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Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business
- sinatra 11y agoDiane was 43 when she founded VMware, and 56(?) when she started Bebop. That's encouraging. Does anybody have details about her background in the years 1978 to 1998?
- npalli 11y agohttp://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/11/computing http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/11/computing > What is known about her life is that she grew up in Annapolis, on the coast of Maryland, in a house on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Her father was an engineer and her mother a teacher. It was on the north-eastern seaboard that she developed a passion for water sports, especially sailing and later windsurfing. She helped to organise the first windsurfing world championship in 1974 and two years later won the women's national double-handed dinghy championship. > Her love of the sea influenced her choice of college education after she studied mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. She moved to MIT to study naval architecture before a brief spell working for an oil consultancy based in San Francisco. She left that job relatively quickly to go to Hawaii to design windsurfing equipment, but returned to the US a few years later to study computer science at Berkeley. She worked for a succession of Silicon Valley stalwarts: Sybase, Silicon Graphics and Tandem. But her first big break came with the founding of her own media streaming business, VXtreme, in the early days of the dotcom boom. It was sold for a rumoured $75m in 1997.
- Someone1234 11y agoShe needs to write a book. Interesting life...
- zck 11y agoShe gave a talk at Startup School 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c
- simonswords82 11y agoShe did indeed, I was there and she was not only intelligent and knowledgeable but probably the most endearing speaker on the day.
- univalent 11y agoAn easy area of improvement is documentation, samples etc. They are seriously lagging behind AWS and Azure. Becomes hard to choose Google because the cost of learning is higher.
- x0x0 11y agoI dunno, I've found aws documentation to be atrocious. For example, I've had a very hard time figuring out how to do things like reattaching ebs volumes to ec2 spot instances. Maybe it's because I don't use aws much, but I get frustrated and have a hard time understanding how simple tasks need to be so complex. I wonder how effective the Microsoft style API lockin strategy will be for aws. My personal guess is very effective.
- nulltype 11y agoYeah, AWS docs are really not very good in my limited experience. Google's docs have some pretty good parts, but they can be hard to find. Authentication is still kind of confusing on GCP.
- vonklaus 11y agoI second this. I like digital ocean a lot for the simplicity and the community. Obviously, it takes a much more bare bones approach, but being greeted with 50 icons on your dashboard, each of them a proprietary product and cost/second pricing services makes it super hard to figure out what you even are paying, much less receiving.
- univalent 11y agoYes, it isn't perfect but they have more samples for every language, tutorials etc. They also have quite a few training videos etc. online.
- obulpathi 11y agoRelational Databases is one key area where Google Cloud can improve. Adding support for the most used databases (Maria, Postgres and may be Google own version of SQL-like AWS Aurora to support large data stores) and easing the migration path for companies to move their databases into Cloud can ease a lot of customer pain. This can accelerate the migration to Cloud much faster. It is very difficult for companies to move to Cloud and adopt NoSQL stores simultaneously.
- mikecb 11y agohttps://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/introduction https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/introduction
- obulpathi 11y agoI know. Compared to Amazon's offering of MySQL, MariaDb, Aurora, SQL Server and Oracle, Google MySQL offering looks not so good. It's hard to persuade everyone to migrate to MySQL. Everyone has their own reason to use different databases.
- mikecb 11y agoOh yeah, in terms of variety, totally true. I tend to just spin up a compute instance if I need any one of those though.
- devsquid 11y agoTheir managed SQL service doesn't support Postgresql and POSTGIS, its the only thing stopping me from move over to GCN.
- shawn-butler 11y agoTrust me, it won't be the only thing. It's just the first roadblock.
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- IBM 11y agoIn 5 years will AWS still have 25% operating margins?
- josephcooney 11y agoJeff Bezos' quote "Your margin is my opportunity" might come back to haunt their AWS Business.
- notatoad 11y agoI suspect yes. AWS seems to be pushing hard towards more managed application services (things like lambda) built on top of their core AWS services like EC2 and S3, and they can maintain their margin on those services even if competition drives down the prices on EC2.
- wstrange 11y agoThose services are incredibly proprietary to AWS. I really question why companies would want to tie themselves to a single cloud provider.
- yeukhon 11y agoBecause technology evolves too quickly to do cross-platform, cross-cloud solution and the demand for getting work done now is more demanding than ever. Tried to do it for two cloud platforms + on-premise, you will literally want to kill yourself for supporting your code three-way. Do it right once for one platform, and then next step. AWS isn't going away any time soon. But seriously, you don't just click buttons all day to spin up your infrastructure. Lock in with GCP is like lock in with AWS or herkuo, or App Engine, their APIs belongs to them, you built around kubernetes, and you lock yourself into their BigTable Query. Whatever your SRE/Infra/DevOps team are building now for your company's infrastructure automation is totally locked down for one kind of solution.
