Googler here. My opinions are my own; I have no non-public knowledge on this topic.
I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.
> said people with knowledge of the matter.
As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.
> The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.
So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.
You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.
And finally:
> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."
There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
> So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use.
Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google.
Amazon doesn't drop products.
Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map.
Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
This is the entire problem. Swap “Google” for “AWS” in the article and you’d have legions of folks calling foul on the article. Instead, most folks are nodding along to the article going “yep, seems like something Google would do all right…”
Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
Funny thing about plus, reader and wave: that was the kind of stuff that people who are now in positions to make infrastructure decisions got worked up about. It's the sort of image damage that may have seemed minor and acceptable at the time that can come back with a very large multiplier in the future, especially given the kind of prominence those products once had.
Googles reputation was pretty much the decisive factor when a couple of years ago we decided to move from Heroku to AWS instead of GCP. Besides a prettier web interface GCP didn't really had anything going for them in comparison for our use cases, so why take the chance of having a rug pulled even if that risk might be quite small.
Absolutely. I like GCP more than AWS or Azure, but I don't use it because I don't trust that individual services will be available long term. Meanwhile, AWS sends me emails about minor service changes that may affect me well over a year in advance. (MS has a reputation for long term support, but the Azure UI was just so terrible. Maybe they've changed it by now?)
Eh, I have to point out that AWS has many services that receive such scant updates that they are effectively dropped products.
There are a lot of things that AWS produces which never receive adequate polish or timely updates. I’ve been in betas for more than a few new offerings and was stunned at how incomplete and buggy these offerings were. More than a year later, they remain in a half usable state.
Google dumps things it’s not committed to making great. AWS maintains numerous things which are half usable, poorly documented, and incomplete. It all depends on the context, but in some ways I prefer drops to half-assed products.
> he problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet.
This is merely a symptom of the real problem Google has: a contempt for humans that aren't Googlers. Everything about Google - as a company and their products - speaks of an institutional contempt for the normies outside their walls: everything from the interview process through the complete inability to respond to criticism with anything other than a "you're holding it wrong".
Google's high-handed behaviour around "oh your account got locked, fuck you", or "we shuttered this thing that people depended on, fuck you" is a product of that contempt. You're a Googler or you're shit.
It's absurd to compare loss-making consumer products with a business that's the only shot for Google diversifying beyond ads and that has companies paying hundreds of millions of dollars over decade+ contracts. Urs says enterprises don't care about this aspect of the Google brand. What they do care about is Google's reputation for technical excellence and security.
It's also interesting that Google is willing to suffer an unprofitable product for many many years (YouTube) without being fickle and cutting it, yet other products aren't even given a fair shot before getting the axe.
I agree your sentiments here. The goal for Alphabet is to make Cloud platform business profitable not shutting it down. From this article it looks like it hasn't been so since 2014 after GOOG gave it full attention. And to be profitable, Alphabet execs thought it has to be within top 2 to be profitable, I am unsure if that's true, given the cloud business is still a slow and painful transition process for Fortune 1000 businesses(some more advanced than the others).
Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against.
Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.
Google has cool things in GCP, but I struggle to imagine them being _popular_, cool, things.
If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and shared hosting for application hosting because they eliminated the costs and burden of systems administration and hardware maintenance. If you’re a company that did move to AWS/Azure - provided you stuck to their commodity offerings (App Service, EC2, RDS, Azure SQL, etc) you can move back to your own hardware just fine. For other things like S3/Azure Storage which are hard to move in-house, at least it’s easy to separate that from the rest of your application.
But what does GCP have that is cool - but without associated costs of what is essentially vendor lock-in? Without a solid contract/guarantee from Google that some binary I wrote that uses a GCP-exclusive service _will_ be supported for a minimum of 2-5 years it’s hard for me to justify risking it.
Yes, it could have been Google's competitor making up these stories so enterprise customers would stop and think before switching, it is also better for competitors's sales to pitch on the potential of a shuttered GCP, which you can tell full well if I was a sales I would be referencing this article.
And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative.
Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
> Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
This. A thousand times this!
Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline.
Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ...
Google should hire Satya Nadella.
Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
It’s not Google’s competitor making this story if you look at previous blog and critical comments from last few years you can see, google has internally been struggling on how to get more profit out of Google’s users. Also google PR is launching active campaign to muzzle voice by downvoting critical comments and blogs. Happened yesterday to my comments on HN and might happen to this comment as well.
Google used search for additional revenue by first make advertisement appear as legitimate search results by using a non prominent and small font text “Ad” in front of ads. But these are on top of search result. So asking users and company to pay to be on top of search results.
Launching new service and then offering free to attract developers and users and if it failed to generate revenue shut them down. [1]
As google is faltering on revenue in cloud, they started using security as pretext to scare the users of gsuite [2] and take away the functionality and force them to toe the google line and soon there will be change in charges and conditions.
Also shut down of gcp is a legitimate concern, google doesn’t care about users, they offer free to gain traction and if can not generate revenue shut down the service without regard for users.
> Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.
No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.
> Google's well documented and long history of killing products
How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.
The problem is that Google has a credibility problem wrt supporting their products over long periods of time. Even if this particular report is wrong, it's still "true" in that sense.
For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?
If they'd even make some sub-brand explicitly for "shit we're serious about and promise we'll continue to invest in for a really long time"—and then actually stick by that—it'd go a long way. I think it's having no reliable indicator of their level of seriousness or commitment to a given product or service that's the main source of irritation for people. It's all just "Google" and who knows what the hell that means, this time.
Google could fix this credibility problem in a single step by simply saying "We won't materially change documented functionality of services A, B, or C in the next 5 years. Upon breach of this promise, we will pay any affected user $10M".
If they did that, I'd trust them. If they breached my trust, I'd get a cool $10M. They wouldn't shutdown the service because of the extreme financial disincentive to do so.
I semi-seriously wonder if they just brought back Google Reader and seriously supported it how much goodwill they'd regain. Not that they haven't killed hundreds of other products, but that one just sticks out so much.
Given Google's track record of killing products people depend on, I can imagine the hesitation managers feel when they consider moving mission critical applications to Google.
Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.
I will believe Google is serious about supporting GCP when they decide the job of interacting with their customers and partners is worthy of being labeled a 'Googler'.
Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.
Google has a graveyard full of products that have been shuttered. Imagine the risk in the decision - Do I bet my entire organization’s IT infrastructure on a product line that Google may just decide to disappear? It’s a trust issue. Trust is earned over time. I personally hope GCP stays and grows.
I think that what you’re seeing here on HN is a big problem that Google has — they’ve eroded the trust that they once had.
Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.
Betting on Google’s offering is like betting your business on Bing. It might work but it’s an also-ran. And that’s before this leak. Time for leadership to clarify hard, ASAP.
Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand.
Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.
>So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
Instead of spending time posting stuffs here, could your Googlers get back to your work to improve GCP's quality? Poor availability, of no help customer support, and slow fix of any problems is killing GCP.
> You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.
No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.
In regards of profitable, I hope you also consider internal cloud computing usage as it were used by an external party.
E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.
the problem is the timeframe. the decision is a sound one - at some point google has to cut its loses. but not in 3 years -- thats too early. if you want to be in the cloud business, you have to commit to trying to make a run for it for at least 5-7 years. it will take that long for the business to build
The article goes into more detail that it was a 5 year plan. Their source told them about meetings that took place in 2018 and they agreed on funding until 2023.
The article does say that there was a discussion about "exiting the business"; that's sufficiently terrible to be news, even without anyone explicitly talking about shutting it down.
I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.
Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG. They’ll have to keep it running to prevent people leaving because of the leak so they’ll do something drastic like pledge 10 years of support or something.
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
It always seems to me Google won the Search Engine battle, ads became their revenue source, and that is it. Android came out of necessity and stupidity of Microsoft at the time.
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
> Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG.
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
Agreed, this is a disaster. A lot of leaks simply don't matter all that much-- Apple might get annoyed at iPhone leaks, but they probably don't affect sales one bit-- but this is dead serious.
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
By this strategy, which disregard customer confidence completely, considering that Stadia isn't exactly well received, I seriously doubt I will put my money on it getting anywhere.
