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How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

219 points by dwynings 10y ago

manigandham 10y ago
Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there are definitely changes happening both in product and culture. As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail which is what we saw as well. [1] I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all the hiring at Google. 1. https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp
- boulos 10y ago
  Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective customer who doesn't find the current channels working? (I ask to know what to work on, not to accuse). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
  - ing33k 10y ago
    Hi, sorry if it's the wrong place to report an issue that I faced recently with GCP. I had reached the limit of max projects one can have in their dashboard. I deleted some projects and when I tried to create a new project, I was getting the same message . I had to wait for a week to create a new project ( the time window in which user can stop project deletion ) this really prevented me from trying some new services in spite of GCP giving generous $300 credit.
    - boulos 10y ago
      Interesting, I thought there was a "Seriously, I know what I'm doing, delete right now". I've never run into this, and apparently that's because the issue is that we have a limit of 10 free trial projects (to prevent abuse). I'll look into the "Seriously, let me delete immediately" thing though.
    - mbrukman 10y ago
      I'm curious why you would need to delete projects and create new ones just to try out new products and services—could you please clarify? A project is just a container for resources. You can use any combination of GCP products and services within a single project—you are only charged for the resources you use, so just deleting what you created earlier would get you to a zero-state.
  - godzillabrennus 10y ago
    My startup was awarded $10k in Google Cloud hosting credits at Web Summit. By the time we went to launch they had expired. If you know of anyone at Google who would be open to helping us redeem them that'd be awesome! My email is hn (at) joinjune (dot) com
    - mbrukman 10y ago
      Hi, I'm a product manager on Google Cloud Platform. Sorry to hear that your credits expired before you could try out GCP. I inquired on your behalf, and was told that the Web Summit you're referring to is from 2014 (2 years ago), and the credits expired in 2015 (1 year ago), and unfortunately, this program is no longer available. That said, we do have a credits program for startups (https://cloud.google.com/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/startups/) but you cannot apply for it directly, you need to "contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for Startups application details." (quote from the site) In the mean time, if you just want to kick the tires, you can sign up on https://cloud.google.com https://cloud.google.com for a free trial.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    Perhaps I should restate: I can reach most people via forums/social (although ignored plenty of times including the main startup guy) but the conversations and the platform just seem informal as if this entire thing is a side project (I know it's not). We're a paying customer and I understand tiered support is available (as it is with every vendor) but there's a distinct difference in on-boarding, which is even more important and has to happen before we're a stable long-term client with a support contract. GCP is very barren in on-boarding resources and opaque in happenings. Here are some of my recommendations: - The APIs (which are quite literally how applications connect to the platform) need a lot of work. I know there are idiomatic versions in progress but this has to be improved rapidly, like yesterday. They just don't seem production ready (they're even called alpha). I don't want to dig around github, I just expect to use them in whatever major language I'm writing. - Documentation has recently gotten much better (good job!) but was terrible for a long time and is still confusing in parts. Add more solution/use-case oriented writeups. This is often the best way to understand how to use a new service rather than wondering how to make it best fit our app. - Send an email as soon as an account is spending more than $1k/mth and see what they're doing and how you can help. Don't mention anything about buying a support plan or offer it free for the first quarter until everything is setup. The money is far outweighed by the goodwill. - Properly staff the startups department so they can vet companies instead of outsourcing this to VCs/Accelerators. Right now you're turning away many companies that are bootstrapped or have other needs and are actually focused on building sustainable/profitable companies - the ones that will become long-term paying clients for you. - Put out a roadmap with more detail or let companies take part in planning the next features. There seems to be only vague indications of what's coming up in the future. Formality, reliability, assurance and easy access are critical, especially when you're asking companies to build on you as a foundation. The basics of computing are becoming commoditized so it's important that the services and service are able to differentiate. I get the sense that the GCP team is aware of all this though so good luck, we all want a great platform and I can't wait to see what's in store.
    - mbrukman 10y ago
      Thanks for all the feedback! Appreciate your taking the time to write this up in detail, and thanks for not sugar-coating it. We'll share this with the relevant teams and work on improvements across the board. Great to hear that you like the changes to the docs! Please keep providing feedback and suggestions.
  - gburt 10y ago
    You should put an email address in your profile if you're serious about acting as routing service for "lost" GC support.
  - brianx 10y ago
