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Google nabs Apple as a cloud customer

471 points by ra7 11y ago

anacleto 11y ago
This should be read as: "In exchange for keeping Android crappy, Apple to reward Google on his Cloud efforts." (being downvoted? little sense of humor)
- halayli 11y ago
  Because of the # of trolls here, sometimes it's hard to differentiate between sarcasm and trolling.
  - anacleto 11y ago
    Huge difference bw trolling and sarcasm. As my old professor used to say "Sarcasm is a closed number class".
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
So, it will be nearly impossible to buy a phone in the United States that isn't designed to send your data to a Google datacenter?
- dchest 11y ago
  "Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure." (https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) Although your IP address and some other connection metadata will be known to Google.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    That's not too bad then. As long as the 'iCloud account', where Apple likes to store the keys, are never third party hosted.
  - WireWrap 11y ago
    Ever seen an analysis of the traffic and breakdown of the metadata you speak of? If an account or device or advertising or other unique ID is sent to Google, it could help Google to track the user's IP Address changes and locations.
markgavalda 11y ago
We are consolidating all of our cloud services at Google Cloud and couldn't be more happier. We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across ~6 2nd and 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer for us.
- kennethh 11y ago
  How did the change impact you? More control, lower cost?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- Artemis2 11y ago
  How is the reliability? I want to like GCP but I have never trusted their services in general.
  - hasch 11y ago
    I can't speak for the OP ... but from what I've seen, it's extremely good. consistent fast performance and their proprietary "live migration" really stands out. besides really good raw machine speed, the inter-networking is also far superior.
    - markgavalda 11y ago
      I can absolutely second that. It's far superior to anything we've seen so far!
- jacobwcarlson 11y ago
  > We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across ~6 2nd and 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer for us. All the of the success stories I've heard about Google Cloud are from companies using significant resources. Why hasn't Google gone after startups? Perhaps I'm missing something but a turnkey package of computing, analytics, and advertising seem like a no-brainer.
obulpathi 11y ago
This move will be a "GAME CHANGER" for the Cloud industry.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Why do you think so?
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    I can clearly Google Cloud winning the Cloud industry. It's only a matter of time and not a matter of if. Cases like this and Spotify, will make the shift happen sooner than rather.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I don't see any evidence in your assertion. There are quite a few very powerful players in this segment and I don't see anybody 'winning' to the point where they will exclude the others. Just a lot of secret sauce and attempts at locking in the customers. What you will see is a shift from dedicated hosting providers to cloud providers, which is one of the reason why almost every large dedicated hosting provider now has their own cloud offering. And that is born out by evidence, in fact, if Google 'won' the cloud battle and let's say Amazon would end up as a Google customer we'd all lose. I don't think that's even a remote possibility at this point.
      - eitally 11y ago
        Yes, Google will not "win" at the total expense of Amazon & Microsoft, but I would bet a good deal of money that they'll become the market leader within the next five years, and likely sooner. The rate at which Google has been open-sourcing things, too, will further expedite this, and the fact that they just joined OCP will give them better industry credibility on the data center / computing side.
        scholia 11y ago
Implicated 11y ago
This seems to be good for everyone but Amazon, can anyone offer some insight otherwise?
- mikecb 11y ago
  Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price. They have been quick to introduce products, but their technical infrastructure and abstractions thereof seem to lag Azure and GCP, and investment in those take a long time to pay off.
  - skeletonjelly 11y ago
    > Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price That sounds like it's good for consumers (of the cloud services)
    - amnesia 11y ago
      Whoever wins... we lose. But really, I'm glad that Google has stepped up with their cloud services (they will be revealing more awesome stuff at the GCP Next 2016). And looks like they have the best "cloud core": https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp
fidget 11y ago
My guess is that it's pretty much just BigQuery. No one else seems to be able to compete, and that's a big deal. The companies moving their analytics stacks to BQ and thus GCP probably make up the majority (in terms of revenue) of customers for GCP
- mikecb 11y ago
  Given how cheap bigquery is, there would have to be a lot more bq-only customers than customers that use other services. And given how seamlessly the different products work with each other, any beachhead product like bq will quickly garner more product usage.
- kodablah 11y ago
  I doubt it. Not only does Apple (maybe?) run one of the largest Cassandra clusters in the world, but surely they wouldn't leverage cloud provider features over open source alternatives for fear of vendor lock-in.
  - lern_too_spel 11y ago
    Cassandra and BigQuery are not at all comparable. BigQuery's open source competitors are Impala, Presto, and Drill.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
iqonik 11y ago
