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How Google Is Challenging AWS

467 points by tortilla 10y ago

honkhonkpants 10y ago
I disagree with the central thesis of this article that Google is a product company rather than a platform company. I think that's wrong because throughout its history Google has asked itself "what if we had this?" first, and built the products around that later. Essentially the company believes that products will naturally emerge if you hire tens of thousands of engineers and deploy an unholy number of computers. I said this before on this site: Google's core product is dirt-cheap computing. Everything else follows from that.
- fumar 10y ago
  Is company's business model based on what they use to create their Widgets or what Widgets they sell (and how)? I agree its hard to paint Google solely as a products company, but its also more than the sum of dirt-cheap computing.
  - justicezyx 10y ago
    Dirt cheap computing is like the life line of Google. W/o that, nothing Google did can sustain at all.
    - fumar 10y ago
      Just curious on your thoughts, are not most modern companies (startups) dependent on cheap computing (+ smart folks)?
      - akiselev 10y ago
        They depend on cheap computing in the sense that they only pay for what they use and don't have upfront capex costs but I don't think thats what GP means. Google initially grew by filling data centers with commodity consumer computers instead of "enterprise-grade" servers and now they have cheap computing in the form of ASICs and highly customized/integrated general purpose servers.
      - justicezyx 10y ago
        Google is probably the one company is most dependent on their computing efficiency. Google's most prominent products are possible only because they could deliver those with the unprecedented computing efficiency. This is not to be found anywhere else. For example, search, Gmail, Youtube. Before AWS, Amazon care about efficiency. But fundamentally, Amazon do not depend on computing efficiency to support the company's bottom line, or at least only in a degree that is far less important compared to Google.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        Not at all. Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources. Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D). For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place. That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive. (Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).
- kgwgk 10y ago
  A "platform company" would provide a platform to its users. Unless I misunderstand your comment you say that Google has an internal platform that it uses to build products for customers, which is something different.
lasermike026 10y ago
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. How about criminal penalties for false arrest due to bugs? To be serious this is a catastrophic failure. We can not deprive people of there freedom because of a glitch. This system doesn't have fail safes.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  You must've replied to the wrong article, this one is not the one about the California court's new computer system.
ap22213 10y ago
I want to try out Google, but they need to make it easier to try it out. I have petabytes of data in S3 that I would need to move first (at least some of it).
- mvitorino 10y ago
  You can try "Cloud Storage Transfer": `Transfer data to your Cloud Storage buckets from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), HTTP/HTTPS servers or other buckets. You can schedule once-off or daily transfers, and you can filter files based on name prefix and when they were changed.` https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/
  - ap22213 10y ago
    It would be nice if they managed the transfer themselves via AWS Snowball. Sure, they would have upfront costs, but based on what I spend on AWS monthly, it's probably worth it to them.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      Why would you want to move data between AWS and GCP using a hard drive? The networks between the two cloud providers are immense.
      - cobookman 10y ago
        It'd avoid expensive egress costs.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - ranman 10y ago
        At some point (many 1000s of terrabytes) it is faster and cheaper to ship the data on physical devices than it is to send it over the network. (I work for AWS)
darksaints 10y ago
> Amazon’s AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company successful in the first place I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. As far as Amazon's AWS strategy, I can't comment (I worked in the retail business side). But I can comment on a relatively small aspect of management that I witnessed. At one point in time I had a very strong need for PostGIS, and I lamented on an internal email list about AWS not having a Postgres version of RDS. I received an email directly from Raju Gulabani, VP of databases in AWS. He scheduled an appointment with me, him, and two product managers. He asked me pointed questions about why I wanted Postgres over the other options, how I would be using it, what extensions I wanted, and what features were important to me. He thanked me for my time, and less than a year later it was released to the public. In the retail business side, I never had more than 2 minutes at a time with someone at the director level, and not once had I spoken to someone at the VP level. Literally zero communication from the bottom up, everything was top down. Whether AWS had already been working on it or not I don't know, but they definitely took the time to hear my case, and when it was released it was almost perfectly as I had asked for. And that, IMO is waaaay more important than anything regarding the size of a team or whatever the fluff pieces have attributed.