- wstrange 11y agoWhy not Kubernetes? It run's on all major cloud platforms, VM environments and bare metal. Supported by every major player except Amazon (for obvious reasons, why would they want to support something that makes it easy to migrate away from them?)
- nodesocket 11y agoGoogle compute has taken some awesome strides in the last year. I now prefer GCE over AWS, because of pricing (per minute) and simplicity. AWS quickly can get overwhelming and overly complex.
- slashink 11y agoPricing is fine. Tech support is a joke. I wish I could pay more for Google to actually offer good support. We tried GCE for a while but it just didn't cut it in terms of mean response time to questions. AWS really leads on support.
- boulos 11y agoWe do have paid support tiers (https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/) with explicit time-to-response targets. Which were you using? Disclaimer: I work on GCE.
- slashink 11y agoWell tbh we got answers but they usually were; nope not offered, cannot be fixed. 3 weeks later I met a Google engineer working with GCE at a party who fixed it for us the day after hearing about our issue, which means it probably was able to be fixed from the first time.
- nodesocket 11y agoDid Diane's bebop even launch? I can't find their website. It is kind of frustrating that everybody involved (employees, investors) in bebop are getting a payday, without really putting in much work, or verifying their ideas. Just leaves a sour taste in my mouth (old boys network) as a two-time failed entrepreneur.
- henridf 11y agoYou could look at this as a very high-end acquihire.
- x5n1 11y agoIt is who you know.
- exw 11y agoSeriously? You feel it is unfair that Google would talent acquire a company with a founder that revolutionized virtualization and dismiss this with an implication that she was acquired because she knew "the right people" (and you apparently don't) vs. being one of the most impressive people Google could hire to run their cloud business?
- eitally 11y agoAnd besides this, she's not even an unknown quantity herself. She's been on Google's board for 3 years! :)
- takinola 11y agoI understand how you feel but you should realize that this point of view is wrong-headed. Her, or anyone else's, success has zero impact on you so there is no justification to feel bad about their achievements being "undeserved". By the way, it is often really hard to see just how much other people put into their projects and so from the outside their success does not seem very justified (hence the phenomena of ten year overnight success). I find myself making this mistake as well, but it is useful to remind yourself that it is the wrong way to think.
- elizaway 11y agoyeah totally
- clock_tower 11y agoI'm glad to hear that "the cloud" is becoming less likely to mean "the Amazon cloud". Monocultures are dangerous, and I doubt that any monoculture is quite as dangerous -- or at least as unexpected -- as a monoculture for providing distribution and resilience.
- pinkunicorn 11y agoI don't understand why the reporters hold Google in such high regard, particularly in the cloud business. Here is a statement from the article: > "At the same time, analysts say, the company’s offerings in cloud development services — computing, storage, data analytics and others — are already comparable to Amazon’s." AWS is far far ahead of GC and it is in no way comparable. Plus the ecosystem around AWS has evolved and is much more stable. There are a lot of articles explaining "how to fix X or how to do Y" with AWS than with GC. I also don't think Google will ever have the level of customer obsession that Amazon has. Your account got hacked? No worries, AWS will waive the fee, but I honestly don't think Google will ever do that. Google is a technology company and might outrun Amazon in terms of technical superiority, but I don't think they can simply outrun Amazon in cloud business.
- nulltype 11y agoIn the ones they mentioned, GCE vs EC2, GCS vs S3, and BigQuery vs Redshift, they seem pretty comparable to me.
- pinkunicorn 11y agoBut what about ECS? Lambda? Role Based Authentication? EBS snapshots?
- boulos 11y agoGKE is miles ahead of ECS, and being based on Kubernetes is huge. We don't really have an equivalent to Lambda (yet?) but classic App Engine isn't actually too far off 'technology-wise' (pay per use, containerized, instant start). Our lack of IAM is beyond painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it. PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"!
- nulltype 11y agoAlso I've found the network load balancer to be amazingly better than ELBs.
- jzelinskie 11y agoMoving to GCE would be great, if they offered to eat the cost of moving all my data off S3 ;)
- boulos 11y agoHow much data? 10 TB will "only" cost $900. Alternatively there's the "ship us hard drives" option. Failing that, if you're at a crazy scale, we did announce a switch-and-save program as part of Nearline (https://cloud.google.com/storage-nearline/ https://cloud.google.com/storage-nearline/). Depending on how much you're storing, the one time hit to move may make sense given our ~25% lower cost per byte (and as you mention way better GCE pricing).
- jzelinskie 11y agoHow'd you arrive at that number? To my understanding, you get hit up twice -- paying for data leaving S3 and data entering GCS. The other thing to keep in mind is that if lots of your customers are also using AWS, their S3 traffic from you is free.
- boulos 11y agoNo, you only pay for egress (outbound traffic) not ingress. You pay for operations (GETS and PUTS) on each side but the total costs are going to be dominated by the egress. In addition to free egress within GCP regions, we also recently announced reduced egress pricing for major CDN partners: https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect . So how much data do you store and serve? ;)