Side note, but I'm impressed the article didn't try and put a positive spin on it given Jeff Bezos' interest in Business Insider.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Would it even have gotten coverage in business insider if he had not had an interest in it?
rdl 11y ago
They've been a heavy Azure user too. Probably more than AWS. I'm glad there's now at least 2 and probably 3 competitors for public cloud infrastructure. So many things were at risk, including adoption of public cloud in general, when it was a sole source monopoly from Google (OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn, and VPSes aren't the same thing, nor was VMware ever really credible for public cloud) Neither GC nor Azure are as comprehensive as AWS, but together at least one of them is usually a viable alternative for any given deal.
- redwood 11y ago
  Yea big news. We all benefit from competition here
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn What's wrong with Openstack/Rackspace?
  - paulryanrogers 11y ago
    Feature creep if I recall correctly. Though Openshift is an interesting implementation.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Google has some really interesting features, closer to docker, so some better mobility options from private/vps to google, and back. They seem to have some of the best compute options out there, and tend to perform above the others in a lot of ways. Azure's services are imho a bit easier to use, at least from my limited experience, mostly vm's, queues, tables and hosted sql. AWS has so many options and services it's hard to keep some of them straight... Lambda is really interesting imho, and some of their options for data storage are compelling to say the least. Joyent's Triton/Docker option is really interesting, but their pricing model just seems too much for what they're offering. I do hope that they have success in terms of selling/setting up private clouds though... there's a lot of big companies that would be much better off with their solutions.
imperialdrive 11y ago
I so sick of EC2 rogue 'underlying hardware issues' and EBS volumes dropping dead... AWS Console status will say everything is 'Okay' even when there are major problems - it's a joke... I wonder to myself, is it because I recently migrated (December 15) over and they are starting to buckle? Really a bad experience. At this rate I'll be looking at Google next month, or going back to Colo (25 servers, 100TB) so not much, but still worth doing right.
- soccerdave 11y ago
  I've had ~25-30 instances running for the past 3 years and only had 1 or 2 instances have hardware issues, never had issues with EBS. Running on us-west-2 but it seems like more issues happen in us-east-1.
  - imperialdrive 11y ago
    I'm on Virginia zone D... the other day a 15TB EBS went down, even with status as good. Their explanation, which took a lot of time/energy to get, was that the 2nd replicated copy had a failure, and when rebuilding from the 1st good replicated copy (primary) it suffered an unknown error taking down that copy as well... I was upset to say the least.
  - mmmBacon 11y ago
    1 or 2 failures out of 30 is a really high failure rate for HW.
    - ac29 11y ago
      I challenge you to build enterprise grade hardware, run it hard and have a hardware failure rate of ~1% a year.
      - mmmBacon 11y ago
        Challenge accepted. Been building carrier grade equipment with significantly lower failure rates than that for >15 years. Gear I designed in my first year out of grad school is still in field use today.
phoboslab 11y ago
Can someone explain to me why traffic is still so damn expensive with every cloud provider? A while back we managed a site that would serve ~700 TB/mo and paid about $2,000 for the servers in total (SQL, Web servers and caches, including traffic). At Google's $0.08/GB pricing we would've ended up with a whooping $56,000 for the traffic alone. How's that justifiable?
- saganus 11y ago
  Wow, ~700 TB/mo? That does sound like a lot. What kind of site would serve that volume of traffic and not have 56k for operating expenses? I mean, I can think of a few examples like Wikipedia maybe, since they are non-commercial and such, but for a commercial business? Maybe 4chan moves that much without a lot of revenue I would think, or maybe... imgur? but not really sure, I mean, it would seem like they could get that amount easily via ads alone. What was the use case here? Also, I think that 56k for traffic alone kind of depends on context. I mean, how much does Netflix pay for serving their volume of traffic? What I'm saying is, isn't 700 TB a month something that would probably be very expensive no matter the context? Just storing 700TB would cost a lot, no? I'm really curious about your use case here.
  - virtuallynathan 11y ago
    700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo. Netflix's total cost is probably below $0.25/Mbps. $56,000/mo would get you over 100Gbps of committed capacity from any major provider (or a mix).
    - pyre 11y ago
      > 700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo Is that a fixed-cost sustained pipe though? I was under the impression that (at least at the backbone level) those contracts got more costly the closer to full that your pipe was.
      - virtuallynathan 11y ago
karlshea 11y ago
I'd be super interested to know what their backend looks like (at least the new stuff, not WebObjects), I wish they were as open as Facebook with regard to tech. Unfortunately that's probably a wish that will forever be unfulfilled.
- mikecb 11y ago
  Depends on what you mean by backend, but they do publish a lot of papers and give a lot of conference presentations.
- ajessup 11y ago
  Announced today - https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-GCP-networking.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-s...
  - karlshea 11y ago
    Sorry, I guess I wasn't super clear. I meant Apple's backend.
mahyarm 11y ago
If you run little snitch on your mac and have your photos sync with apple, you'd notice the photos agent going to google for quite a while now. Maybe it was a trial? I say this is why icloud is about 2x the price of other cloud providers, because they don't run it themselves and want a profit margin.