- darawk 10y ago
  > I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and the largest cloud services platform in the world seem like two pretty big wins. Either one on its own would be an extremely successful company IMO.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    >Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.
aikah 10y ago
tldr; competition is good. Google Cloud UI is vastly superior to AWS. It's clear to me AWS didn't put a lot of effort into their interface, Google console is nice too in order to quickly experiment with the platform. On the other hand, it seems to me that AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now.
- bduerst 10y ago
  >AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now How so? I thought this was brought up just a week ago saying GCloud is consistently cheaper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021
  - ranman 10y ago
    That article had a unique relationship with reality. A few of my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 (I work for AWS)
    - bduerst 10y ago
      I definitely agree on your critique of the bandwidth claims, but the gist I got from that article was that custom instances outcompete AWS's reserved instances on price - i.e. per CPU and per GB memory, GCloud is cheaper. Is that not true?
      - ranman 10y ago
        Actually I do think that GCE offers cheaper instances, but the 50% overall price reduction claim is unsubstantiated. The author compared completely different instance types. Monthly discounts does make GCE cheaper but for many instance types without that discount it's actually more expensive on GCE.
        dekhn 10y ago
        Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).
thiyags 10y ago
very nice article. well articulated. not just tech but also the different business models(futuristic)
- sorenbs 10y ago
  I can highly recommend subscribing to http://exponent.fm/ http://exponent.fm/ the weekly podcast Ben is hosting with James.
  - throwaway40483 10y ago
    I concur. In fact, I find the podcast better than articles. I'm not sure why though. I think the conversational tone of the podcast is better. They attack the problem from different area and then hone in on the main point.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
seregine 10y ago
Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matters, and management is tight. The platform emerged because internal teams thought of their infrastructure services as products with customers. Google really puts ideas (or technology) first; it aims to hire the smartest people and rewards them for launching new things and solving complex problems rather than optimizing UX or making customers happy. Resources are ample and management is loose, so individual contributors can try new things with greater leisure. It's been compared to grad school. But simplifying customer experience is less of a priority, so the internal infrastructure was notoriously complex and hard to use. They're now learning to prioritize customers, but it's hard to change culture. Of course, both companies are huge and diverse and evolving, so you'll find plenty of variance. App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow.
- findjashua 10y ago
  "rather than optimizing UX or making customers happy" as someone who's dabbled a bit w both, I found GCP UI/UX to be far simpler than dealing w AWS
- mathattack 10y ago
  Great point on simplifying the UI being a priority. This takes a lot of coordination and willingness to say "We will drop features A, B and C to make the overall experience easier." This is ultimately both an organizational and cultural issue. Some companies optimize on centralization (historically Apple) while others have a more decentralized "empower the individual" ethos. This article from the same source highlights how Apple's centralized org is core to it's view of product integration. https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/ https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad... When dealing with a platform, this user experience coordination becomes much more important. (Think the old Apple ecosystem versus all the crap that came pre-installed on the Wintel systems)
mixmastamyk 10y ago
I would like to try out google cloud due to its lower costs, but don't trust them with my data--partially perception I know. Also Amazon has never failed me over the last 15 years I've been doing business with them, so I'll probably continue despite the clunkiness of their products.
- naner 10y ago
  I'm not sure if Google's commercial products are as bad as their consumer-facing offerings, but if we can't get someone on the phone when a support issue arises then we'd never consider using them for any cloud services.
  - rrdharan 10y ago
    [Disclaimer: I work on GCP at Google] GCP Gold and Platinum support packages include phone support: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
    - naner 10y ago
      Thanks rrdharan for pointing that out, I should have spent a couple minutes researching first.
    - eknkc 10y ago