    We are currently considering going with Google Cloud but were not sure if it's going to be any better then other company's offerings. Apparently Urs has an OKR to become the top 2nd cloud provider. This tells me Google has accepted the fact they can't compete with AWS and are fighting for second place against the likes of Microsoft. We follow you're miniclusters project and have noticed that you just finished the deployment of your Japan site. Which other locations are you going to cover in the near future?
ktamura 10y ago
This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless, Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible. Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in the last 6 months. Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes, AWS still "gets" enterprise better than GCP. And yes, GCP is back in the cloud infrastructure game and will give AWS and Microsoft a run for their money.
- TheIronYuppie 10y ago
  I don't think we've discussed revenue anywhere, where did you get this number? We'll certainly do our best! Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.
  - ktamura 10y ago
    Hi there, This was my source: http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-head-in-the-cloud http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-hea... The # is from Oct 2015, so it's entirely possible that my number is very out of date. Couldn't figure out how to amend my original comment, so adding this one as a substitute.
bootload 10y ago
Diane Greene talking at Startup School in 2013, VMWare ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c
williadc 10y ago
tl;dr - Greene convinced Google to get serious about providing cloud services to enterprise.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  I know internet comments are pointless, but this isn't the truth. Google knew it had to take things seriously, and as a result hired her. New hires, even at the exec level, usually don't have the social capital to make huge changes. So they usually tie in to an existing sentiment.
  - eitally 10y ago
    I think you'll see huge changes as a result ... and you also need to remember Diane was a Google board member for three years prior to taking this role.
pm90 10y ago
> When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API, translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers weather data and language services, and so on, Greene's got a comeback ready. "We have Chromebooks." Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than others. Am I missing something here? Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete information in this article at all. Sounds like a fluff piece/advertisement to me (IMO).
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Like she said - Chromebooks are very secure and easy to administer. They're also the ideal choice for running Google Apps in the enterprise.
  - partiallypro 10y ago
    > Google Apps in the enterprise Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust in its offerings and just so much better all around. My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a start-up.) I feel like an SMB is not likely to do volume purchases of Chromebooks, but a large corporation is...which Google just fails at in their offering in the office space, imo.
    - kyrra 10y ago
      What issue do you have with Google apps that Microsoft does better at?
      - willvarfar 10y ago
        Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy animations etc. Basically, I was forced to go back to Powerpoint, and I didn't want to. Given that the google docs today is the same google docs from five years back, I figure that Google invests 0% in them and using them themselves. It is really frustrating - it wouldn't take a programmer more than a few weeks to clean things up and make real headway. I really can't cut google no slack on this - its an unloved backwater of featurelessness.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?
- harshal 10y ago
  Geographic reach is the significant thing holding GCP back at this point - despite being ahead on the tech. Not having a Singapore presence (or anything closer to India) basically kills it as a serious option for many Indian companies. I personally know of a couple of startups personally who would have loved to use GCP since they actually want to use things like BigQuery, but went with AWS due to this. They have so far just mentioned they are adding two regions soon - but nothing about where. I fear its just additional options in Europe or something ... 2017 is still too far out for a startup considering options today. Edit: Oh .... looks like I missed the announcement that the two new regions are Tokyo and Oregon. Looks like India is out of luck for now.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Hmm, our Taiwan region (asia-east1) is too far? We've had a number of customers from India, and thanks to our points-of-presence throughout the world it's not so simple as "AWS is in Singapore, Google is in Taiwan". That said, we hear you, and you can imagine we've done a lot of asking customers (and losing deals!) on the basis of where we are and where we could be. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
    - gumshuda 10y ago
      AWS is coming to Mumbai(IN) in near future. It will make it give much better performance for us so right now investing time in GCE is difficult to justify.
    - harshal 10y ago
      Yes, Taiwan is too far. I personally know of an adtech startup that is going through contortions because they need to stay below latency limits on specific ad exchanges and those exchanges are located in Singapore. Taiwan is certainly way to far for them. There are other instances where I think additional ~50ms latency diff to from India to Taiwan matters much less and I am dubious if it is material. But what matters if that the difference exists and people believe it does matter.
msravi 10y ago
I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region) a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM flexibly to a point, which is important for me. Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year. And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.
