have global incidents more often than the competition (for example [2] last July)
AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 explicitly to locations, because they didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What?
command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.
Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes.
I never got to a point I could test if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked.
GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.
Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an issue that is being ping-ponged around different reps for >10 days by now.
Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those.
Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.
Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not)
Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.
The UI is, um, lets say, very unconventional for non-windows folks. It is extremely sluggish compared to AWS or GCP. As in, each page takes several seconds+ to fully load vs AWS/GCP. Maybe this is just for me, or an IE vs Chrome issue or something, I'm not sure. The horizontal panning in the UI is pretty strange for the uninitiated too. Everyone else, the entire internet pretty much scrolls up/down on a web page but in Azure it's up/down + side-to-side + expanding panels with scroll. I'm not even sure where to look for things (scroll down or to the side). As far as the tech is concerned, I'm not sure but the first impression of the UI coming from another cloud provider just seems off. Typically, I use the UI to get the lay of the land before hitting the API or something. But, I suspect I'm not the target market since I've spent my entire career on the linux side of things.
It's been a while (~2 years) since I last had to tangle with it, but off the top of my head:
1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass.
2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI but didn't reliably work, old was cruddy looking but did. The set of features present in them was not congruent either ("new" had some some "old" didn't and vice versa). But wait, there's more! see #3
3) Not every operation was possible via the admin consoles. Some things you had to use their powershell cli tools to do, which is great fun when you have no windows machines around to run powershell on. This was for something stupidly obvious like "assign an IP to this instance" or something; mercifully I've forgotten the details but it was something you'd think would be trivial.
4) Whoever designed their payment model was ... to be charitable, extremely set in their ways. Instead of being able to set up a payment method and pay by the hour (or whatever), you had to buy "entitlement packs" at $X per license and apply those to your account, sort of like the boxware model but awkwardly shoehorned into cloud billing. Woe betide you if your "microsoft bucks" ran out in the middle of an extended compute run!
All these were for comparatively simple and straightforward uses of their infra (i.e. pretty much just compute and block storage, no fancy database or machinelearningAIwhizbang-as-a-service stuff). I can't imagine the more complex features were better off if the foundations were so haphazardly implemented.
Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst.
Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).
In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:
* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.
* They don't have as many features as AWS.
* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)
* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)
-
FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)
----
Digression;
I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;
No it is not! Azure is not even in the same ballpark. APIs fail randomly, instances take a random amount of time to come up(sometimes similar to AWS, sometimes double digits) services are poorly integrated, lots of weird constraints and surprising behavior(their load balancers are nonsensical), lack of AZs (and support for them) in many regions, etc.
Can you make your stuff work on Azure? Sure you can. Is that a good experience? No way.
This is probably what people are referring to. The underlying tech may not be horrible, but the user experience is.
While Microsoft has undoubtedly been catching up, and there are always some specific products where one vendor has a leg up, there is no doubt the Azure cloud has been technologically far behind AWS and significantly behind Google.
First of all, I'd want to acknowledge that Google is behind AWS as well. One big technical reason is IAM. Few realize just how important AWS IAM is as a service federation infrastructure. If you look at the details, Google's IAM product is inferior.
Now, on to Azure. Three years ago I was involved with a high stakes effort to port an AWS-grown platform service architecture onto Azure. At the time, they had massive gaps in their understanding of what IaaS meant. Here are some concrete examples:
* They did not really understand what object storage was. Blob storage was not possible to use at scale due to trivially low bandwidth, storage, and API limits
* Software-defined networking was not available between availability zones
* Software-defined networking could not be used to launch mixes of instance types
* Software-defined Internet gateways were not available except in a config that resembled "AWS Classic" networking
* On-demand instances were effectively unavailable beyond one or two instances at a time (at least for the instance types we wanted). You had to reserve instance capacity in advance, by going through a support ticket
* Creating and using custom machine images was undocumented in the API
* Instance metadata APIs were not available
* On-demand instance launches would encounter weird behaviors, where upon hitting certain limits entire groups of instances would be terminated
* Many aspects of APIs for the above were undocumented and unsupported
Combined, these problems made deployment on Azure extremely difficult. I have prefaced this with the caveat that Microsoft has improved since then. Many of the problems above are no longer issues, I'm sure. But what I found was a gaping chasm between what Microsoft claimed and what was really possible on the ground. What I found since then is that Google and Microsoft are making an earnest effort to catch up, and that's good for us consumers, but Microsoft (and to some extent Google) often don't even understand the full feature set of what they are trying to catch up with.