      And they cost a smartphone / month. AWS has a 40$ dev support package which is great.
brilliantcode 10y ago
If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost. If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge. By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.
- CobrastanJorji 10y ago
  I haven't used Azure, so I'm a bit confused. Do you mean something with different capabilities than Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio? https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/ https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    nice find! I didn't know about GCT plugin but yes that's more or less along the lines of what I expect from AWS. However, Google Cloud really hasn't entered my mind as much as Azure has this year. AWS has always been there. I'm not sure as to why this is maybe I have built a perception that GCE is more expensive and my documentation experience with Google wasn't anymore smoother than AWS. One thing for sure, Build 2016 earlier this year was one of the key driver for my conversion + Nadella's leadership. Google Cloud has always been obscured by AWS and now Azure in my mind and so far, they've yet to really jump out at me like AWS does on HN regularly which Azure is now catching up.
- daxfohl 10y ago
  What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
daxfohl 10y ago
> Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps that even today keep Windows at the center of business. Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?
- zeveb 10y ago
  > Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible? I certainly don't think so (although there are some nice things about the Windows kernel, if one comes from a VMS background), and it's certainly not the reason for the success of Windows. Remember that MS-DOS beat Mac OS; Windows 1 beat Mac OS; Windows 3.1 beat Mac OS; Windows 95 beat Mac OS. None of those was technically any good whatsoever, and only one of those had a UI that was worth shaking a stick at. The reasons for the success of Windows are non-technical: Bill Gates's mother served on a charity board with the chairman of IBM; business bought IBM computers because no-one ever got fired for buying IBM; IBM clones were cheaper than Macs; IBM clones were more extensible and hackable than Macs; Unix workstation vendors thought they could keep milking their cash cows; Microsoft engaged in noncompetitive behaviour; random chance.
  - daxfohl 10y ago
    So kinda kills the primary analogy the article is based on.
- brassic 10y ago
  To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338
  - st3v3r 10y ago
daxfohl 10y ago
Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. That seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It seems like they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their visibility greatly.
- daxfohl 10y ago
  The article mentioned kubernetes multiple times and I think it's providers like Heroku that actually stand the most to gain there. With kubernetes in theory they should no longer have to make you choose between providers, and be able to run on spot instances of whatever provider is cheapest at the time. You just choose your max latency at certain geo areas and a budget to balance by, some AI to help you determine the tradeoffs, and it does the rest. If Heroku isn't working toward that then there has to be someone doing so soon. If not it seems like there's a pretty big opportunity there.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Cloud Foundry is closest to this vision, in my entirely biased opinion. We're already able to mount standalone installations on AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere and others. Distributing apps across multiple clouds is easy to say, hard to do. Each IaaS has peculiarities and wrinkles, different tradeoffs in performance and cost and so on. It takes a moderately tricky scheduling problem and turns it into a much gnarlier one. What's easier is using high-level tools like Terraform and BOSH to manage installations on different IaaSes, and pushing apps to whichever one you like as you like. I can easily imagine setting up round-robin deploys. That said: data has inertia. Any sensible architecture has to bear that in mind; typically apps will wind up living close to their datastores. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal. Cloud Foundry was partly inspired by and is somewhat in competition with Heroku. "Do one thing and do it well" is underselling Heroku. PaaSes have to do a lot of things and do them well.
olimashi 10y ago
I think Ben (who I generally think is right on) in this post misapprehends the effectiveness of generalized data for machine learning services and thus the effectiveness of this approach in Google’s strategy here. Perhaps the slide makers in Mountain View have the same misapprehension. 1 - Prediction API - you provide your own data there, so no data advantage from Google there. 2 - Cloud Natural Language API - the effectiveness really depends on what type of text you want to understand. If Google’s training data includes information about my type of text application great, but if it doesn’t then what? How do I know that? 3 - Cloud Vision API - likewise. Can I subset the training set? Provide my own examples? If they subset, can I inspect the examples? 