- harshal 10y ago
  Yeah, I've seen multiple folks putting off reserved instance commitments and continuing to pay on-demand costs since they don't want to get locked in for a year. Its a serious commitment for smaller companies. The No-Upfront reservation options that AWS last year helped narrow the difference quite a bit - but Google automatic discounts for sustained use are so much better and less complicated for users.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - boulos 10y ago
    And per-minute billing, and the ability to move between zones month to month ("Oh, Haswell zone just launched? I'll be moving there..."). It's night and day, and if I could, I'd happily take the other side of any RI deal ;). Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
- mkj 10y ago
  You can't buy a GC instance in Singapore though? Not quite a fair comparison in that case!
  - msravi 10y ago
    It's Taiwan[1]. Close enough for me - actually better, because I'm mostly talking to servers in Hong Kong. 1. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones#available https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-...
2pointsomone 10y ago
Wow I did not know she gave her $150m on the sale of Bebop to charity. That is very very impressive and must be celebrated more.
- zaroth 10y ago
  Yes, but... At her tax bracket and future earning potential, the money is very likely to be worth more as a donation than as income. Total tax rate would be above 50%, but as a donation you get a $1-for-$1 deduction against future income. So the choice is something like 'keep 40 cents on the dollar today, or negate 60 cents on the dollar in taxes tomorrow.' Also, the money isn't really all gone to a 3rd party, it's in a foundation-type entity similar to how Zuck does it.
  - phonon 10y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. The deduction is in the same amount of the income she just received (I assume her basis (since she was a founder) was very low or near zero). It will not be available for "future income". The foundation-type entity is correct though, she will still be overseeing how it's spent.
    - zaroth 10y ago
      No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the personal tax return. Plus you still get to take the deduction on the fair market value of the security. See: http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-estate-planning/appreciated-securities.shtml http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-esta...
      - phonon 10y ago
        Ummm...the whole point is that she sold those shares to Google, donating large "paper profits" is a total other thing. EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but that's not what the SEC notice said. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316000722/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316... "Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each in the Merger, plus cash for fractional shares. Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund."
bogomipz 10y ago
How exactly did she "transform" it if they were number 3 before and are number 3 now?
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Really? Down-voted for asking a legitimate question related to the article? Why? HN is becoming a bit silly with this isn't it?
  - manigandham 10y ago
    I think it's because you severely limited the perception to a basic ranking. It's a massive undertaking to actually move up against AWS or Azure considering the incredible scale of these platforms so continuing to be #3 in customers is not really an accurate measure of progress. The article is pretty clear on what's she's done so far. There's no denying that they have a lot of work to do but if you're actively using the platform then you'll notice that there has been a lot of change in just a few months with them, which should all help to increase that customer number.
    - texthompson 10y ago
      Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.
- discodave 10y ago
  Revenue is a trailing indicator.
- obmelvin 10y ago
  They have built a lot of momentum in terms of their commitment to 'enterprise' cloud offerings. Obviously that's not going to happen overnight, but they have some amazing technology underlying and are moving in the right direction.
- crucifiction 10y ago
  She has transformed its ability to get PR pieces printed in a variety of news websites and get those links into HN. She has also transformed the amount of Google employees who respond on HN threads when GCE is brought up in any context. As far as the actual business, this PR piece seems to indicate the main transformation was adding in all of the "enterprise cruft" needed to be a real #3 player and not slip to #4.
fpgaminer 10y ago
I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter. If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down? Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet, having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences have left me sorely disappointed. It's been a nightmare, honestly. Why such a difference between what I expected and what we experienced? The article seems to allude that Google's cloud offerings are, like a lot of services they offer, just side projects for them. That would explain why a lot of their platform feels half-baked. And the article (clearly a PR piece) waffles on about how Diane Greene has brought in lots of sales and marketing muscle. I see that clearly in the large amount of PR articles about Google Cloud floating around (including on Hacker News) and the sheer quantity of Google employees on social media and on here. I don't see the same from AWS. At first I saw that as a good thing, but it seems like the same effort that goes into their marketing and customer engagement has not gone into the technical side of things, despite what the article may say. Perhaps that's a necessity of business. Maybe Alphabet doesn't want to pour more resources into Google Cloud without seeing more revenue. So Diane Greene is beefing up the numbers so she can get the technical resources she needs allocated. Maybe. My personal opinion remains doubtful, given Google's overarching track record, but time will tell. Google Cloud is by no means unusable. It's a nightmare to work with, yes, but it does work, and if you've got the engineers on staff to handle the extra workload, then it's fine. We're going to continue to put up with it, because Google's particular mix of offerings allows us to save money and at the end of the day that's the common tongue. I just wish they wouldn't make my life more difficult.