- Polyphonie 11y ago
  iCloud Drive pricing is equal to that of Google Drive: $3.99 for 200GB (Google doesn't offer 200 but 100GB at $1.99). At 1TB, both iCloud and Google prices are $9.99.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Last I remembered it was $20/month for 1TB. OneDrive is $7/mo/1TB and Amazon is $5/month equivalent.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
So it makes sense for Dropbox to build it's own infra but it doesn't for Apple. Also wondering why Apple isn't hosting exclusively with IBM, they seem to have the best geographical coverage.
- sjwright 11y ago
  Apple does operate its own infrastructure. It has numerous, exceptionally large data centers in the USA, Europe and China. Most notable is the $1 billion, 500,000 square foot facility in Maiden, North Carolina. Apple probably augments their own infrastructure with cloud providers for various reasons, e.g. increasing geographic diversity, allowing for progressive growth, and to handle comparatively small jobs (e.g. merely a few hundred VMs). I imagine it would also be a waste of Apple's time to tool up their own data centers to offer general purpose cloud computing services.
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Apple doesn't have "numerous" facilities. Compared to Google or Amazon they have very few. They really only have two worth mentioning, and having only two is the most expensive thing you can do, with 50% natural overhead.
    - tallanvor 11y ago
      Apple has at least 5 data centers in the US alone. And it makes sense that the overall size of their facilities would be much smaller than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft... They're not running a major search engine or offering anything like AWS, GC, or Azure.
    - robzyb 11y ago
      How much diversifiable overhead does a data center have? My spidey-sense is telling me that its very little.
    - sjwright 11y ago
      A trivial Google search shows that you are entirely incorrect. And comparisons to Google or Amazon are unreasonable, as both these companies sell cloud services. Apple does not.
dantiberian 11y ago
Would be interesting to know what kind of discounts Apple got on this. It's a massive PR win for Google, the kind I expect they could give $100m for. Apple is also notorious for getting a very sharp price from their suppliers, so the combination suggests there were some steep discounts.
- massemphasis 11y ago
  Apple was very happy that Google gave S. Korea a very public smackdown at their own game with the AlphaGo AI software. If only I were kidding.
- vidarh 11y ago
  The public cloud prices bear no relation whatsoever to what large customers pay. I know people spending less than $1m/month that are paying ~25% of the public prices on one of the top three cloud providers. Frankly, I'd be surprised if Apple is paying more than 10%-15% of the public pricing. The reason is that anything above that, and you can save massively by going to more traditional dedicated hosting.
nodesocket 11y ago
It is reported that Apple accounts for 9% of Amazon's AWS revenue. If that is true, this move by AAPL is a serious dent in the financials of AMZN.
- runevault 11y ago
  Any chance you have a link with that number? Would be interesting to read more about apple using such a chunk of Amazon's services.
- partiallypro 11y ago
  From my understanding, and I could be wrong, Apple does more on Azure than they do AWS. Also they aren't leaving AWS or Azure, but are diversifying to other cloud providers for scalability and uptime.
kloud_ops 11y ago
I expect they want a multi-cloud presence for HA now that there is good tooling to support that such as Spinnaker ( http://spinnaker.io/ http://spinnaker.io/ )
hans 11y ago
Does anyone enjoy working at AWS? maybe the Zon will have to up its game to compete but they're so mired in employee-thrashing it seems unlikely. Is it getting better there or worse? this seems to question that.
- mmmBacon 11y ago
  I've heard their layer 1 network is a mess and they have a small army of PhDs troubleshooting basic problems at layer 1. Sounds like misery to me.
lobo_tuerto 11y ago
"It's been only four months since Google convinced enterprise queen Diane Greene to lead its fledgling cloud-computing business, but she's already scored a second huge coup for Google" Who was the first?
- rajathagasthya 11y ago
  I assume Spotify.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  Maybe Spotify?
- frankthedog 11y ago
  Spotify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840
- rafaelm 11y ago
  Spotify, I think.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  Spotify was, as of late February.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  Spotify, as mentioned in TFA.
- codesushi42 11y ago
  Perhaps Pandora! Wait...
serge2k 11y ago
Have the google PR guys been working a lot of OT lately?
conradev 11y ago
They've been using Google Cloud Storage for blob storage of iMessage attachments for a little while now. They seem to use a combination of Amazon S3 and GCS (just watching connections coming out of the app on OS X).
Xcelerate 11y ago
Does anyone know if GCE offers discounts or grants to graduate students doing research?
- ac29 11y ago
  Doesn't look as broad as Amazon's program, but Google does fund research, at least in Computer Science and related fields: http://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-outreach/faculty-engagement http://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-...
pori 11y ago
Can someone provide a little context towards this exodus from AWS to Google Cloud? I understand in DropBox's case that they (questionably) need their own infrastructure for cost saving. But then there's Apple and Spotify suddenly changing over. What's the advantage? I have a fear that this trend among large companies is going to trickle down to smaller ones and independent devs. Considering these "Cloud Wars" I can see stories like continuing with different providers. Ultimately, a scenario could occur where one year, one provider is king. Then the next, everyone decides they need to migrate to the next big thing. That would be irritating for us contractors. We would have to learn new interfaces and apis at the same rate of JS frameworks.