4 - Translation API seems like the exception here, mainly because the odds are that customers of translation service are unlikely to have collected language pairs and this collection is more highly specialized. But it’s unclear that this one API would be the deciding factor for many companies choosing which cloud vendor to use. ML services as a differentiator have yet to be proven out. I am highly suspect. Yes, some big general data sets will be better on some applications than others, but an enterprises’ own data about their problem will always be better than a huge, general data set. And if you’re using your own data anyway, you’re going to care about all the platformy things Amazon has already been winning with. Barring proprietary breakthroughs in unsupervised learning, I don’t believe that this strategy as outlined will work in practice.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I think you've really pointed out a very important flaw in that as developers and startups we don't have terabytes of training data. However, I'm not sure who's in the leading edge here while Microsoft seems to suggest as the leader, but in the end machine learning, deep learning will be commoditized with enough training already baked in. ex. Need your web app translated flawlessly into Farsi? Just drop in farsi.js to your </head> and etc.
  - olimashi 10y ago
    Information embedded in a pre-trained model (Google isn't given out that data, just access to an artifact) is helpful if your application lines up to goals of the model. I think it's an open question how broad that alignment might be. It totally depends on the application. You can control the app, but you don't have control over the model. It will be useful to some apps but I don't think it is going to be the secret weapon in Google's fight against AWS as Ben's article suggests. It's a neat argument but I think it ignores the reality of applications and machine learning.
perseusprime11 10y ago
This is how Amazon is challenging Google as of today. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon-ai-to-bring-its-machine-learning-smarts-to-developers/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon-ai-...
wangii 10y ago
>> Microsoft did the same with its Win32 API. Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS ... The author loses his creditability since here.
origami777 10y ago
There's always the simpler explanation to why Google is getting traction: - Price/performance is better in some/many cases for VMs - It's easy(ier?) to use - Clear technical advantage with some of their other services e.g. Load balancers - Customers prefer when there are multiple companies competing for their business I get that there are long-term strategies that involve the likes of container services. But just the fact that they are better in some areas will help them get traction. Plus they have a fantastic brand name.
dxxvi 10y ago
Nothing can beat the 1 year free for AWS free tier.
- dx034 10y ago
  Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    The AWS free tier is useless imho. If the thing you want to test fits into the AWS free tier then a AWS or GCloud solution would be overkill anyway.
    - dx034 10y ago
      But it's good if you just test a bit as a developer. Not to check if a project is valid, but to gain some experience. That way, if you hire as a company, developers more likely have AWS experience than GCE/Azure experience.
      - jsolson 10y ago
        I don't agree on the free trial. I think it lets you play around a lot more than the AWS free tier -- as I said in my comment up the thread, go ahead and move the slider to the right and scale up a bit (a little -- the free trial is still quota limited to prevent abuse), see how things perform, slide it back to the left and have only used a tiny fraction of your credit. I think you get a lot more "kick the tires" flexibility with a moderately large up-front credit. (affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)
- jsolson 10y ago
  Depending on how you use the services the AWS free tier is actually worth less than GCP's $300 free-trial credit: https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/ https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/ I will give Amazon that theirs extends out to a year, but summing up the costs of everything included in the free tier if you use all of it, I think it may still come out to less than $300 (or the equivalents on GCP would, anyway). For example, running an f1-micro for a year will cost you a bit under $60. If you add in another for Google Cloud SQL you're up to a total of about $150 over the course of a year. What they offer you in S3 is basically free (<$2 over the course of a year). It's possible the other services are a better deal than compute and storage, if you have a use for them, but the GCP free trial lets you allocate that $300 however you like. You can scale up more in that 60 days than you can within the AWS free tier. To me, personally, this strikes me as more valuable if I'm trying to sketch out a new product — I'd rather not try to figure out how to fit inside the AWS free tier resource envelope and instead understand how my costs are scaling with the resources I'm using while not being on the hook for those costs (up to the $300 size of the credit, obviously) for the first couple months. Especially to absorb things like shaking out automation -- go ahead, spin up a GKE cluster, scale it out to 5x the size you currently need, run some quick load tests, and then scale it back down 30 minutes later (and only pay for that 30 minutes). (affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)
NicoJuicy 10y ago
Denk aan