- boulos 10y ago
  Sorry to hear about your troubles! Assuming you got hit by our painful network outage, we can only repeat: sorry, and we have taken serious action internally to avoid this again. To explain the difference between your experience (outages taking you out) and "Google.com", I'd guess the difference is that "Google.com" is massively distributed. Perhaps you were running in just one zone or region, or maybe even quite sophisticatedly running across two regions (say us-central1 and us-east1). For Google.com, we have 15 "major" datacenter locations (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...) which are approximately regions in Compute Engine / Cloud parlance. To your other question though, Cloud is not a side project. Google happens to be enormous, so even though we have thousands of folks across Technical Infrastructure (TI) working on Cloud, thousands divided by tens of thousands is still a "small" percentage (but TI is bigger than say YouTube or Android). [Edit: And please reach out to support! Don't be silently unhappy, have someone call us up, even if it's just to strangle a PM about how difficult it is to use.] Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
querulous 10y ago
google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it
- wstrange 10y ago
  Google offers managed service variants comparable to most of those AWS services. For example - Cloud SQL. How are these anymore "home grown" than the AWS equivalents?
  - querulous 10y ago
    calling cloud sql comparable to aws rds is exactly what i mean cloud sql offers a single version of mysql aws rds has multiple versions of postgres, mysql, oracle, mssql and aurora
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Managed Spark & Hadoop = Cloud Dataproc https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/ https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/ One-click deploys for Kafka and Postgres: https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/kafka https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la..., https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/postgresql https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la...
  - jordanthoms 10y ago
    To be fair there is a big difference between a button to deploy an image and something like RDS which manages that instance going forward.
nmy 10y ago
I use both AWS and GCP. GCP has better engineering but fails to offer a good business experience. And this aggressive GCP PR feels a bit desperate.
shade23 10y ago
Someone from BI or anyone,please fix the """ text in the article.Its distracting considering nearly 30% of the article is quoted by Diane Greene.I guess I am nitpicking or is a fault with my browser?
- scholia 10y ago
  Sorry if this is not much help, but I'm not seeing any instances of """ in Firefox or Vivaldi (Chromium-based) in Windows 7 Pro.
  - shade23 10y ago
    I just reopened the article on Firefox Aurora too.Its become worse now. I can see <p> and <img> tags too.Wow
deafcalculus 10y ago
The one thing I've found baffling about both AWS and GCE is the bandwidth pricing. At about 0.1$/GB, it's 10x more expensive than competitors like linode. Why is that? Bandwidth cost is the primary reason I'm afraid of hosting side projects on AWS/GCE.
- aiiane 10y ago
  Because Linode and similar overcommit their bandwidth given that they're charging a package deal - most people won't actually use the full allocated bandwidth. AWS/GCE charge for actual bandwidth usage, which means that everyone uses exactly what they pay for, and the folks who use less bandwidth don't subsidize the folks who use more.
djhworld 10y ago
I'd like to play with google cloud using my personal details but here in the UK it says you need to be a business/commercial entity on the registration page with the following clause > This service can only be used for business or commercial reasons. You are responsible for assessing and reporting VAT. whereas Amazon don't seem to stipulate that (at least not explcitly, there might be something in their t+c's) and they deal with all the VAT stuff. Oh well.
krakensden 10y ago
> Google's competitive strength, Greene believes, is the breadth of the tech it can offer an enterprise. > Enterprise-app developers can tap into things like Maps, Google's computer-vision engine (the tech that powers Google Photos), weather data, and language/translation/speech recognition. They can build apps on top of Google's Calendar, documents, spreadsheet and presentation apps. > And, under Greene's new integrated organization, they can even tap into the tech that powers Google's ads or YouTube, search, or its many other services. Probably a good time to reshare the famous Yegge rant about platforms: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
p0rkbelly 10y ago
Not to get into a technical discussion of the merits between the two. But, I don't get the excitement around Diane Greene? Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? Seems like a major blunder and sitting on your laurels.
- frostmatthew 10y ago
  > Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? She left VMware in 2008, that's only two years after AWS launched and two years before Microsoft Azure. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight "cloud" seems like an obvious next step but I imagine it wasn't as clear in 2008ish - even Amazon didn't move its retail operation to AWS until two years later[1]. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-australia-closing-keynote-how-amazoncom-migrated-to-aws-by-jon-jenkins http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-au...