Their UIs and tooling are inconsistent and clunky. They kind of shove some of their tooling on to you as well.
Obviously, my experience is rather shallow here and wouldn't dare go into too deep discussions on that. And the shoving part can easily be avoided with some extra elbow grease.
I'd like to comment a few things made me appreciate and enjoy Google/Cloud services and I am aware they are very subjective to my personal experience as a student and beginner to web dev, but there are many folks like me so I could be speaking for them too.
Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners.
Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.
Google has done an excellent job with their Cloud documentation, including many useful howto sections. When we raise issues with them, they are quick to update the documentation with "gotchas" so there isn't tribal knowledge about this floating around in every company.
Azure's documentation is standard Microsoft technical doc fare, i.e. atrocious. It's horrible trying to get a straight answer out of anything they've written.
My impression from a decade in Windows Server and .NET development is exactly the opposite. You may have to do a lot of reading, but the available technical docs have 100x the raw utility of those from Apple and others.
And as discussed to death in the linked thread, what Microsoft should've done instead? Excluded Office from the cloud revenue, simply because Amazon didn't make as much money from their own office productivity suite (but still included it in their cloud revenue numbers)?
MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.
And to be fair Microsoft only includes Office365 revenue which consists of storage, active directory support and not standalone office that you can download.
What does Amazon offer for a cloud office suite though? I have never heard of one despite living in Seattle, where we see all kinds of failed Amazon expansions.
I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number that you see in all the graphs.
Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to “juice” the numbers.
Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.
Readit News
I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.
How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.
Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are
I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.
Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.
I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.
Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.
Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.
"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."
Never again.
However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.
It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.
In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.
Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)
Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
Now watch as i consider them the same thing.
Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.
Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.
Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.
It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.
I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/08/03/1-microsof...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/04/30/cloud-r...
IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.
Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.
Incredibly stupid move.
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I honestly cannot imagine the words ‘sales’ and ‘no suit’ together in a sentence anywhere in the world, much less Japan.
I’m not even Japanese and I think by now I’d consider it more or less an insult.
Amazon is so much better in my experience when it comes to supporting their platform.
[0] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
Indeed! Just ~~~last month~~~ 62 months ago they shut down Reader.
(I see that you're hedging with the reference to Maps. But I'd love if this time, we wouldn't make a single event a 10-year talking point)
If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.
"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.
We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.
We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services.
If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.
On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer.
In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name.
When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.
Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.
It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.
Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.
The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have some extra restrictions, but they aren’t some kind of clones of AWS software.
Unless I’m missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the other regions.
Due to laws and logistics, AWS Classic -> AWS China aren't at full feature parity, but it's certainly not some watered down or different version of the AWS cloud.
Azure has a region in China which is not a baby version of its public cloud offering. It might not have some new SaaS products but for core offerings it's exactly the same feature wise.
Amazon “Consultants” are basically useless. The ones I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with only know the netops side and the best they can do is help you do a “lift and shift”. They usually know very little about how to implement all of the other managed services AWS offers.
I was the Dev lead at a previous company with no AWS experience and they brought in “consultants” to help us move to AWS. They gave no guidance on how to actually develop a product using AWS services even though I explained in high level my proposed architecture. I could have easily cut the cost by over 60% if I had known all I know about AWS now or the consultants could have actually helped.
As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:
For every dollar you pay: Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me, Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far.Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.
All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
People in procurement are often measured on the amount of discount they can get. Try getting that when you purchase online.
In the Nordics you can't compare the "salesforce" of AWS and Google with the army that is the Azure-team.
Around the Nordic countries at least, Google tries to outsource sales to participants in the Google Cloud Partners program.
If you want the " face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc", you go to a partner.
How one chooses a trusted partner, when ones decision is based on the Google brand, I have no idea...
I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there (now).