467 points by tortilla 10y ago

I disagree with the central thesis of this article that Google is a product company rather than a platform company. I think that's wrong because throughout its history Google has asked itself "what if we had this?" first, and built the products around that later. Essentially the company believes that products will naturally emerge if you hire tens of thousands of engineers and deploy an unholy number of computers. I said this before on this site: Google's core product is dirt-cheap computing. Everything else follows from that.

fumar 10y ago
Is company's business model based on what they use to create their Widgets or what Widgets they sell (and how)? I agree its hard to paint Google solely as a products company, but its also more than the sum of dirt-cheap computing.
- justicezyx 10y ago
  Dirt cheap computing is like the life line of Google. W/o that, nothing Google did can sustain at all.
  - fumar 10y ago
    Just curious on your thoughts, are not most modern companies (startups) dependent on cheap computing (+ smart folks)?
    - akiselev 10y ago
      They depend on cheap computing in the sense that they only pay for what they use and don't have upfront capex costs but I don't think thats what GP means. Google initially grew by filling data centers with commodity consumer computers instead of "enterprise-grade" servers and now they have cheap computing in the form of ASICs and highly customized/integrated general purpose servers.
    - justicezyx 10y ago
      Google is probably the one company is most dependent on their computing efficiency. Google's most prominent products are possible only because they could deliver those with the unprecedented computing efficiency. This is not to be found anywhere else. For example, search, Gmail, Youtube. Before AWS, Amazon care about efficiency. But fundamentally, Amazon do not depend on computing efficiency to support the company's bottom line, or at least only in a degree that is far less important compared to Google.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      Not at all. Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources. Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D). For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place. That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive. (Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).
kgwgk 10y ago
A "platform company" would provide a platform to its users. Unless I misunderstand your comment you say that Google has an internal platform that it uses to build products for customers, which is something different.

lasermike026 10y ago

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. How about criminal penalties for false arrest due to bugs? To be serious this is a catastrophic failure. We can not deprive people of there freedom because of a glitch. This system doesn't have fail safes.

wyldfire 10y ago
You must've replied to the wrong article, this one is not the one about the California court's new computer system.

ap22213 10y ago

I want to try out Google, but they need to make it easier to try it out. I have petabytes of data in S3 that I would need to move first (at least some of it).

mvitorino 10y ago
You can try "Cloud Storage Transfer": `Transfer data to your Cloud Storage buckets from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), HTTP/HTTPS servers or other buckets. You can schedule once-off or daily transfers, and you can filter files based on name prefix and when they were changed.` https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/
- ap22213 10y ago
  It would be nice if they managed the transfer themselves via AWS Snowball. Sure, they would have upfront costs, but based on what I spend on AWS monthly, it's probably worth it to them.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    Why would you want to move data between AWS and GCP using a hard drive? The networks between the two cloud providers are immense.
    - cobookman 10y ago
      It'd avoid expensive egress costs.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - ranman 10y ago
      At some point (many 1000s of terrabytes) it is faster and cheaper to ship the data on physical devices than it is to send it over the network. (I work for AWS)

darksaints 10y ago

> Amazon’s AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company successful in the first place I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. As far as Amazon's AWS strategy, I can't comment (I worked in the retail business side). But I can comment on a relatively small aspect of management that I witnessed. At one point in time I had a very strong need for PostGIS, and I lamented on an internal email list about AWS not having a Postgres version of RDS. I received an email directly from Raju Gulabani, VP of databases in AWS. He scheduled an appointment with me, him, and two product managers. He asked me pointed questions about why I wanted Postgres over the other options, how I would be using it, what extensions I wanted, and what features were important to me. He thanked me for my time, and less than a year later it was released to the public. In the retail business side, I never had more than 2 minutes at a time with someone at the director level, and not once had I spoken to someone at the VP level. Literally zero communication from the bottom up, everything was top down. Whether AWS had already been working on it or not I don't know, but they definitely took the time to hear my case, and when it was released it was almost perfectly as I had asked for. And that, IMO is waaaay more important than anything regarding the size of a team or whatever the fluff pieces have attributed.