219 points by dwynings 10y ago

Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there are definitely changes happening both in product and culture. As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail which is what we saw as well. [1] I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all the hiring at Google. 1. https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp

boulos 10y ago
Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective customer who doesn't find the current channels working? (I ask to know what to work on, not to accuse). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- ing33k 10y ago
  Hi, sorry if it's the wrong place to report an issue that I faced recently with GCP. I had reached the limit of max projects one can have in their dashboard. I deleted some projects and when I tried to create a new project, I was getting the same message . I had to wait for a week to create a new project ( the time window in which user can stop project deletion ) this really prevented me from trying some new services in spite of GCP giving generous $300 credit.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Interesting, I thought there was a "Seriously, I know what I'm doing, delete right now". I've never run into this, and apparently that's because the issue is that we have a limit of 10 free trial projects (to prevent abuse). I'll look into the "Seriously, let me delete immediately" thing though.
  - mbrukman 10y ago
    I'm curious why you would need to delete projects and create new ones just to try out new products and services—could you please clarify? A project is just a container for resources. You can use any combination of GCP products and services within a single project—you are only charged for the resources you use, so just deleting what you created earlier would get you to a zero-state.
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  My startup was awarded $10k in Google Cloud hosting credits at Web Summit. By the time we went to launch they had expired. If you know of anyone at Google who would be open to helping us redeem them that'd be awesome! My email is hn (at) joinjune (dot) com
  - mbrukman 10y ago
    Hi, I'm a product manager on Google Cloud Platform. Sorry to hear that your credits expired before you could try out GCP. I inquired on your behalf, and was told that the Web Summit you're referring to is from 2014 (2 years ago), and the credits expired in 2015 (1 year ago), and unfortunately, this program is no longer available. That said, we do have a credits program for startups (https://cloud.google.com/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/startups/) but you cannot apply for it directly, you need to "contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for Startups application details." (quote from the site) In the mean time, if you just want to kick the tires, you can sign up on https://cloud.google.com https://cloud.google.com for a free trial.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Perhaps I should restate: I can reach most people via forums/social (although ignored plenty of times including the main startup guy) but the conversations and the platform just seem informal as if this entire thing is a side project (I know it's not). We're a paying customer and I understand tiered support is available (as it is with every vendor) but there's a distinct difference in on-boarding, which is even more important and has to happen before we're a stable long-term client with a support contract. GCP is very barren in on-boarding resources and opaque in happenings. Here are some of my recommendations: - The APIs (which are quite literally how applications connect to the platform) need a lot of work. I know there are idiomatic versions in progress but this has to be improved rapidly, like yesterday. They just don't seem production ready (they're even called alpha). I don't want to dig around github, I just expect to use them in whatever major language I'm writing. - Documentation has recently gotten much better (good job!) but was terrible for a long time and is still confusing in parts. Add more solution/use-case oriented writeups. This is often the best way to understand how to use a new service rather than wondering how to make it best fit our app. - Send an email as soon as an account is spending more than $1k/mth and see what they're doing and how you can help. Don't mention anything about buying a support plan or offer it free for the first quarter until everything is setup. The money is far outweighed by the goodwill. - Properly staff the startups department so they can vet companies instead of outsourcing this to VCs/Accelerators. Right now you're turning away many companies that are bootstrapped or have other needs and are actually focused on building sustainable/profitable companies - the ones that will become long-term paying clients for you. - Put out a roadmap with more detail or let companies take part in planning the next features. There seems to be only vague indications of what's coming up in the future. Formality, reliability, assurance and easy access are critical, especially when you're asking companies to build on you as a foundation. The basics of computing are becoming commoditized so it's important that the services and service are able to differentiate. I get the sense that the GCP team is aware of all this though so good luck, we all want a great platform and I can't wait to see what's in store.
  - mbrukman 10y ago
    Thanks for all the feedback! Appreciate your taking the time to write this up in detail, and thanks for not sugar-coating it. We'll share this with the relevant teams and work on improvements across the board. Great to hear that you like the changes to the docs! Please keep providing feedback and suggestions.
- gburt 10y ago
  You should put an email address in your profile if you're serious about acting as routing service for "lost" GC support.
- brianx 10y ago
  We are currently considering going with Google Cloud but were not sure if it's going to be any better then other company's offerings. Apparently Urs has an OKR to become the top 2nd cloud provider. This tells me Google has accepted the fact they can't compete with AWS and are fighting for second place against the likes of Microsoft. We follow you're miniclusters project and have noticed that you just finished the deployment of your Japan site. Which other locations are you going to cover in the near future?

ktamura 10y ago

This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless, Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible. Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in the last 6 months. Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes, AWS still "gets" enterprise better than GCP. And yes, GCP is back in the cloud infrastructure game and will give AWS and Microsoft a run for their money.