When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.
I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.
Like they literally came to the office sat at the table and talked to us.
Not sure that is a differentiator at all, except for the Support pricing model.
1: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...
2: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...
command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.
Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes.
I never got to a point I could test if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked.
GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.
Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those.
Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.
Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.
1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass.
2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI but didn't reliably work, old was cruddy looking but did. The set of features present in them was not congruent either ("new" had some some "old" didn't and vice versa). But wait, there's more! see #3
3) Not every operation was possible via the admin consoles. Some things you had to use their powershell cli tools to do, which is great fun when you have no windows machines around to run powershell on. This was for something stupidly obvious like "assign an IP to this instance" or something; mercifully I've forgotten the details but it was something you'd think would be trivial.
4) Whoever designed their payment model was ... to be charitable, extremely set in their ways. Instead of being able to set up a payment method and pay by the hour (or whatever), you had to buy "entitlement packs" at $X per license and apply those to your account, sort of like the boxware model but awkwardly shoehorned into cloud billing. Woe betide you if your "microsoft bucks" ran out in the middle of an extended compute run!
All these were for comparatively simple and straightforward uses of their infra (i.e. pretty much just compute and block storage, no fancy database or machinelearningAIwhizbang-as-a-service stuff). I can't imagine the more complex features were better off if the foundations were so haphazardly implemented.
Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst.
Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).
In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:
* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.
* They don't have as many features as AWS.
* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)
* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)
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FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)
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Digression;
I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;
No it is not! Azure is not even in the same ballpark. APIs fail randomly, instances take a random amount of time to come up(sometimes similar to AWS, sometimes double digits) services are poorly integrated, lots of weird constraints and surprising behavior(their load balancers are nonsensical), lack of AZs (and support for them) in many regions, etc.
Can you make your stuff work on Azure? Sure you can. Is that a good experience? No way.
This is probably what people are referring to. The underlying tech may not be horrible, but the user experience is.
First of all, I'd want to acknowledge that Google is behind AWS as well. One big technical reason is IAM. Few realize just how important AWS IAM is as a service federation infrastructure. If you look at the details, Google's IAM product is inferior.
Now, on to Azure. Three years ago I was involved with a high stakes effort to port an AWS-grown platform service architecture onto Azure. At the time, they had massive gaps in their understanding of what IaaS meant. Here are some concrete examples:
* They did not really understand what object storage was. Blob storage was not possible to use at scale due to trivially low bandwidth, storage, and API limits
* Software-defined networking was not available between availability zones
* Software-defined networking could not be used to launch mixes of instance types
* Software-defined Internet gateways were not available except in a config that resembled "AWS Classic" networking
* On-demand instances were effectively unavailable beyond one or two instances at a time (at least for the instance types we wanted). You had to reserve instance capacity in advance, by going through a support ticket
* Creating and using custom machine images was undocumented in the API
* Instance metadata APIs were not available
* On-demand instance launches would encounter weird behaviors, where upon hitting certain limits entire groups of instances would be terminated
* Many aspects of APIs for the above were undocumented and unsupported
Combined, these problems made deployment on Azure extremely difficult. I have prefaced this with the caveat that Microsoft has improved since then. Many of the problems above are no longer issues, I'm sure. But what I found was a gaping chasm between what Microsoft claimed and what was really possible on the ground. What I found since then is that Google and Microsoft are making an earnest effort to catch up, and that's good for us consumers, but Microsoft (and to some extent Google) often don't even understand the full feature set of what they are trying to catch up with.
Obviously, my experience is rather shallow here and wouldn't dare go into too deep discussions on that. And the shoving part can easily be avoided with some extra elbow grease.
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Provisioning instances take quite a long time. The response I received from a product manager was, "how long should it take?"
Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners.
Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.
Google has done an excellent job with their Cloud documentation, including many useful howto sections. When we raise issues with them, they are quick to update the documentation with "gotchas" so there isn't tribal knowledge about this floating around in every company.
> These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.”
You don't even have to host your own ad servers! They just appear on your website like magic!
MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.
Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.
Pretty sure Google does this too to a lesser extent with including G-Suite in their 'Google Cloud' revenue.