darawk 10y ago
> I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased. Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Creating the largest retailer in the world and the largest cloud services platform in the world seem like two pretty big wins. Either one on its own would be an extremely successful company IMO.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  >Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not? Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.

aikah 10y ago

tldr; competition is good. Google Cloud UI is vastly superior to AWS. It's clear to me AWS didn't put a lot of effort into their interface, Google console is nice too in order to quickly experiment with the platform. On the other hand, it seems to me that AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now.

bduerst 10y ago
>AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now How so? I thought this was brought up just a week ago saying GCloud is consistently cheaper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021
- ranman 10y ago
  That article had a unique relationship with reality. A few of my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998170 (I work for AWS)
  - bduerst 10y ago
    I definitely agree on your critique of the bandwidth claims, but the gist I got from that article was that custom instances outcompete AWS's reserved instances on price - i.e. per CPU and per GB memory, GCloud is cheaper. Is that not true?
    - ranman 10y ago
      Actually I do think that GCE offers cheaper instances, but the 50% overall price reduction claim is unsubstantiated. The author compared completely different instance types. Monthly discounts does make GCE cheaper but for many instance types without that discount it's actually more expensive on GCE.
      - dekhn 10y ago
        Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).

thiyags 10y ago

very nice article. well articulated. not just tech but also the different business models(futuristic)

sorenbs 10y ago
I can highly recommend subscribing to http://exponent.fm/ http://exponent.fm/ the weekly podcast Ben is hosting with James.
- throwaway40483 10y ago
  I concur. In fact, I find the podcast better than articles. I'm not sure why though. I think the conversational tone of the podcast is better. They attack the problem from different area and then hone in on the main point.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

seregine 10y ago

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matters, and management is tight. The platform emerged because internal teams thought of their infrastructure services as products with customers. Google really puts ideas (or technology) first; it aims to hire the smartest people and rewards them for launching new things and solving complex problems rather than optimizing UX or making customers happy. Resources are ample and management is loose, so individual contributors can try new things with greater leisure. It's been compared to grad school. But simplifying customer experience is less of a priority, so the internal infrastructure was notoriously complex and hard to use. They're now learning to prioritize customers, but it's hard to change culture. Of course, both companies are huge and diverse and evolving, so you'll find plenty of variance. App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow.

findjashua 10y ago
"rather than optimizing UX or making customers happy" as someone who's dabbled a bit w both, I found GCP UI/UX to be far simpler than dealing w AWS
mathattack 10y ago
Great point on simplifying the UI being a priority. This takes a lot of coordination and willingness to say "We will drop features A, B and C to make the overall experience easier." This is ultimately both an organizational and cultural issue. Some companies optimize on centralization (historically Apple) while others have a more decentralized "empower the individual" ethos. This article from the same source highlights how Apple's centralized org is core to it's view of product integration. https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/ https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad... When dealing with a platform, this user experience coordination becomes much more important. (Think the old Apple ecosystem versus all the crap that came pre-installed on the Wintel systems)

mixmastamyk 10y ago

I would like to try out google cloud due to its lower costs, but don't trust them with my data--partially perception I know. Also Amazon has never failed me over the last 15 years I've been doing business with them, so I'll probably continue despite the clunkiness of their products.

naner 10y ago
I'm not sure if Google's commercial products are as bad as their consumer-facing offerings, but if we can't get someone on the phone when a support issue arises then we'd never consider using them for any cloud services.
- rrdharan 10y ago
  [Disclaimer: I work on GCP at Google] GCP Gold and Platinum support packages include phone support: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
  - naner 10y ago
    Thanks rrdharan for pointing that out, I should have spent a couple minutes researching first.
  - eknkc 10y ago
    And they cost a smartphone / month. AWS has a 40$ dev support package which is great.