- outside1234 11y ago
  There is no exodus. There are a lot of companies moving to multi-cloud, which makes sense from a disaster recovery perspective, a negotiating perspective, and possibly from cherry picking the best parts of each platform. This is what Apple is doing. They use AWS and Azure already in large volume. This move adds the #3 vendor in cloud to mix and isn't really a surprise.
  - pori 11y ago
    Thanks for the answer. That makes a lot of sense. I guess To some degree, I did know this. But the media has been portraying these moves as a complete move, hence the whole "exodus" hype. It bothers me still, because this rhetoric may lead to scenario I described above for smaller companies.
    - lugg 11y ago
      Is that a bad thing? Competition good.
    - grrowl 11y ago
      The media is sensationalist as ever — I would worry about any CTO or Engineering Lead who based such a huge important decision on a Business Insider article.
  - 11y ago
kozukumi 11y ago
God damn Diane Greene hit it out of the park with this one! Amazing work getting Apple to migrate so much away from Amazon.
- tim333 11y ago
  She does seem to have something of a knack for getting things done. I watched her startup school talk just the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c
- kzhahou 11y ago
  I guess the article does say it was attributed to her, but whenever I read an executive-focused press article, I just think of the team that worked hard for months to get to this point, and suddenly the newly-hired senior executive marches in, attends a few meetings and reviews, makes a few phone calls, and then winds up getting all the credit. Seen it so many times at big companies. Especially irksome is whenever a product launches or a deal is signed, the exec replies-all to the mass internal celebration email with a "So proud of this team!" message. Ok, thanks for smiling upon us peons with your lordly approval, after the 4 hours total you personally put into the effort. Sorry... slightly bitter :-)
  - estefan 11y ago
    Same with when you write report for your boss and they just stick their name on it and present it.
  - chickenbane 11y ago
    Consider the possibility the team doesn't mind the executive getting the credit, or perhaps does enjoys doing great work regardless. I also used to view myself as a lowly peon, but that overshadowed the satisfaction of a job well done. Also, consider Greene's (no relation) Law #1: Never outshine the master.
jessegreathouse 11y ago
I can't see this as anything but a good thing for us lowly consumers. Competition in the marketplace is a great thing.
phragg 11y ago
Apple vs FBI in Encryption Lawsuit. Pentagon Grabs Former CEO Larry Page to head technology. Google nabs Apple as cloud customer. i put on my robe and tinfoil hat
- Polyphonie 11y ago
  You mean Eric Schmidt: http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head-pentagon-innovation-board/ http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head...
doxcf434 11y ago
We've been doing tests in GCE in the 60-80k core range: What we like: - slightly lower latency to end users in USA and Europe than AWS - faster image builds and deployment times than AWS - fast machines, live migrations blackouts are getting better too - per min billing (after 10mins), and lower rates for continued uses vs. AWS RIs where you need to figure out your usage up front - project make it easy to track costs w/o having to write scripts to tag everything like in AWS, down side is project discovery is hard since there's no master account What we don't like: - basic lack of maturity, AWS is far a head here e.g. we've had 100s of VMs get rebooted w/o explanation, the op log ui forces you to page through results, log search is slow enough to be unsuable, billing costs don't match our records for the number of core hours and they simply can't explain them, quota limit increases take nearly week, support takes close to an hour to get on the phone and they make you hunt down a PIN to call them - until you buy primare support (aka a TAM), they limit the number of ppl who can open support cases, caused us terrible friction since it's so unexpected esp. when it's their bugs you're trying to report and they can mature from fixing them
- boulos 11y ago
  Sorry to hear about your troubles. Are you running with onHostMaintenance set to terminate or are you losing "regular" VMs. If you want to ping me with your project id (my username at google), I'd like to investigate. 100s of VM failures is well outside of our acceptable range. Also, if it's been a while since your last quota request, we've drastically improved the turnaround time. All I can say is, your complaints were heard and we've tried to fix it. Keep yelling if something is busted! (And yes, I see the irony of the support ticket statement; out of curiosity which support are you on?) Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
- jbaptiste 11y ago
  Maybe there is something special for the member of GCE startup program, but for us the quotas requests take between 1min and 1 hour, where the same requests over aws took a few days, and endless discussions. Our all experience with the folks over at Google has been amazing compared to the poor level we had with AWS. Granted we are on a range way lower than yours.
tn13 11y ago
I don't think someone at Apple looked at Amazon's pricing table and Google's pricing table and decided to move to Google. Very like sales teams of Azure, Amazon, Google must have done the mating dance for few months sharing their future plans etc. Very probably government's stand on encryption could have been one of the things that were discussed. Some people must have played golf together and eventually made some decision. Also, very likely Apple will be well invested in all these three players and will remain so for a long time.
pinkskip 11y ago
I love aws fanboy