"That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information."
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
CTOs and CEOs who matter do not give shit about these sort of leaks. Google cloud is unlikely going anywhere because it is the same thing on which Google runs. Unless Google itself is shutting down the marginal cost of providing GCP to the rest of the world is less (still in billions though).
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
I want to put on end to the "you can't contact Google" comments that comes up every time Google Cloud makes the front page.
You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.
We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).
Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.
The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.
If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.
I’ve had a similar experience where I could email PMs and we even had Google forward deployed engineers on-site.
The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.
We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen.
The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.
Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.
If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
Cloud Dataflow is also vastly more expensive than using pyspark and Apache Beam is 10 times slower for most operations than Flink or Spark. I have to try the new flexible scheduling but DataFlow the last time I tried it 2 years ago was a massive rip off.
Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a < 1TB dataset cleaning costs $25...
Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But lately Ive been trying to figure out a semi-managed way of doing exactly-once stream processing for cheaper than dataflow. Possibly an architecture around cloud run might work.
I had a 4 roundtrip email thread with their support over a speech API bug. Eventually sent them a narrated step-by-step screencast, and the guy is finally like "oh, it's not supposed to work that way." (Yes, that's what I said in e-mail 1!)
In one corner, I have the good experience of you, a semi-anonymous internet commentor.
In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.
I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
You're mostly likely getting lucky. We've gone through their highest tier startup program and have had so many account reps assigned that most aren't even with the company anymore. The ones that are don't reply to emails either.
GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
With Slack, anyone in the organization can file a ticket and get a human to respond in a few hours. If something isn’t great about Google Sheets (or of their cloud offerings), I have no idea how to submit and issue that will get attention of someone at google. They lose big time for this stance.
I don’t know if you still can but it used to be that with Microsoft premier support if you passed some specific exams you could bypass the first tier (who were excellent engineers) and go straight to escalation/ cpr engineers
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
This deadline should never have been set in the first place. They should have attached a massive bonus if they exceeded the target by that date instead. Of course, the CEO could have in their head the deadline, but that's be announced internally at earliest 6 months ahead of time.
> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
"The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. "
Since at least as of this writing, nobody else has mentioned this, and it's always someone's day [1] to hear something the first time, this is a variant of something that goes very far back in our industry called the Osbourne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.
Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.
So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.
(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)
People with real knowledge to the matter knows that GCP is growing, and more companies are adopting GCP every month.
This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.
Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure.
Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.
What and where is the story?
GCP produce new products and features every week [1]
At my company, we use all major 3 clouds.
The GCP support is super fast.
The GCP price is better than other two.
Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise.
By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.
Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.
There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?
> The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
>When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
They put the guy that ran ORACLE'S CLOUD STRATEGY in charge of GCP.
ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.
Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with 'total failure'?
Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.
Are we talking about the same Oracle Fusion that powers most of the world's corporation's accounting backends today (including Netsuite, which Oracle acquired several years ago)?
Because if so, he did a pretty good job of achieving his objective: establishing market dominance in the face of superior competing products.
Hiring Kurian is a message to investors that Google is serious[1] about trying to take over the cloud platform space, through any means necessary.
[1] At this moment, at least. Given Google's history, their actual commitment to their cloud platform remains to be seen.
I think the logic was a recognition of how badly Google sucks in enterprise. Therefore the goal was to hire someone who embodied "enterprise" albeit in all aspects.
It would be better to phase how badly Google sucks at doing business. From SME to Enterprise.
And that is not a surprise since Google's culture is to get rid of the human / customers interaction and wants to automate everything. But in real world all business are conducted by person.
To be fair, my understanding is that Oracle basically went in the opposite direction that Kurian wanted to go on cloud strategy. With that said, yeah, nobody's thinking outside the box when hiring an executive from Oracle.
Oracle Cloud in the last year has been completely changing and restructuring their Cloud and the actual organizational structure of their Oracle Cloud team to match AWS. They even started calling it Oracle Cloud 2.0
Didn't know this, pretty crazy hire... what's the reasoning behind that. Maybe they were desperate as the vmware founder wanted to retire and they needed to fill in the seat quickly?
