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I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and

I think this shows a fundamental difference between Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud. AWSs offerings seem fairly vanilla and boring. Google are offering more and more really useful stuff: - cloud machine learning - custom hardware - live migration of hosts without downtime - Cold storage with access in seconds - bigquery - dataflow

obulpathi 10y ago
- Google Container Engine - Cloud Shell to name a couple more.
eva1984 10y ago
Meaning even deeper level of vendor lock -- now you cannot even find the chips to run your application elsewhere!
- dgacmu 10y ago
  No - tensorflow is open source and you can run it on many platforms. TPUs are about efficiency. You might not be able to do image recognition as efficiently without one, but you can still perform exactly the same tasks. (I work on TF this year.)
  - eva1984 10y ago
    Well, that is good to know. Thanks for clarification.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I would be shocked if tensorflow optimizations where useful 1:1 for stock Intel chips or GPU's. So, there is still plenty of lock-in even if your process runs. GPU vendors love to play this game by helping optimize games.
    - dgacmu 10y ago
      It's possible, but I think that the majority of ML optimization as seen by a programmer using tensorflow is more about optimizing the balance of accuracy, training & inference speed, and memory use, and a lot of the solutions in this space are pretty hardware independent. There's an entire other type of optimization about, e.g., making conv2d insanely fast, but that's not something that a typical data scientist-type user deals with. (To elaborate -- it's questions like "how deep should I make this convolution? Should I use tf.relu or tf.sigmoid? How many fully-connected layers should I put here, and how big should I make them?". These are really knotty deep learning design questions, but they're often h/w independent. Not always - we certainly have some ops on TF that we only support in CPUs and not on GPUs, for example - but often.)
      - Retric 10y ago
        I am more thinking in terms of: 1. Best price/performance is tensorflow right now. So, the best software choice is platform X. 2. Then in 2 years.. Well we are using Platform X so tensorflow is clearly the best option. In other words once you pick conv2d, you tend to also stick with whatever conv2d is optimized for. Which also means HW vendors love to help optimize popular platforms.
        visarga 10y ago
        Others can make TF hardware too. Now that Google has opened the way, they will compete.
    - micro_cam 10y ago
      All of the comparable tools are practically locked into nVidia gpus/CUDA. TensorFlow is rapidly reaching performance parity on that hardware [1] and can now be run on this so it's actually sort of the least locked in framework. [1] It has been climbing the charts at https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks for example.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 10y ago
I think the difference you observe relates directly to the difference between what Google does outside of Cloud Platform and what Amazon does outside of AWS.
merb 10y ago
to start a REAL business you SHOULD act boring. for everything else there is google.
- manigandham 10y ago
  ...are you saying Google isn't a real business?
  - merb 10y ago
    no it's just that google has so many shiny things that come and go, if you build a business with shiny new things, you will propably fail if you do that over and over again, just because its shiny and new.
gcr 10y ago
Vanilla? Boring? I read "Vanilla" and "Boring" as "Horray, I don't have to spend time rewriting all this complicated code I already have!" If I'm just dipping my toes into (say) Caffe or Theano, I don't have to rewrite it from scratch. That is a huge advantage---not a disadvantage!---of AWS over google.
- vgt 10y ago
  Your point is valid, but I think what the OP was saying is that Google is offering all this stuff IN ADDITION to the boring stuff. Google does boring stuff very well too.. and one can argue much better than AWS as well.. take a look at Quizlet's story: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp (shamelessly biased Googler)
  - jbooth 10y ago
    If I recall correctly, it took Google a while to actually offer the boring stuff. For a while, you could get a Google Compute Engine but you couldn't just get a dang VM image, because Google knows better than you and you should do things their way. They've fixed it now, but lost a lot of potential market share for that conceit.
    - vgt 10y ago
      If I recall correctly myself (getting old!), Google has had the ability to build your own custom image since GCE went GA 2.5 years ago. Now, admittadly, it took a while to get IAM and VPC going, but we done did it now! I'd love to hear what other boring stuff has been a showstopper for you, in case we missed something dumb :)
      - pritambarhate 10y ago
        Not having Managed Postgres and Managed Redis are 2 main showstoppers for me.

