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Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud

• filleokus 8y ago
  This seems related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553 (Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue), where this point was discussed almost endlessly: > These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into “cloud revenue.”
  • wlesieutre 8y ago
    If the critieria for cloud is "it's a service on the internet," wait 'till they hear about Google's "cloud advertising" business. You don't even have to host your own ad servers! They just appear on your website like magic!
  • partiallypro 8y ago
    Google also wraps GSuite into Cloud revenue, and Amazon wraps their competitor into Cloud revenue. So, it's not misleading.
    • metildaa 8y ago
      What does Amazon offer for a cloud office suite though? I have never heard of one despite living in Seattle, where we see all kinds of failed Amazon expansions.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • rdp36 8y ago
        They have email and web conferencing -- https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ I am not sure about https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ (sort of an office suite?)
        • metildaa 8y ago
          I would be hard pressed to find other Seattle businesses that use either of those products, perhaps some marketing would help with uptake.
      • awad 8y ago
        Here you go, all offered under the 'Business Productivity' umbrella of AWS: Amazon WorkDocs https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/ Amazon WorkMail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ Amazon Chime https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ Amazon Alexa for Business https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/ https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/
        • benburleson 8y ago
          I'd love to see the contribution these services make to AWS revenue.
        • metildaa 8y ago
          I would be seriously challenged to find more than a handful of businesses in Seattle that use any of these offerings. I don't think I have ever heard of these offerings, compared to G Suite there seems to be no marketing of these offerings. For reference, we've seen a variety of failed attempts by Amazon to expand, like Amazon Register.
  • filoleg 8y ago
    And as discussed to death in the linked thread, what Microsoft should've done instead? Excluded Office from the cloud revenue, simply because Amazon didn't make as much money from their own office productivity suite (but still included it in their cloud revenue numbers)? MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.
    • wmf 8y ago
      I guess it would be more comparable if they split out IaaS/PaaS/SaaS although probably no company wants to do that.
    • amf12 8y ago
      And to be fair Microsoft only includes Office365 revenue which consists of storage, active directory support and not standalone office that you can download.
• Arqu 8y ago
  Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an issue that is being ping-ponged around different reps for >10 days by now. Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those. Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.
  • partiallypro 8y ago
    Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not) Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.
    • Arqu 8y ago
      Their UIs and tooling are inconsistent and clunky. They kind of shove some of their tooling on to you as well. Obviously, my experience is rather shallow here and wouldn't dare go into too deep discussions on that. And the shoving part can easily be avoided with some extra elbow grease.
      • partiallypro 8y ago
        I've used all 3 major providers, and I am going to have to strongly disagree. Out of UI, Azure is far and above superior with AWS and GCS which are both confusing messes. That is literally the worst complaint I can even think of in regards to Azure.
• lalos 8y ago
  Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of enterprise.
  • writepub 8y ago
    Where are you getting this "price hike" narrative for Google from? Google's presence in the cloud market is instrumental in across the board price drops.
    • thanatropism 8y ago
      Google Maps left probably thousands of small, barely viable projects with their shorts down and no belt.
      • writepub 8y ago
        Google maps is NOT a part of Google cloud! https://cloud.google.com/products/ https://cloud.google.com/products/
        • arctux 8y ago
          This is not correct: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/ https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/
          • jkaplowitz 8y ago
            Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform, despite now integrating with Google Cloud Platform's web console for purposes of managing billing and API keys. Yes, this is a branding and communication mess, but nevertheless true.
• samfisher83 8y ago
  Given how customer unfriendly google seems it is not surprising. If you are running a service and google shuts it down or just closes your account with no explanation it might be hard for you.
• Havoc 8y ago
  On a commercial scale sure, but personally gcloud will stay a firm favorite of mine for one simple reason - an aspect of their free tier: AWS/Azure seems cool too, but that promise of "you'll always have a custom VPS you can SSH into forever" is wildly underrated imo. It's not a money issue, it's more about someone handing you a swiss army knife and saying keep it.
• oppositelock 8y ago
  I work in this space. If you count VMWare on-prem deployments, Azure and GCP are 3rd and 4th, respectively. Amazon's dominance is massive, Azure exists because Microsoft gives it away for free with big Windows and Office purchases, and GCP putters along last due to perceived bad customer service (which is kind of true)
• alienreborn 8y ago
  Google having an edge in ML and kubernetes will help them but they really need superior documentation to counter crowd wisdom on AWS. Solutions/answers to most basic roadblocks you might encounter when working with AWS offerings are a quick google search away but that's the case for gcp offerings. They also need to ramp up their evangelism (for the lack of better word) to get some mind share.