brilliantcode 10y ago

If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost. If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge. By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago
I haven't used Azure, so I'm a bit confused. Do you mean something with different capabilities than Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio? https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/ https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  nice find! I didn't know about GCT plugin but yes that's more or less along the lines of what I expect from AWS. However, Google Cloud really hasn't entered my mind as much as Azure has this year. AWS has always been there. I'm not sure as to why this is maybe I have built a perception that GCE is more expensive and my documentation experience with Google wasn't anymore smoother than AWS. One thing for sure, Build 2016 earlier this year was one of the key driver for my conversion + Nadella's leadership. Google Cloud has always been obscured by AWS and now Azure in my mind and so far, they've yet to really jump out at me like AWS does on HN regularly which Azure is now catching up.
daxfohl 10y ago
What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?
- brilliantcode 10y ago

daxfohl 10y ago

> Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps that even today keep Windows at the center of business. Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

zeveb 10y ago
> Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible? I certainly don't think so (although there are some nice things about the Windows kernel, if one comes from a VMS background), and it's certainly not the reason for the success of Windows. Remember that MS-DOS beat Mac OS; Windows 1 beat Mac OS; Windows 3.1 beat Mac OS; Windows 95 beat Mac OS. None of those was technically any good whatsoever, and only one of those had a UI that was worth shaking a stick at. The reasons for the success of Windows are non-technical: Bill Gates's mother served on a charity board with the chairman of IBM; business bought IBM computers because no-one ever got fired for buying IBM; IBM clones were cheaper than Macs; IBM clones were more extensible and hackable than Macs; Unix workstation vendors thought they could keep milking their cash cows; Microsoft engaged in noncompetitive behaviour; random chance.
- daxfohl 10y ago
  So kinda kills the primary analogy the article is based on.
brassic 10y ago
To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338
- st3v3r 10y ago

daxfohl 10y ago

Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. That seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It seems like they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their visibility greatly.

daxfohl 10y ago
The article mentioned kubernetes multiple times and I think it's providers like Heroku that actually stand the most to gain there. With kubernetes in theory they should no longer have to make you choose between providers, and be able to run on spot instances of whatever provider is cheapest at the time. You just choose your max latency at certain geo areas and a budget to balance by, some AI to help you determine the tradeoffs, and it does the rest. If Heroku isn't working toward that then there has to be someone doing so soon. If not it seems like there's a pretty big opportunity there.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Cloud Foundry is closest to this vision, in my entirely biased opinion. We're already able to mount standalone installations on AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere and others. Distributing apps across multiple clouds is easy to say, hard to do. Each IaaS has peculiarities and wrinkles, different tradeoffs in performance and cost and so on. It takes a moderately tricky scheduling problem and turns it into a much gnarlier one. What's easier is using high-level tools like Terraform and BOSH to manage installations on different IaaSes, and pushing apps to whichever one you like as you like. I can easily imagine setting up round-robin deploys. That said: data has inertia. Any sensible architecture has to bear that in mind; typically apps will wind up living close to their datastores. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
jacques_chester 10y ago
I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal. Cloud Foundry was partly inspired by and is somewhat in competition with Heroku. "Do one thing and do it well" is underselling Heroku. PaaSes have to do a lot of things and do them well.

olimashi 10y ago

I think Ben (who I generally think is right on) in this post misapprehends the effectiveness of generalized data for machine learning services and thus the effectiveness of this approach in Google’s strategy here. Perhaps the slide makers in Mountain View have the same misapprehension. 1 - Prediction API - you provide your own data there, so no data advantage from Google there. 2 - Cloud Natural Language API - the effectiveness really depends on what type of text you want to understand. If Google’s training data includes information about my type of text application great, but if it doesn’t then what? How do I know that? 3 - Cloud Vision API - likewise. Can I subset the training set? Provide my own examples? If they subset, can I inspect the examples? 4 - Translation API seems like the exception here, mainly because the odds are that customers of translation service are unlikely to have collected language pairs and this collection is more highly specialized. But it’s unclear that this one API would be the deciding factor for many companies choosing which cloud vendor to use. ML services as a differentiator have yet to be proven out. I am highly suspect. Yes, some big general data sets will be better on some applications than others, but an enterprises’ own data about their problem will always be better than a huge, general data set. And if you’re using your own data anyway, you’re going to care about all the platformy things Amazon has already been winning with. Barring proprietary breakthroughs in unsupervised learning, I don’t believe that this strategy as outlined will work in practice.