Judging a decision based on its outcome is a very good way to get articles into the Harvard Business Review, and a very poor way to evaluate a decision.
AWS is unassailable as number one, but Azure is more fragile than they might appear in their #2 position. They use their Office online revenue to boost their numbers (EDIT: apparently they don't do that anymore), and their utilization is probably lower than the competition because they rely heavily on bundling new cloud services into legacy contracts at renewal to reach their targets. So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using, but count against their revenue number anyway.
On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.
What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.
I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
> So lots of Office / Outlook / AD / Windows Server customers are getting hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars worth of Azure that they’re not using
Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.
I'd disagree. Microsoft has an EA with every significant corporate entity, and basically taxes everyone. They have the ability to leverage those relationships unlike any other.
Leveraged relationships Oracle has, and look how that turned out for them. Universally hated have they became.
Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.
While AWS has a strong #1 offering in low-hanging fruit products like vms, dbs. I find they have terrible MVP-like execution on niche offerings (and support sucks too) for things like Fargate, K8s, one-off job execution. Azure has a stronger, more thoughtful offering in niche solutions.
This is partially because the customers of AWS do not care too much about these solutions. I have seen other solutions used by large customers (still probably classified as a niche) getting improved over time significantly. Fargate and k8s offers very little over a well designed EC2 cluster. This might be another reason.
I'd beg to differ.
Between Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway and now EventBridge, which cost basically nothing at MVP scale and all of which's usage is drastically simplified by tools like the Serverless framework or Amplify, AWS is my go-to for anything MVP
I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.
I think you're completely wrong. Azure is in the prime position and AWS is on fragile ground. Yes, they have a service for everything, but they've alienated their partners, they aren't viable in an entire industry (Retail), and a significant fraction of their IP is based around creating managed services out of OSS software.
My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT.
Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.
I recently did some consulting work with a trucking company who is modernizing their mainframe systems and moving to the cloud. They made the decision to cancel all their AWS migration plans and go 100% into Azure due to Amazon moving into logistics and basically becoming a competitor.
I don't think it's dreadful (but maybe no. 3) and I think Microsoft are the best out of the 3 at Enterprise sales. Google prob the worst of the 3 in that regard (and no. 1 with stack).
I've been quite pleased with the Azure stack myself. There is the issue of figuring out what the marketing team named the damned thing you are looking for, but I had the same problem with AWS.
I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
not exclusive to azure as aws lambda requires API gateway now, but if i wanted to create a cloud function, azure auto generates like 2-3 other separate requires services for storage, http endpoint, etc
I think the Azure stack is very solid - UI sucks maybe, but it's best not to use UI anyway.
Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run.
Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.
The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes.
You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there's no backup even in this minimalistic sense.
There is no "backup" for anything but a handful of object types (Web Apps, VM disks, Secret Vaults, and that's about it). If you want to protect your data, you'd better have an on-premise copy and 100% automated deployment capability.
Speaking of automated deployment capability, 99.9% of the Azure docs mention manual deployment or procedural (PowerShell) deployment. Declarative is clearly an afterthought, and mentioned only in passing. Because of this, ~95% of Azure deployments I've seen in the wild were entirely hand built and very fragile. If some malicious admin ran Remove-AzResource on everything, those orgs may as well declare bankruptcy the next day.
Despite this fragility, Azure sales reps are pushing-pushing-pushing for their customers to go "all in" on cloud, be "cloud first", and to basically "lift and shift" their data centres. You gotta break a few eggs to meet your quarterly targets, am I right? Right? Guys?
Speaking of the PowerShell, it's 99% auto-generated from the JSON API binding definitions, and about 5% of it is documented even in the bare minimum sense.
IPv6 "support" is hilarious. They very generously provide a /124 static public subnet prefix. So many addresses! A whole 14 of them! Woo! It's the future now! No need for NAT! A routable address for every endpoint! Let me get right on that, soon as I figure out the fiddly scripting needed to allocate addresses from hundreds of tiny pools. Much fun.