• Blunts 8y ago
  It's astonishing to me that you silicon valley types still don't get, how much of a lead MS have on the compliance front (among others) that makes their cloud platform the only logical choice. In Europe, GCP is almost immediately disregarded, as they have, on multiple occasions, proved they cannot be trusted with your data, and legally required audits will destroy your company if you chose google as your provider(see the DeepMind issue for the latest example) while Amazon doesn't have quite the same problem, contrast that to MS who has the largest compliance list, as well as outstanding contracts with most large companies, and the choice is bloody obvious. Essentially, if you are not a SF startup or American centric company, there really is no other option, and the vast majority of the human population, surprise surprise, do not live/work in America.
  • matt4077 8y ago
    I'm also in Europe, using GCP, know many others who do, and have actually never heard criticism of GCP with regard to data security. Yes, there are lots of people criticising Google. But for a business using GCP, my impression is that they have been pretty good crossing their t's and dotting their ö's during, for example, the recent introduction of GDPR. They have contracts and model clauses for different scenarios and products. And while I can't judge how good these are, I would assume they will be tested in court pretty quickly. Long before that, they have reacted well to criticism. For about a decade or so, Analytics has had the option to only collect anonymized IP data, a requirement from a couple of court decisions categorizing IP addresses as PII. I don't disagree that Google's size alone is reason for scepticism, and to keep an eye on them. But please don't go around claiming to speak for some imaginary European consensus when no such thing exists.
    • nprateem 8y ago
      Well things like the DeepMind NHS data transfer don't really help[1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-betrays-patient-trust-deepmind-healthcare-move https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-be...
• mathattack 8y ago
  Google struggles with the top down Enterprise sales required to make something like this happen at a non-Tech Fortune 500 firm. It’s not about low cost hardware and fancy AI, it’s about helping move a process along.
• manigandham 8y ago
  Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features, and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way". AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional, scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant stream of updates. They apply the iterative process of startups to the cloud, and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster. We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100% of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.
  • tdb7893 8y ago
    Anecdotally I've met an absolutely crazy amount of recent Google Cloud hires in the past few months so I'm curious if the pace of updates will improve in like a year as they throw money at it.
    • thundergolfer 8y ago
      They told me in Grad interviews that a majority of their grad hires are into Google Cloud right now.
• twunde 8y ago
  One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up datacenters) has helped them become #2 in the cloud space
  • briffle 8y ago
    I'm having a hard time finding something in Google cloud that is NOT covered by their BAA: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-products https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...
    • twunde 8y ago
      That lists 38 hipaa-compliant services. Azure's is close to 80ish hipaa-compliant services. AWS' list is fairly large too. I haven't used GCE in a long time, so maybe GCE just has that many fewer products/services.
      • vel0city 8y ago
        One big selling point of GCP vs other cloud providers in regards to HIPAA is that pretty much all of GCP is covered, and probably will in the future: "GCP’s security practices allow us to have a HIPAA BAA covering GCP’s entire infrastructure, not a set aside portion of our cloud. As a result, you are not restricted to a specific region which has scalability, operational and architectural benefits. You can also benefit from multi-regional service redundancy as well as the ability to use Preemptible VMs to reduce costs. The security and compliance measures that allow us to support HIPAA compliance are deeply ingrained in our infrastructure, security design, and products. As such, we can offer HIPAA regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, including sustained use discounts. Other public clouds charge more money for their HIPAA cloud, we do not." https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-products https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-... Its been about a year since I last checked out everything you need to be HIPAA compliant to run AWS services, but IIRC it required running dedicated instances for nearly everything. That can make running on AWS way more expensive. EDIT: Apparently the limitation of dedicated instances was removed in May 2017. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/
• innocentoldguy 8y ago
  The last company I worked for used Azure. I had never used Azure before and the thought of using a Microsoft product was a bit off-putting during my interview, to be honest (yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s). After using it for a few days, I had a change of heart. The documentation is pretty good and their tech support guys were extremely helpful. They would even call me back several days after the fact to make sure their suggestions were working and that I was having a good experience on the platform. In my experience, their UI made sense, their documentation was decent, and their tech support was great. I think Microsoft has earned their spot in the market with Azure.
  • wutbrodo 8y ago
    > yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the 2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes. It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their products in this period).
• ggm 8y ago
  AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 explicitly to locations, because they didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What? command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell. Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes. I never got to a point I could test if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked. GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.
• ewhauser421 8y ago
  I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer. We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure. We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services. If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well. On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer. In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name. When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.
  • PetahNZ 8y ago
    $10M spend, doesn't investigate more than 2 options. Nice.
• awad 8y ago
  Snap and Spotify account for 13.7% of Google Cloud: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-nearly-450-million-on-google-cloud-over-3-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-nearly-45...