471 points by ra7 11y ago

This should be read as: "In exchange for keeping Android crappy, Apple to reward Google on his Cloud efforts." (being downvoted? little sense of humor)

halayli 11y ago
Because of the # of trolls here, sometimes it's hard to differentiate between sarcasm and trolling.
- anacleto 11y ago
  Huge difference bw trolling and sarcasm. As my old professor used to say "Sarcasm is a closed number class".

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

So, it will be nearly impossible to buy a phone in the United States that isn't designed to send your data to a Google datacenter?

dchest 11y ago
"Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure." (https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) Although your IP address and some other connection metadata will be known to Google.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  That's not too bad then. As long as the 'iCloud account', where Apple likes to store the keys, are never third party hosted.
- WireWrap 11y ago
  Ever seen an analysis of the traffic and breakdown of the metadata you speak of? If an account or device or advertising or other unique ID is sent to Google, it could help Google to track the user's IP Address changes and locations.

markgavalda 11y ago

We are consolidating all of our cloud services at Google Cloud and couldn't be more happier. We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across ~6 2nd and 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer for us.

kennethh 11y ago
How did the change impact you? More control, lower cost?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Artemis2 11y ago
How is the reliability? I want to like GCP but I have never trusted their services in general.
- hasch 11y ago
  I can't speak for the OP ... but from what I've seen, it's extremely good. consistent fast performance and their proprietary "live migration" really stands out. besides really good raw machine speed, the inter-networking is also far superior.
  - markgavalda 11y ago
    I can absolutely second that. It's far superior to anything we've seen so far!
jacobwcarlson 11y ago
> We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across ~6 2nd and 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer for us. All the of the success stories I've heard about Google Cloud are from companies using significant resources. Why hasn't Google gone after startups? Perhaps I'm missing something but a turnkey package of computing, analytics, and advertising seem like a no-brainer.

obulpathi 11y ago

This move will be a "GAME CHANGER" for the Cloud industry.

jacquesm 11y ago
Why do you think so?
- obulpathi 11y ago
  I can clearly Google Cloud winning the Cloud industry. It's only a matter of time and not a matter of if. Cases like this and Spotify, will make the shift happen sooner than rather.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I don't see any evidence in your assertion. There are quite a few very powerful players in this segment and I don't see anybody 'winning' to the point where they will exclude the others. Just a lot of secret sauce and attempts at locking in the customers. What you will see is a shift from dedicated hosting providers to cloud providers, which is one of the reason why almost every large dedicated hosting provider now has their own cloud offering. And that is born out by evidence, in fact, if Google 'won' the cloud battle and let's say Amazon would end up as a Google customer we'd all lose. I don't think that's even a remote possibility at this point.
    - eitally 11y ago
      Yes, Google will not "win" at the total expense of Amazon & Microsoft, but I would bet a good deal of money that they'll become the market leader within the next five years, and likely sooner. The rate at which Google has been open-sourcing things, too, will further expedite this, and the fact that they just joined OCP will give them better industry credibility on the data center / computing side.
      - scholia 11y ago

Implicated 11y ago

This seems to be good for everyone but Amazon, can anyone offer some insight otherwise?

mikecb 11y ago
Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price. They have been quick to introduce products, but their technical infrastructure and abstractions thereof seem to lag Azure and GCP, and investment in those take a long time to pay off.
- skeletonjelly 11y ago
  > Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price That sounds like it's good for consumers (of the cloud services)
  - amnesia 11y ago
    Whoever wins... we lose. But really, I'm glad that Google has stepped up with their cloud services (they will be revealing more awesome stuff at the GCP Next 2016). And looks like they have the best "cloud core": https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp

fidget 11y ago

My guess is that it's pretty much just BigQuery. No one else seems to be able to compete, and that's a big deal. The companies moving their analytics stacks to BQ and thus GCP probably make up the majority (in terms of revenue) of customers for GCP

mikecb 11y ago
Given how cheap bigquery is, there would have to be a lot more bq-only customers than customers that use other services. And given how seamlessly the different products work with each other, any beachhead product like bq will quickly garner more product usage.
kodablah 11y ago
I doubt it. Not only does Apple (maybe?) run one of the largest Cassandra clusters in the world, but surely they wouldn't leverage cloud provider features over open source alternatives for fear of vendor lock-in.
- lern_too_spel 11y ago
  Cassandra and BigQuery are not at all comparable. BigQuery's open source competitors are Impala, Presto, and Drill.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

iqonik 11y ago

Side note, but I'm impressed the article didn't try and put a positive spin on it given Jeff Bezos' interest in Business Insider.

jacquesm 11y ago
Would it even have gotten coverage in business insider if he had not had an interest in it?