TheIronYuppie 10y ago
I don't think we've discussed revenue anywhere, where did you get this number? We'll certainly do our best! Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.
- ktamura 10y ago
  Hi there, This was my source: http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-head-in-the-cloud http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-hea... The # is from Oct 2015, so it's entirely possible that my number is very out of date. Couldn't figure out how to amend my original comment, so adding this one as a substitute.

bootload 10y ago

Diane Greene talking at Startup School in 2013, VMWare ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c

williadc 10y ago

tl;dr - Greene convinced Google to get serious about providing cloud services to enterprise.

ryanobjc 10y ago
I know internet comments are pointless, but this isn't the truth. Google knew it had to take things seriously, and as a result hired her. New hires, even at the exec level, usually don't have the social capital to make huge changes. So they usually tie in to an existing sentiment.
- eitally 10y ago
  I think you'll see huge changes as a result ... and you also need to remember Diane was a Google board member for three years prior to taking this role.

pm90 10y ago

> When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API, translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers weather data and language services, and so on, Greene's got a comeback ready. "We have Chromebooks." Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than others. Am I missing something here? Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete information in this article at all. Sounds like a fluff piece/advertisement to me (IMO).

bitmapbrother 10y ago
Like she said - Chromebooks are very secure and easy to administer. They're also the ideal choice for running Google Apps in the enterprise.
- partiallypro 10y ago
  > Google Apps in the enterprise Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust in its offerings and just so much better all around. My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a start-up.) I feel like an SMB is not likely to do volume purchases of Chromebooks, but a large corporation is...which Google just fails at in their offering in the office space, imo.
  - kyrra 10y ago
    What issue do you have with Google apps that Microsoft does better at?
    - willvarfar 10y ago
      Google docs hasn't moved forward since it was first released. Its as feature poor as ever. The style of charts is so bland it has a java applet in a myspace page feel to it. There are no multi-column layouts. Some things can be created offline, but not drawings etc. Recent Powerpoint on the desktop is just lightyears better at animation. The Office 365 nonsense lags behind - it can view, but not create, the fancy animations etc. Basically, I was forced to go back to Powerpoint, and I didn't want to. Given that the google docs today is the same google docs from five years back, I figure that Google invests 0% in them and using them themselves. It is really frustrating - it wouldn't take a programmer more than a few weeks to clean things up and make real headway. I really can't cut google no slack on this - its an unloved backwater of featurelessness.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional 10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of AWS?

harshal 10y ago
Geographic reach is the significant thing holding GCP back at this point - despite being ahead on the tech. Not having a Singapore presence (or anything closer to India) basically kills it as a serious option for many Indian companies. I personally know of a couple of startups personally who would have loved to use GCP since they actually want to use things like BigQuery, but went with AWS due to this. They have so far just mentioned they are adding two regions soon - but nothing about where. I fear its just additional options in Europe or something ... 2017 is still too far out for a startup considering options today. Edit: Oh .... looks like I missed the announcement that the two new regions are Tokyo and Oregon. Looks like India is out of luck for now.
- boulos 10y ago
  Hmm, our Taiwan region (asia-east1) is too far? We've had a number of customers from India, and thanks to our points-of-presence throughout the world it's not so simple as "AWS is in Singapore, Google is in Taiwan". That said, we hear you, and you can imagine we've done a lot of asking customers (and losing deals!) on the basis of where we are and where we could be. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
  - gumshuda 10y ago
    AWS is coming to Mumbai(IN) in near future. It will make it give much better performance for us so right now investing time in GCE is difficult to justify.
  - harshal 10y ago
    Yes, Taiwan is too far. I personally know of an adtech startup that is going through contortions because they need to stay below latency limits on specific ad exchanges and those exchanges are located in Singapore. Taiwan is certainly way to far for them. There are other instances where I think additional ~50ms latency diff to from India to Taiwan matters much less and I am dubious if it is material. But what matters if that the difference exists and people believe it does matter.

msravi 10y ago

I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region) a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM flexibly to a point, which is important for me. Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year. And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.

harshal 10y ago
Yeah, I've seen multiple folks putting off reserved instance commitments and continuing to pay on-demand costs since they don't want to get locked in for a year. Its a serious commitment for smaller companies. The No-Upfront reservation options that AWS last year helped narrow the difference quite a bit - but Google automatic discounts for sustained use are so much better and less complicated for users.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- boulos 10y ago
  And per-minute billing, and the ability to move between zones month to month ("Oh, Haswell zone just launched? I'll be moving there..."). It's night and day, and if I could, I'd happily take the other side of any RI deal ;). Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
mkj 10y ago
You can't buy a GC instance in Singapore though? Not quite a fair comparison in that case!
- msravi 10y ago
  It's Taiwan[1]. Close enough for me - actually better, because I'm mostly talking to servers in Hong Kong. 1. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones#available https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-...