  • zjaffee 8y ago
    And when anytime both of these services go down at the same time, it's obvious who to blame (it happens way more often than you see the same on AWS).
  • human_error 8y ago
    It only means they don't have many customers.
  • romed 8y ago
    Snap doesn't spend it all on what you are all discussing here, though. Even though it's wrapped up in Google Cloud marketing, Snap's main use seems to be of App Engine, a product that is clearly in the lead among comparable products, as opposed to things like GCS and GCE which are clearly behind S3 and AWS, respectively. Snap also has a huge contract with AWS, for what it's worth. Other large customers like Apple also split their ticket between Amazon and Google.
    • wikibob 8y ago
      In what specific way is GCE behind EC2? I would argue on many points GCE is clearly significantly superior to EC2. The Google billing model is far better, they bill on straight CPU and Memory, which you can combine in any desired ratio. Amazon has well over 100 different instance types. Google gives you an automatic sustained usage discount. Amazon requires you to commit to reserved instances up front for 1 year minimum, and those have to be specific instance types, so as your workloads change you can't reallocate capacity. GCE has workload live-migration. If the underlying hardware that your VM is hosted on begins to fail, they will migrate you to new hardware in REAL TIME without any downtime other than a sub-second pause in processing. Amazon will notify you that your hardware is failing and give you a deadline usually a week or so out to reboot your VM, if you don't they just terminate it. I could continue for several more points if interested.
• api 8y ago
  The fact that GCP doesn't have IPv6 yet (except for load balancers) is insane.
  • ec109685 8y ago
    How does that limit you?
    • api 8y ago
      For our application it would make it a lot easier to directly communicate with phones and other devices on mobile networks among other things. It's a UDP-based native protocol. Google has UDP load balancers, but they obscure source IP and other info. It's also just lame. It's 2018.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• alexnewman 8y ago
  4th place. IBM is beating them.
• ozten 8y ago
  Bloomberg article lacks comparable data. Seems like an Azure puff piece. Would have loved to see comparable data across the top 5 players.
• NotANaN 8y ago
  I wonder how much of the increasing success of Azure is creditable to its deep integration with Visual Studio Code.
  • oaiey 8y ago
    There is no deep integration. Some plugins yes. It is driven by that motivation. I use VS Code daily and never read the word Azure there. My opinion on your question: Not much. The interesting question is: How much the good will (VS Code, .NET Core, Linux support,...) of the last year's pay out
• daxfohl 8y ago
  How much do you think Active Directory is driving Azure's success? I picture Azure's big sales pitch as being able to call up GE or Exxon or whatever and say "hey throw all your ancient lotus notes and other various hosted stuff onto our servers and we can sync all your AD to AAD and you're done". I can see that as being a huge thing. And once an enterprise is in, they're start using it for new things as well. I've never done any kind of enterprisey user access management before so I don't know if it's actually that easy or even if it's any different from migrating to AWS/GCP. Or if AD sucks and enterprises hate it. Would love to hear from people who have more experience there.
• rhexs 8y ago
  Interesting. Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena, they had a chance to integrate with Red Hat's customer base and lost it to IBM. I suspect IBM will handily pull into third unless they manage the acquisition like most of their other acquisitions.
  • whoisjuan 8y ago
    > Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena. Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals. The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capitalize on any expanded and growing market if you're just a niche player catering companies under 10MM ARR. That doesn't mean you can't build a great company that caters for SMBs, but you just won't be a significant player in the market (Think Digital Ocean). You can try to capture all that theoretical mass of small and medium businesses which in theory looks larger and more profitable when seen as a block, but you will burn yourself harder and get less return over those deals. It's simple math. It's better to go after an account that will spend 20MM on your services (for instance Netflix), than trying to close 200 accounts that will spend 100K on your services. The logic here is that by earning the trust and loyalty of the enterprise clients you can slowly capture the other segments of the market. Not the other way around. If Google's plan for their cloud is to focus on SMBs, they will get crushed even harder and potentially disrupted by niche companies which ironically will build their own offerings on top of more feature-rich public clouds like AWS or Azure.
    • jpatokal 8y ago
      You're incorrectly conflating "enterprise" with "large" here. For example, Snap and Apple are very large companies in terms of Cloud spend, but they're very much not an "enterprise"/Fortune 500 company that moves at the speed of an arthritic sloth and needs to be sold on the benefits of moving to the cloud.
      • 8y ago
• sxp62000 8y ago
  If Godaddy can provide decent support, why can't Google?! The only think I use on Google Cloud is Firebase, love Firebase. But even then, I never know who/where to ask if I have questions.