rdl 11y ago

They've been a heavy Azure user too. Probably more than AWS. I'm glad there's now at least 2 and probably 3 competitors for public cloud infrastructure. So many things were at risk, including adoption of public cloud in general, when it was a sole source monopoly from Google (OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn, and VPSes aren't the same thing, nor was VMware ever really credible for public cloud) Neither GC nor Azure are as comprehensive as AWS, but together at least one of them is usually a viable alternative for any given deal.

redwood 11y ago
Yea big news. We all benefit from competition here
enraged_camel 11y ago
>>OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn What's wrong with Openstack/Rackspace?
- paulryanrogers 11y ago
  Feature creep if I recall correctly. Though Openshift is an interesting implementation.
tracker1 11y ago
Google has some really interesting features, closer to docker, so some better mobility options from private/vps to google, and back. They seem to have some of the best compute options out there, and tend to perform above the others in a lot of ways. Azure's services are imho a bit easier to use, at least from my limited experience, mostly vm's, queues, tables and hosted sql. AWS has so many options and services it's hard to keep some of them straight... Lambda is really interesting imho, and some of their options for data storage are compelling to say the least. Joyent's Triton/Docker option is really interesting, but their pricing model just seems too much for what they're offering. I do hope that they have success in terms of selling/setting up private clouds though... there's a lot of big companies that would be much better off with their solutions.

imperialdrive 11y ago

I so sick of EC2 rogue 'underlying hardware issues' and EBS volumes dropping dead... AWS Console status will say everything is 'Okay' even when there are major problems - it's a joke... I wonder to myself, is it because I recently migrated (December 15) over and they are starting to buckle? Really a bad experience. At this rate I'll be looking at Google next month, or going back to Colo (25 servers, 100TB) so not much, but still worth doing right.

soccerdave 11y ago
I've had ~25-30 instances running for the past 3 years and only had 1 or 2 instances have hardware issues, never had issues with EBS. Running on us-west-2 but it seems like more issues happen in us-east-1.
- imperialdrive 11y ago
  I'm on Virginia zone D... the other day a 15TB EBS went down, even with status as good. Their explanation, which took a lot of time/energy to get, was that the 2nd replicated copy had a failure, and when rebuilding from the 1st good replicated copy (primary) it suffered an unknown error taking down that copy as well... I was upset to say the least.
- mmmBacon 11y ago
  1 or 2 failures out of 30 is a really high failure rate for HW.
  - ac29 11y ago
    I challenge you to build enterprise grade hardware, run it hard and have a hardware failure rate of ~1% a year.
    - mmmBacon 11y ago
      Challenge accepted. Been building carrier grade equipment with significantly lower failure rates than that for >15 years. Gear I designed in my first year out of grad school is still in field use today.

phoboslab 11y ago

Can someone explain to me why traffic is still so damn expensive with every cloud provider? A while back we managed a site that would serve ~700 TB/mo and paid about $2,000 for the servers in total (SQL, Web servers and caches, including traffic). At Google's $0.08/GB pricing we would've ended up with a whooping $56,000 for the traffic alone. How's that justifiable?

saganus 11y ago
Wow, ~700 TB/mo? That does sound like a lot. What kind of site would serve that volume of traffic and not have 56k for operating expenses? I mean, I can think of a few examples like Wikipedia maybe, since they are non-commercial and such, but for a commercial business? Maybe 4chan moves that much without a lot of revenue I would think, or maybe... imgur? but not really sure, I mean, it would seem like they could get that amount easily via ads alone. What was the use case here? Also, I think that 56k for traffic alone kind of depends on context. I mean, how much does Netflix pay for serving their volume of traffic? What I'm saying is, isn't 700 TB a month something that would probably be very expensive no matter the context? Just storing 700TB would cost a lot, no? I'm really curious about your use case here.
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo. Netflix's total cost is probably below $0.25/Mbps. $56,000/mo would get you over 100Gbps of committed capacity from any major provider (or a mix).
  - pyre 11y ago
    > 700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo Is that a fixed-cost sustained pipe though? I was under the impression that (at least at the backbone level) those contracts got more costly the closer to full that your pipe was.
    - virtuallynathan 11y ago

karlshea 11y ago

I'd be super interested to know what their backend looks like (at least the new stuff, not WebObjects), I wish they were as open as Facebook with regard to tech. Unfortunately that's probably a wish that will forever be unfulfilled.

mikecb 11y ago
Depends on what you mean by backend, but they do publish a lot of papers and give a lot of conference presentations.
ajessup 11y ago
Announced today - https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-GCP-networking.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-s...
- karlshea 11y ago
  Sorry, I guess I wasn't super clear. I meant Apple's backend.

mahyarm 11y ago

If you run little snitch on your mac and have your photos sync with apple, you'd notice the photos agent going to google for quite a while now. Maybe it was a trial? I say this is why icloud is about 2x the price of other cloud providers, because they don't run it themselves and want a profit margin.