If you delete a DNS Zone by accident, you can't properly recover it within 48 hours because they randomly pick one of 10 name server pools. Hence, your NS bindings at the registrar will point at the wrong servers and even if you update this, there's an inevitable propagation delay. I am aware of workarounds for this like Resource Group Pinning, but only because we jumped up and down and forced support to admit that it's a problem. This little "surprise" is still undocumented.
Speaking of DNS, until we forced Microsoft to fix it, the only way to back up Azure DNS records (az network dns zone export) would corrupt CNAMES and wouldn't round-trip.
Azure DNS uses an idiotic Zone->RecordSet->Record hierarchical structure, which makes small incremental changes hugely fiddly in scripting. You have to download the existing RecordSet, modify it, and then send it back with ETags intact. You can't treat each record as independent rows in a table, even though they effectively are.
The Azure DNS servers don't send "Additional" records (e.g.: the matching A records for the target of a CNAME record), which means that a) it's slower for clients, and b) they can charge you more. They have zero incentive to fix this, because it literally doubles their revenue for alias records of all types.
DNS Metrics are collected every 2 hours, but the graph displays only daily or hourly intervals, so you either get no detail at all, or a sawtooth graph that gives you no useful feedback at all at best, or is panic inducing at worst. Imagine making a small change, glancing at the graph, and seeing it hit zero. Then... staying at zero for an hour. A joyous time, for sure.
I could go on and on.
Azure has some neat stuff, but they're moving fast and breaking things, and half their products are basically MVP garbage authored by the lowest-bidding Indian outsourced teams.
My guess is that if Microsoft is able to hold onto the JEDI contract (after Amazon's lawsuit/appeal), Azure is going to be much more unassailable than you think. As it's a huge in to being the de facto US government cloud provider.
Readit News
I do not understand the hyperbole around this report. Nowhere does it say that Google plans to shutter GCP if it doesn't reach #1 by 2023.
> said people with knowledge of the matter.
As in, people who may not have even been at said meeting which took place nearly two years ago, under a different VP and now a different CEO, and saw some meeting notes.
> The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market.
So it's not about being #1, it's about being profitable.
In other words, this was a conversation about literally every product at an executive level ever.
You set goals, you decide what happens when those goals are met. Furthermore, there is no concrete assertion here that what happens if this deadline is passed. "at risk of losing funding" can literally mean anything from changing FTE allocation to capital expenses to a million other things that get discussed at an executive level.
And finally:
> A Google spokesperson declined to comment prior to the publication of this story, but after it appeared released the following statement: "Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate."
There may be some truth to these accounts--reality is often between the lines--but this is extremely soft on details and actual first person accounts.
The problem Google has with the developer community is largely around the fact that Google has a long history of pulling the rug out from our feet. There have been 3 stories on HN in the past couple weeks alone about Google products which have either been dropped or changed significantly such that they are no longer viable for developers to use.
Google has lost a lot of trust in the community and if Google management wants to avoid this kind of reaction, they need to build a reputation for stability. Years of dropping products people rely has eroded much of the good will people used to have for Google.
Amazon doesn't drop products. Microsoft has spent decades building a reputation for having a long term reliable product road-map.
Google is fickle and doesn't seem to care when they screw people over by changing terms underneath us. As the old saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Google’s problem remains its reputation for turning things off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835
Google could potentially win by being the least bad not the best.
There are a lot of things that AWS produces which never receive adequate polish or timely updates. I’ve been in betas for more than a few new offerings and was stunned at how incomplete and buggy these offerings were. More than a year later, they remain in a half usable state.
Google dumps things it’s not committed to making great. AWS maintains numerous things which are half usable, poorly documented, and incomplete. It all depends on the context, but in some ways I prefer drops to half-assed products.
This is merely a symptom of the real problem Google has: a contempt for humans that aren't Googlers. Everything about Google - as a company and their products - speaks of an institutional contempt for the normies outside their walls: everything from the interview process through the complete inability to respond to criticism with anything other than a "you're holding it wrong".
Google's high-handed behaviour around "oh your account got locked, fuck you", or "we shuttered this thing that people depended on, fuck you" is a product of that contempt. You're a Googler or you're shit.