brilliantcode 10y ago
I think you've really pointed out a very important flaw in that as developers and startups we don't have terabytes of training data. However, I'm not sure who's in the leading edge here while Microsoft seems to suggest as the leader, but in the end machine learning, deep learning will be commoditized with enough training already baked in. ex. Need your web app translated flawlessly into Farsi? Just drop in farsi.js to your </head> and etc.
- olimashi 10y ago
  Information embedded in a pre-trained model (Google isn't given out that data, just access to an artifact) is helpful if your application lines up to goals of the model. I think it's an open question how broad that alignment might be. It totally depends on the application. You can control the app, but you don't have control over the model. It will be useful to some apps but I don't think it is going to be the secret weapon in Google's fight against AWS as Ben's article suggests. It's a neat argument but I think it ignores the reality of applications and machine learning.

perseusprime11 10y ago

This is how Amazon is challenging Google as of today. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon-ai-to-bring-its-machine-learning-smarts-to-developers/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon-ai-...

wangii 10y ago

>> Microsoft did the same with its Win32 API. Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS ... The author loses his creditability since here.

origami777 10y ago

There's always the simpler explanation to why Google is getting traction: - Price/performance is better in some/many cases for VMs - It's easy(ier?) to use - Clear technical advantage with some of their other services e.g. Load balancers - Customers prefer when there are multiple companies competing for their business I get that there are long-term strategies that involve the likes of container services. But just the fact that they are better in some areas will help them get traction. Plus they have a fantastic brand name.

dxxvi 10y ago

Nothing can beat the 1 year free for AWS free tier.

dx034 10y ago
Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  The AWS free tier is useless imho. If the thing you want to test fits into the AWS free tier then a AWS or GCloud solution would be overkill anyway.
  - dx034 10y ago
    But it's good if you just test a bit as a developer. Not to check if a project is valid, but to gain some experience. That way, if you hire as a company, developers more likely have AWS experience than GCE/Azure experience.
    - jsolson 10y ago
      I don't agree on the free trial. I think it lets you play around a lot more than the AWS free tier -- as I said in my comment up the thread, go ahead and move the slider to the right and scale up a bit (a little -- the free trial is still quota limited to prevent abuse), see how things perform, slide it back to the left and have only used a tiny fraction of your credit. I think you get a lot more "kick the tires" flexibility with a moderately large up-front credit. (affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)
jsolson 10y ago
Depending on how you use the services the AWS free tier is actually worth less than GCP's $300 free-trial credit: https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/ https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/ I will give Amazon that theirs extends out to a year, but summing up the costs of everything included in the free tier if you use all of it, I think it may still come out to less than $300 (or the equivalents on GCP would, anyway). For example, running an f1-micro for a year will cost you a bit under $60. If you add in another for Google Cloud SQL you're up to a total of about $150 over the course of a year. What they offer you in S3 is basically free (<$2 over the course of a year). It's possible the other services are a better deal than compute and storage, if you have a use for them, but the GCP free trial lets you allocate that $300 however you like. You can scale up more in that 60 days than you can within the AWS free tier. To me, personally, this strikes me as more valuable if I'm trying to sketch out a new product — I'd rather not try to figure out how to fit inside the AWS free tier resource envelope and instead understand how my costs are scaling with the resources I'm using while not being on the hook for those costs (up to the $300 size of the credit, obviously) for the first couple months. Especially to absorb things like shaking out automation -- go ahead, spin up a GKE cluster, scale it out to 5x the size you currently need, run some quick load tests, and then scale it back down 30 minutes later (and only pay for that 30 minutes). (affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)

NicoJuicy 10y ago

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