2pointsomone 10y ago

Wow I did not know she gave her $150m on the sale of Bebop to charity. That is very very impressive and must be celebrated more.

zaroth 10y ago
Yes, but... At her tax bracket and future earning potential, the money is very likely to be worth more as a donation than as income. Total tax rate would be above 50%, but as a donation you get a $1-for-$1 deduction against future income. So the choice is something like 'keep 40 cents on the dollar today, or negate 60 cents on the dollar in taxes tomorrow.' Also, the money isn't really all gone to a 3rd party, it's in a foundation-type entity similar to how Zuck does it.
- phonon 10y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. The deduction is in the same amount of the income she just received (I assume her basis (since she was a founder) was very low or near zero). It will not be available for "future income". The foundation-type entity is correct though, she will still be overseeing how it's spent.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the personal tax return. Plus you still get to take the deduction on the fair market value of the security. See: http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-estate-planning/appreciated-securities.shtml http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-esta...
    - phonon 10y ago
      Ummm...the whole point is that she sold those shares to Google, donating large "paper profits" is a total other thing. EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but that's not what the SEC notice said. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316000722/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316... "Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock for 200,729 shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each in the Merger, plus cash for fractional shares. Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a donor advised fund."

bogomipz 10y ago

How exactly did she "transform" it if they were number 3 before and are number 3 now?

bogomipz 10y ago
Really? Down-voted for asking a legitimate question related to the article? Why? HN is becoming a bit silly with this isn't it?
- manigandham 10y ago
  I think it's because you severely limited the perception to a basic ranking. It's a massive undertaking to actually move up against AWS or Azure considering the incredible scale of these platforms so continuing to be #3 in customers is not really an accurate measure of progress. The article is pretty clear on what's she's done so far. There's no denying that they have a lot of work to do but if you're actively using the platform then you'll notice that there has been a lot of change in just a few months with them, which should all help to increase that customer number.
  - texthompson 10y ago
    Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.
discodave 10y ago
Revenue is a trailing indicator.
obmelvin 10y ago
They have built a lot of momentum in terms of their commitment to 'enterprise' cloud offerings. Obviously that's not going to happen overnight, but they have some amazing technology underlying and are moving in the right direction.
crucifiction 10y ago
She has transformed its ability to get PR pieces printed in a variety of news websites and get those links into HN. She has also transformed the amount of Google employees who respond on HN threads when GCE is brought up in any context. As far as the actual business, this PR piece seems to indicate the main transformation was adding in all of the "enterprise cruft" needed to be a real #3 player and not slip to #4.

fpgaminer 10y ago

I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter. If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down? Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet, having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences have left me sorely disappointed. It's been a nightmare, honestly. Why such a difference between what I expected and what we experienced? The article seems to allude that Google's cloud offerings are, like a lot of services they offer, just side projects for them. That would explain why a lot of their platform feels half-baked. And the article (clearly a PR piece) waffles on about how Diane Greene has brought in lots of sales and marketing muscle. I see that clearly in the large amount of PR articles about Google Cloud floating around (including on Hacker News) and the sheer quantity of Google employees on social media and on here. I don't see the same from AWS. At first I saw that as a good thing, but it seems like the same effort that goes into their marketing and customer engagement has not gone into the technical side of things, despite what the article may say. Perhaps that's a necessity of business. Maybe Alphabet doesn't want to pour more resources into Google Cloud without seeing more revenue. So Diane Greene is beefing up the numbers so she can get the technical resources she needs allocated. Maybe. My personal opinion remains doubtful, given Google's overarching track record, but time will tell. Google Cloud is by no means unusable. It's a nightmare to work with, yes, but it does work, and if you've got the engineers on staff to handle the extra workload, then it's fine. We're going to continue to put up with it, because Google's particular mix of offerings allows us to save money and at the end of the day that's the common tongue. I just wish they wouldn't make my life more difficult.