obulpathi 10y ago

- Google Container Engine - Cloud Shell to name a couple more.

eva1984 10y ago

Meaning even deeper level of vendor lock -- now you cannot even find the chips to run your application elsewhere!

dgacmu 10y ago
No - tensorflow is open source and you can run it on many platforms. TPUs are about efficiency. You might not be able to do image recognition as efficiently without one, but you can still perform exactly the same tasks. (I work on TF this year.)
- eva1984 10y ago
  Well, that is good to know. Thanks for clarification.
- Retric 10y ago
  I would be shocked if tensorflow optimizations where useful 1:1 for stock Intel chips or GPU's. So, there is still plenty of lock-in even if your process runs. GPU vendors love to play this game by helping optimize games.
  - dgacmu 10y ago
    It's possible, but I think that the majority of ML optimization as seen by a programmer using tensorflow is more about optimizing the balance of accuracy, training & inference speed, and memory use, and a lot of the solutions in this space are pretty hardware independent. There's an entire other type of optimization about, e.g., making conv2d insanely fast, but that's not something that a typical data scientist-type user deals with. (To elaborate -- it's questions like "how deep should I make this convolution? Should I use tf.relu or tf.sigmoid? How many fully-connected layers should I put here, and how big should I make them?". These are really knotty deep learning design questions, but they're often h/w independent. Not always - we certainly have some ops on TF that we only support in CPUs and not on GPUs, for example - but often.)
    - Retric 10y ago
      I am more thinking in terms of: 1. Best price/performance is tensorflow right now. So, the best software choice is platform X. 2. Then in 2 years.. Well we are using Platform X so tensorflow is clearly the best option. In other words once you pick conv2d, you tend to also stick with whatever conv2d is optimized for. Which also means HW vendors love to help optimize popular platforms.
      - visarga 10y ago
        Others can make TF hardware too. Now that Google has opened the way, they will compete.
  - micro_cam 10y ago
    All of the comparable tools are practically locked into nVidia gpus/CUDA. TensorFlow is rapidly reaching performance parity on that hardware [1] and can now be run on this so it's actually sort of the least locked in framework. [1] It has been climbing the charts at https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks for example.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 10y ago

I think the difference you observe relates directly to the difference between what Google does outside of Cloud Platform and what Amazon does outside of AWS.

merb 10y ago

to start a REAL business you SHOULD act boring. for everything else there is google.

manigandham 10y ago
...are you saying Google isn't a real business?
- merb 10y ago
  no it's just that google has so many shiny things that come and go, if you build a business with shiny new things, you will propably fail if you do that over and over again, just because its shiny and new.

gcr 10y ago

Vanilla? Boring? I read "Vanilla" and "Boring" as "Horray, I don't have to spend time rewriting all this complicated code I already have!" If I'm just dipping my toes into (say) Caffe or Theano, I don't have to rewrite it from scratch. That is a huge advantage---not a disadvantage!---of AWS over google.

vgt 10y ago
Your point is valid, but I think what the OP was saying is that Google is offering all this stuff IN ADDITION to the boring stuff. Google does boring stuff very well too.. and one can argue much better than AWS as well.. take a look at Quizlet's story: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp (shamelessly biased Googler)
- jbooth 10y ago
  If I recall correctly, it took Google a while to actually offer the boring stuff. For a while, you could get a Google Compute Engine but you couldn't just get a dang VM image, because Google knows better than you and you should do things their way. They've fixed it now, but lost a lot of potential market share for that conceit.
  - vgt 10y ago
    If I recall correctly myself (getting old!), Google has had the ability to build your own custom image since GCE went GA 2.5 years ago. Now, admittadly, it took a while to get IAM and VPC going, but we done did it now! I'd love to hear what other boring stuff has been a showstopper for you, in case we missed something dumb :)
    - pritambarhate 10y ago
      Not having Managed Postgres and Managed Redis are 2 main showstoppers for me.