Been using AWS for 8+ years since their first inception of S3, then 6 years of GCP. This year I had first hand experience with Azure. I just happen to think GCP has the most cutting edge cloud native technologies and services (GKE is much better than EKS or AKS, IMO; BigQuery is awesome). But AWS has a first mover's advantage and MSFT has the dominant enterprise customer base so pushing additional add-on sales is much easier. Those are GCP are up against.
Perhaps the market is big enough to accommodate top 3 players to be profitable. And GCP needs to do a better job in support their product & services not discontinuing them abruptly.
If your product or project is big enough to require the scaling and capacity that GCP offers then you’re also probably big enough to be risk-averse about predicating your product’s viability on a platform you don’t control. The way I see AWS and Azure’s success: they replaced server colocation, dedicated server rentals and shared hosting for application hosting because they eliminated the costs and burden of systems administration and hardware maintenance. If you’re a company that did move to AWS/Azure - provided you stuck to their commodity offerings (App Service, EC2, RDS, Azure SQL, etc) you can move back to your own hardware just fine. For other things like S3/Azure Storage which are hard to move in-house, at least it’s easy to separate that from the rest of your application.
But what does GCP have that is cool - but without associated costs of what is essentially vendor lock-in? Without a solid contract/guarantee from Google that some binary I wrote that uses a GCP-exclusive service _will_ be supported for a minimum of 2-5 years it’s hard for me to justify risking it.
And it wouldn't matter of there wasn't even an ounce of truth there, Google's reputation on future roadmap, communication, marketing and product dropping has always been on the negative.
Google needs to work hard to earn customer's trust. That is the basic fundamental of doing business. Microsoft is still working their asses off because of what they have done during IE era.
This. A thousand times this!
Once hero of the 2000's, Google is turning into the villain; meanwhile Microsoft has embarked on their redemption storyline.
Microsoft is a fantastic developer-centric company that has made their platform attractive to even Linux users. Google shuts down all the things you use, prices small shops out of freaking Google Maps, won't pick up the phone, ...
Google should hire Satya Nadella.
Doesn't Google understand that we should love them? That we should think they're a cool company? They've strayed so far from that. They might as well be Oracle.
Google used search for additional revenue by first make advertisement appear as legitimate search results by using a non prominent and small font text “Ad” in front of ads. But these are on top of search result. So asking users and company to pay to be on top of search results.
Launching new service and then offering free to attract developers and users and if it failed to generate revenue shut them down. [1]
As google is faltering on revenue in cloud, they started using security as pretext to scare the users of gsuite [2] and take away the functionality and force them to toe the google line and soon there will be change in charges and conditions.
Also shut down of gcp is a legitimate concern, google doesn’t care about users, they offer free to gain traction and if can not generate revenue shut down the service without regard for users.
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806595
No, but it also doesn't say they're in for the long haul in case they don't end up on top and with Google's well documented and long history of killing products you really can't fault people for wondering if it is wise to build on top of GCP no matter what the advantages.
How long will this tired meme continue to have legs for? Sheesh. Google is not going to shutter GCP right after spending billions of dollars on datacenters and fiber cables. The fact that HN is even entertaining the concept is embarrassing and speaks volumes about fall in the quality of discussion.
For potential users, why should we take the risk when there are other competitors that don't have this problem?
If they did that, I'd trust them. If they breached my trust, I'd get a cool $10M. They wouldn't shutdown the service because of the extreme financial disincentive to do so.
Risking losing funding if they don't surpass AWS or Azure is a scary thought. It's a shame because GCP is very good from what I've read.
Since it seems the majority of support and service at Google Cloud is made up of TVCs, with 2 year 'life spans', it seems Google is just hedging their bet, no need to bring people on permanently if you're going to downsize in 2-3 years. In fact, is it entirely coincidental that the goal is to be #1 in roughly the same timeframe as the TVCs are allowed to work? Seems like the same sort of lack of commitment to GCP that Google place in their workers.
Deleted Comment
Perception matters. When you see the lack of trust Google has vs Amazon and Microsoft, you know you have a problem — both companies have track records of less than trustworthy actions.
Infrastructure should be built on rock, not sand. Google has sold too much sand.