Polyphonie 11y ago
iCloud Drive pricing is equal to that of Google Drive: $3.99 for 200GB (Google doesn't offer 200 but 100GB at $1.99). At 1TB, both iCloud and Google prices are $9.99.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Last I remembered it was $20/month for 1TB. OneDrive is $7/mo/1TB and Amazon is $5/month equivalent.

dzhiurgis 11y ago

So it makes sense for Dropbox to build it's own infra but it doesn't for Apple. Also wondering why Apple isn't hosting exclusively with IBM, they seem to have the best geographical coverage.

sjwright 11y ago
Apple does operate its own infrastructure. It has numerous, exceptionally large data centers in the USA, Europe and China. Most notable is the $1 billion, 500,000 square foot facility in Maiden, North Carolina. Apple probably augments their own infrastructure with cloud providers for various reasons, e.g. increasing geographic diversity, allowing for progressive growth, and to handle comparatively small jobs (e.g. merely a few hundred VMs). I imagine it would also be a waste of Apple's time to tool up their own data centers to offer general purpose cloud computing services.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  Apple doesn't have "numerous" facilities. Compared to Google or Amazon they have very few. They really only have two worth mentioning, and having only two is the most expensive thing you can do, with 50% natural overhead.
  - tallanvor 11y ago
    Apple has at least 5 data centers in the US alone. And it makes sense that the overall size of their facilities would be much smaller than Amazon, Google, or Microsoft... They're not running a major search engine or offering anything like AWS, GC, or Azure.
  - robzyb 11y ago
    How much diversifiable overhead does a data center have? My spidey-sense is telling me that its very little.
  - sjwright 11y ago
    A trivial Google search shows that you are entirely incorrect. And comparisons to Google or Amazon are unreasonable, as both these companies sell cloud services. Apple does not.

dantiberian 11y ago

Would be interesting to know what kind of discounts Apple got on this. It's a massive PR win for Google, the kind I expect they could give $100m for. Apple is also notorious for getting a very sharp price from their suppliers, so the combination suggests there were some steep discounts.

massemphasis 11y ago
Apple was very happy that Google gave S. Korea a very public smackdown at their own game with the AlphaGo AI software. If only I were kidding.
vidarh 11y ago
The public cloud prices bear no relation whatsoever to what large customers pay. I know people spending less than $1m/month that are paying ~25% of the public prices on one of the top three cloud providers. Frankly, I'd be surprised if Apple is paying more than 10%-15% of the public pricing. The reason is that anything above that, and you can save massively by going to more traditional dedicated hosting.

nodesocket 11y ago

It is reported that Apple accounts for 9% of Amazon's AWS revenue. If that is true, this move by AAPL is a serious dent in the financials of AMZN.

runevault 11y ago
Any chance you have a link with that number? Would be interesting to read more about apple using such a chunk of Amazon's services.
partiallypro 11y ago
From my understanding, and I could be wrong, Apple does more on Azure than they do AWS. Also they aren't leaving AWS or Azure, but are diversifying to other cloud providers for scalability and uptime.

kloud_ops 11y ago

I expect they want a multi-cloud presence for HA now that there is good tooling to support that such as Spinnaker ( http://spinnaker.io/ http://spinnaker.io/ )

hans 11y ago

Does anyone enjoy working at AWS? maybe the Zon will have to up its game to compete but they're so mired in employee-thrashing it seems unlikely. Is it getting better there or worse? this seems to question that.

mmmBacon 11y ago
I've heard their layer 1 network is a mess and they have a small army of PhDs troubleshooting basic problems at layer 1. Sounds like misery to me.

lobo_tuerto 11y ago

"It's been only four months since Google convinced enterprise queen Diane Greene to lead its fledgling cloud-computing business, but she's already scored a second huge coup for Google" Who was the first?

rajathagasthya 11y ago
I assume Spotify.
jonlucc 11y ago
Maybe Spotify?
frankthedog 11y ago
Spotify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840
rafaelm 11y ago
Spotify, I think.
wutbrodo 11y ago
Spotify was, as of late February.
jlgaddis 11y ago
Spotify, as mentioned in TFA.
codesushi42 11y ago
Perhaps Pandora! Wait...

serge2k 11y ago

Have the google PR guys been working a lot of OT lately?

conradev 11y ago

They've been using Google Cloud Storage for blob storage of iMessage attachments for a little while now. They seem to use a combination of Amazon S3 and GCS (just watching connections coming out of the app on OS X).