boulos 10y ago
Sorry to hear about your troubles! Assuming you got hit by our painful network outage, we can only repeat: sorry, and we have taken serious action internally to avoid this again. To explain the difference between your experience (outages taking you out) and "Google.com", I'd guess the difference is that "Google.com" is massively distributed. Perhaps you were running in just one zone or region, or maybe even quite sophisticatedly running across two regions (say us-central1 and us-east1). For Google.com, we have 15 "major" datacenter locations (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...) which are approximately regions in Compute Engine / Cloud parlance. To your other question though, Cloud is not a side project. Google happens to be enormous, so even though we have thousands of folks across Technical Infrastructure (TI) working on Cloud, thousands divided by tens of thousands is still a "small" percentage (but TI is bigger than say YouTube or Android). [Edit: And please reach out to support! Don't be silently unhappy, have someone call us up, even if it's just to strangle a PM about how difficult it is to use.] Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

querulous 10y ago

google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it

wstrange 10y ago
Google offers managed service variants comparable to most of those AWS services. For example - Cloud SQL. How are these anymore "home grown" than the AWS equivalents?
- querulous 10y ago
  calling cloud sql comparable to aws rds is exactly what i mean cloud sql offers a single version of mysql aws rds has multiple versions of postgres, mysql, oracle, mssql and aurora
jpatokal 10y ago
Managed Spark & Hadoop = Cloud Dataproc https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/ https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/ One-click deploys for Kafka and Postgres: https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/kafka https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la..., https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/postgresql https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la...
- jordanthoms 10y ago
  To be fair there is a big difference between a button to deploy an image and something like RDS which manages that instance going forward.

nmy 10y ago

I use both AWS and GCP. GCP has better engineering but fails to offer a good business experience. And this aggressive GCP PR feels a bit desperate.

shade23 10y ago

Someone from BI or anyone,please fix the """ text in the article.Its distracting considering nearly 30% of the article is quoted by Diane Greene.I guess I am nitpicking or is a fault with my browser?

scholia 10y ago
Sorry if this is not much help, but I'm not seeing any instances of """ in Firefox or Vivaldi (Chromium-based) in Windows 7 Pro.
- shade23 10y ago
  I just reopened the article on Firefox Aurora too.Its become worse now. I can see <p> and <img> tags too.Wow

deafcalculus 10y ago

The one thing I've found baffling about both AWS and GCE is the bandwidth pricing. At about 0.1$/GB, it's 10x more expensive than competitors like linode. Why is that? Bandwidth cost is the primary reason I'm afraid of hosting side projects on AWS/GCE.

aiiane 10y ago
Because Linode and similar overcommit their bandwidth given that they're charging a package deal - most people won't actually use the full allocated bandwidth. AWS/GCE charge for actual bandwidth usage, which means that everyone uses exactly what they pay for, and the folks who use less bandwidth don't subsidize the folks who use more.

djhworld 10y ago

I'd like to play with google cloud using my personal details but here in the UK it says you need to be a business/commercial entity on the registration page with the following clause > This service can only be used for business or commercial reasons. You are responsible for assessing and reporting VAT. whereas Amazon don't seem to stipulate that (at least not explcitly, there might be something in their t+c's) and they deal with all the VAT stuff. Oh well.

krakensden 10y ago

> Google's competitive strength, Greene believes, is the breadth of the tech it can offer an enterprise. > Enterprise-app developers can tap into things like Maps, Google's computer-vision engine (the tech that powers Google Photos), weather data, and language/translation/speech recognition. They can build apps on top of Google's Calendar, documents, spreadsheet and presentation apps. > And, under Greene's new integrated organization, they can even tap into the tech that powers Google's ads or YouTube, search, or its many other services. Probably a good time to reshare the famous Yegge rant about platforms: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

p0rkbelly 10y ago

Not to get into a technical discussion of the merits between the two. But, I don't get the excitement around Diane Greene? Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? Seems like a major blunder and sitting on your laurels.

frostmatthew 10y ago
> Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? She left VMware in 2008, that's only two years after AWS launched and two years before Microsoft Azure. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight "cloud" seems like an obvious next step but I imagine it wasn't as clear in 2008ish - even Amazon didn't move its retail operation to AWS until two years later[1]. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-australia-closing-keynote-how-amazoncom-migrated-to-aws-by-jon-jenkins http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-au...