Businesses need to focus on their next battle not finding a replacement API, web toolkit or cloud.
Stop, do you mean that despite cutting the corners with technical support and having a weaker offering than the competition, GCP is not freakin' profitable?
Dead Comment
No customer is going to sink risk into a statement like that. Everyone wants to know that the investment increases and only increases.
E.g. if stuff like AlphaGo, Youtube, or the Search Engine used tons of cloud computing resources you should not count it as no profit made (actually loss because of power consumption, server housing, networking, ...), regardless if those cloud resources were anyways unused. Then it's up to your colleagues then to make the profit.
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
Totally gonna believe them
Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
Think how good your rates might be for the last six months of 2022!
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
You can't plant a leak, if it's planted by a 3rd party it's either a lie it's or a leak.
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.
We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).
Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.
The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.
If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.
The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.
We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen.
The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.
Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.
If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a < 1TB dataset cleaning costs $25...
Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But lately Ive been trying to figure out a semi-managed way of doing exactly-once stream processing for cheaper than dataflow. Possibly an architecture around cloud run might work.
In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.
I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?
Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?
I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not.
Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest.
This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me a whole lot of headache.
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly let you to that conclusion?
1) The article.
> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.
Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.
So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.
(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)
[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
They're at war with a subset of the staff over unionizing. And they have a "culture of openness" around internal information.
This is an attempt (which according to some of the comments here quite succeed) to create a story where there is no story.
Should Google Cloud aim to be better and bigger? Sure. Should Google / Alphabet execs need to discuss challenges and strategy? Sure.
What and where is the story?
GCP produce new products and features every week [1]
At my company, we use all major 3 clouds. The GCP support is super fast. The GCP price is better than other two.
Google indeed has a learning curve as a company, and that is at the area of selling to the enterprise. By its DNA, Google is an engineering company, and it takes years to understand how to "attack" the market, build teams of sales, marketing, and all the supporting infrastructure, and they do it.
Time will tell how successful they are, but I cannot see any option for them to shut down this great platform known as GCP. It simply make no sense.
There is a trend in the media in the recent months to rant about Google by all means and angles, and I tend to think this article is just one of those.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/
A rising tide lifts all boats. Are more companies adopting GCP because they are leaving Amazon/Azure? Or is it simply because the market is still immature and growing fast?
> The group [which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
It's sounds like shutting down GCP at some point is definitely a possibility.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
ORACLE'S. CLOUD. STRATEGY.
Let's hire Thomas Kurian, bang up job on Fusion and ... oh wait, what do you mean with 'total failure'?
Oracle bought Sun, it had the keys to be the third force against AWS and MSFT - and they totally blew it. Just an amazing fumble, worse than MSFT and smartphones.
Because if so, he did a pretty good job of achieving his objective: establishing market dominance in the face of superior competing products.
Hiring Kurian is a message to investors that Google is serious[1] about trying to take over the cloud platform space, through any means necessary.
[1] At this moment, at least. Given Google's history, their actual commitment to their cloud platform remains to be seen.
Note that Amazon declared itself Oracle-free this year, to big fanfare. SFDC is ripping out Oracle too - their single largest DB customer.
ORA is a dead man walking, just like IBM. Zombie momentum will keep them going for a looooong time.
Not sure how you come up with this. Is this backed with actual data?
And that is not a surprise since Google's culture is to get rid of the human / customers interaction and wants to automate everything. But in real world all business are conducted by person.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuri...
On top of that, Azure’s technology stack is dreadful. Definitely the worst of the three.
What Microsoft does have is focus and dedication, they are clearly willing to spend billions of dollars in capex to strengthen their lead.
I think if Google were to get serious about communicating focus and dedication to their cloud business (the opposite of what they’re doing now), they could conceivably catch up to Microsoft.
Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity. Have tons of unused Azure credits that were forced on you? We'll happily use them up and pay you back a fraction of that credit.
Azure is the one to beat, IMO.
Microsoft after a decade of Ballmer is not far from where Oracle is now, despite some recent positive reputation gains. They are already squeezing those relationship by bundling services, and it will be too far too quickly.