Xcelerate 11y ago

Does anyone know if GCE offers discounts or grants to graduate students doing research?

ac29 11y ago
Doesn't look as broad as Amazon's program, but Google does fund research, at least in Computer Science and related fields: http://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-outreach/faculty-engagement http://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research-...

pori 11y ago

Can someone provide a little context towards this exodus from AWS to Google Cloud? I understand in DropBox's case that they (questionably) need their own infrastructure for cost saving. But then there's Apple and Spotify suddenly changing over. What's the advantage? I have a fear that this trend among large companies is going to trickle down to smaller ones and independent devs. Considering these "Cloud Wars" I can see stories like continuing with different providers. Ultimately, a scenario could occur where one year, one provider is king. Then the next, everyone decides they need to migrate to the next big thing. That would be irritating for us contractors. We would have to learn new interfaces and apis at the same rate of JS frameworks.

outside1234 11y ago
There is no exodus. There are a lot of companies moving to multi-cloud, which makes sense from a disaster recovery perspective, a negotiating perspective, and possibly from cherry picking the best parts of each platform. This is what Apple is doing. They use AWS and Azure already in large volume. This move adds the #3 vendor in cloud to mix and isn't really a surprise.
- pori 11y ago
  Thanks for the answer. That makes a lot of sense. I guess To some degree, I did know this. But the media has been portraying these moves as a complete move, hence the whole "exodus" hype. It bothers me still, because this rhetoric may lead to scenario I described above for smaller companies.
  - lugg 11y ago
    Is that a bad thing? Competition good.
  - grrowl 11y ago
    The media is sensationalist as ever — I would worry about any CTO or Engineering Lead who based such a huge important decision on a Business Insider article.
- 11y ago

kozukumi 11y ago

God damn Diane Greene hit it out of the park with this one! Amazing work getting Apple to migrate so much away from Amazon.

tim333 11y ago
She does seem to have something of a knack for getting things done. I watched her startup school talk just the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c
kzhahou 11y ago
I guess the article does say it was attributed to her, but whenever I read an executive-focused press article, I just think of the team that worked hard for months to get to this point, and suddenly the newly-hired senior executive marches in, attends a few meetings and reviews, makes a few phone calls, and then winds up getting all the credit. Seen it so many times at big companies. Especially irksome is whenever a product launches or a deal is signed, the exec replies-all to the mass internal celebration email with a "So proud of this team!" message. Ok, thanks for smiling upon us peons with your lordly approval, after the 4 hours total you personally put into the effort. Sorry... slightly bitter :-)
- estefan 11y ago
  Same with when you write report for your boss and they just stick their name on it and present it.
- chickenbane 11y ago
  Consider the possibility the team doesn't mind the executive getting the credit, or perhaps does enjoys doing great work regardless. I also used to view myself as a lowly peon, but that overshadowed the satisfaction of a job well done. Also, consider Greene's (no relation) Law #1: Never outshine the master.

jessegreathouse 11y ago

I can't see this as anything but a good thing for us lowly consumers. Competition in the marketplace is a great thing.

phragg 11y ago

Apple vs FBI in Encryption Lawsuit. Pentagon Grabs Former CEO Larry Page to head technology. Google nabs Apple as cloud customer. i put on my robe and tinfoil hat

Polyphonie 11y ago
You mean Eric Schmidt: http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head-pentagon-innovation-board/ http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head...

doxcf434 11y ago

We've been doing tests in GCE in the 60-80k core range: What we like: - slightly lower latency to end users in USA and Europe than AWS - faster image builds and deployment times than AWS - fast machines, live migrations blackouts are getting better too - per min billing (after 10mins), and lower rates for continued uses vs. AWS RIs where you need to figure out your usage up front - project make it easy to track costs w/o having to write scripts to tag everything like in AWS, down side is project discovery is hard since there's no master account What we don't like: - basic lack of maturity, AWS is far a head here e.g. we've had 100s of VMs get rebooted w/o explanation, the op log ui forces you to page through results, log search is slow enough to be unsuable, billing costs don't match our records for the number of core hours and they simply can't explain them, quota limit increases take nearly week, support takes close to an hour to get on the phone and they make you hunt down a PIN to call them - until you buy primare support (aka a TAM), they limit the number of ppl who can open support cases, caused us terrible friction since it's so unexpected esp. when it's their bugs you're trying to report and they can mature from fixing them

boulos 11y ago
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Are you running with onHostMaintenance set to terminate or are you losing "regular" VMs. If you want to ping me with your project id (my username at google), I'd like to investigate. 100s of VM failures is well outside of our acceptable range. Also, if it's been a while since your last quota request, we've drastically improved the turnaround time. All I can say is, your complaints were heard and we've tried to fix it. Keep yelling if something is busted! (And yes, I see the irony of the support ticket statement; out of curiosity which support are you on?) Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
jbaptiste 11y ago
Maybe there is something special for the member of GCE startup program, but for us the quotas requests take between 1min and 1 hour, where the same requests over aws took a few days, and endless discussions. Our all experience with the folks over at Google has been amazing compared to the poor level we had with AWS. Granted we are on a range way lower than yours.

tn13 11y ago

I don't think someone at Apple looked at Amazon's pricing table and Google's pricing table and decided to move to Google. Very like sales teams of Azure, Amazon, Google must have done the mating dance for few months sharing their future plans etc. Very probably government's stand on encryption could have been one of the things that were discussed. Some people must have played golf together and eventually made some decision. Also, very likely Apple will be well invested in all these three players and will remain so for a long time.

pinkskip 11y ago

I love aws fanboy