This is partially because the customers of AWS do not care too much about these solutions. I have seen other solutions used by large customers (still probably classified as a niche) getting improved over time significantly. Fargate and k8s offers very little over a well designed EC2 cluster. This might be another reason.
I tried Azure. I ran away. I liked GCP, but it seems I'll steer clear for the time being.
My projection is that -- if everything continues along the same trend line we've seen through 2019 -- in five years MS will comfortably be on top and Google Cloud will have rough parity with AWS, but be significantly far behind MSFT.
Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud but this opinion is my own.
Those are two very bold statements.
I think it’s also very unrealistic, but I guess we’ll see!
Can you describe what you are referring to here?
I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
I am focused primarily on .Net though, so your YMMV by a lot.
Also, Microsoft naturally is the to-go place if you want a partner to trust as an enterprise. They have proven to support systems and software in the long run.
Also, Pentagon just picked Azure over AWS - so Azure has a good run and bright future I'd say.
The resource template format is inhuman gibberish designed for machines. It does idiotic things like manually hard-coding enums in the template to support drop-downs. This means templates go "stale" very quickly and are super fiddly to update to support things like new VM sizes.
You cannot export resource groups bigger than a certain size, so if some idiot in your org makes them too big, there's no backup even in this minimalistic sense.
There is no "backup" for anything but a handful of object types (Web Apps, VM disks, Secret Vaults, and that's about it). If you want to protect your data, you'd better have an on-premise copy and 100% automated deployment capability.
Speaking of automated deployment capability, 99.9% of the Azure docs mention manual deployment or procedural (PowerShell) deployment. Declarative is clearly an afterthought, and mentioned only in passing. Because of this, ~95% of Azure deployments I've seen in the wild were entirely hand built and very fragile. If some malicious admin ran Remove-AzResource on everything, those orgs may as well declare bankruptcy the next day.
Despite this fragility, Azure sales reps are pushing-pushing-pushing for their customers to go "all in" on cloud, be "cloud first", and to basically "lift and shift" their data centres. You gotta break a few eggs to meet your quarterly targets, am I right? Right? Guys?
Speaking of the PowerShell, it's 99% auto-generated from the JSON API binding definitions, and about 5% of it is documented even in the bare minimum sense.
IPv6 "support" is hilarious. They very generously provide a /124 static public subnet prefix. So many addresses! A whole 14 of them! Woo! It's the future now! No need for NAT! A routable address for every endpoint! Let me get right on that, soon as I figure out the fiddly scripting needed to allocate addresses from hundreds of tiny pools. Much fun.
If you delete a DNS Zone by accident, you can't properly recover it within 48 hours because they randomly pick one of 10 name server pools. Hence, your NS bindings at the registrar will point at the wrong servers and even if you update this, there's an inevitable propagation delay. I am aware of workarounds for this like Resource Group Pinning, but only because we jumped up and down and forced support to admit that it's a problem. This little "surprise" is still undocumented.
Speaking of DNS, until we forced Microsoft to fix it, the only way to back up Azure DNS records (az network dns zone export) would corrupt CNAMES and wouldn't round-trip.
Azure DNS uses an idiotic Zone->RecordSet->Record hierarchical structure, which makes small incremental changes hugely fiddly in scripting. You have to download the existing RecordSet, modify it, and then send it back with ETags intact. You can't treat each record as independent rows in a table, even though they effectively are.
The Azure DNS servers don't send "Additional" records (e.g.: the matching A records for the target of a CNAME record), which means that a) it's slower for clients, and b) they can charge you more. They have zero incentive to fix this, because it literally doubles their revenue for alias records of all types.
DNS Metrics are collected every 2 hours, but the graph displays only daily or hourly intervals, so you either get no detail at all, or a sawtooth graph that gives you no useful feedback at all at best, or is panic inducing at worst. Imagine making a small change, glancing at the graph, and seeing it hit zero. Then... staying at zero for an hour. A joyous time, for sure.
I could go on and on.
Azure has some neat stuff, but they're moving fast and breaking things, and half their products are basically MVP garbage authored by the lowest-bidding Indian outsourced teams.