  • danielsju6 8y ago
    Our support page mentions where you can ask questions https://firebase.google.com/support/ https://firebase.google.com/support/ Slack is good and the firebase-talk Google Group is a great resource, as there are Googlers monitoring. Glad you're enjoying Firebase.
  • pier25 8y ago
    I've had my ups and downs with Firebase. The dev experience is generally good, but reliability hasn't been so great. Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers. I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be uploaded. 2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed. Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted. We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android SDKs.
• geggam 8y ago
  Why are people comparing GUIS when talking about cloud usage ? If you are using the cloud and the GUI to spin up resources you are doing it wrong. Period.
• MR4D 8y ago
  I predict they will settle for fourth - after Apple. Give it 2 years, 4 tops.
  • why_only_15 8y ago
    Why do you think that Apple will enter the cloud? Apple hasn't been a real contender in servers for a decade, and it seems like their strength lies more in the design than in raw technical capabilities.
    • MR4D 8y ago
      iCloud, iWork(web based), email, Time Machine(backup), Messages, Apple Pay. Those are some of the things that Apple already does in the cloud. I anticipate it will expand significantly as they grow their services business. Whether they build a “server” is irrelevant - the “service” however, is key.
  • romed 8y ago
    Apple's cloud is already stored on Google's cloud. How do you figure it will work? Apple and Google cloud will somehow become mutually self-hosting?
    • MR4D 8y ago
      Great question. Apple has a long history on building on the shoulders of giants....and then building their own giant. Further, they also have a long history of playing suppliers against each other in order to get the best terms. Finally, Apple occasionally works hard to move away from companies it fights with - Adobe and Qualcomm are two notable ones there, as are the social media firms like Facebook. As for evidence, I’d offer up this report on future data center spending that they are planning. You don’t have as many data centers and add to it in this magnitude without having a solid strategy. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/apple-will-spend-more-than-10bn-on-us-data-centers-over-5-years/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/apple-will-spend-mor...
• tmvnty 8y ago
  I'd like to comment a few things made me appreciate and enjoy Google/Cloud services and I am aware they are very subjective to my personal experience as a student and beginner to web dev, but there are many folks like me so I could be speaking for them too. Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners. Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.
  • Fellshard 8y ago
    Azure's documentation is standard Microsoft technical doc fare, i.e. atrocious. It's horrible trying to get a straight answer out of anything they've written.
    • sk5t 8y ago
      My impression from a decade in Windows Server and .NET development is exactly the opposite. You may have to do a lot of reading, but the available technical docs have 100x the raw utility of those from Apple and others.
  • pm90 8y ago
    So. Much. This. Google has done an excellent job with their Cloud documentation, including many useful howto sections. When we raise issues with them, they are quick to update the documentation with "gotchas" so there isn't tribal knowledge about this floating around in every company.
• navinsylvester 8y ago
  Would like to cover few points discussed here. I don't think its fair to judge cloud platforms competency with just the market share since there are players like Microsoft/Oracle who have lot of enterprise foothold. I have used all other major cloud providers and as a power user, have found GCP to be rock solid. Paid support is the only option with all major cloud platforms if you want faster response. I think all of them need to get better at it. Cloud providers can literally break your business with a price hike so be very careful when you build your stack. Don't tangle yourself by consuming vendor locked features. Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel. Changing infrastructure over a small increase in price (which rarely happens) is a one of those dreams that techies have but hardly ever happens because the risk of regressions is too high. The minute you don’t use managed services and you host everything yourself on EC2 instances you have the worse of all worlds - you’re paying more than baremetal, you’re paying the same amount for supporting your infrastructure, and you’re not developing any faster than you could on prem.
    • navinsylvester 8y ago
      Depends on your team and product needs. I don't think price is the main motivation to use cloud. Ease of use, vast resources to provision without any significant delay and pay for what you use are the main factors. If your infra is not mission critical and if you have deep pockets you can afford to be tied to a vendor. Otherwise - having skilled expertise and designing your architecture in vendor agnostic way is pretty much essential.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        Of all the business risks you have, AWS or Azure going out of business is the least of them. Do you think that the executives at Netflix stay up at night worrying about AWS going out of business?
• Aloha 8y ago
  Third place is still a big chunk of the pie.
• sandGorgon 8y ago
  Azure's UX is terrible. They have this weird sliding, Metro UI that takes a lot of learning to figure out. Every startup that I have talked to has hated using Azure. Even the pricing is so hard to figure out. There is some weird intermediate conversion when looking up the price for managed databases. Microsoft is known to throw brilliant discounts into bundling cloud along with its other Office stuff. Not sure if they are using this as leverage. In India, I know for a fact that the banks that are moving to the cloud are doing it on Azure, because Microsoft is not afraid of heavy compliances. It's hard to speak to a human in Google Cloud.
  • richardknop 8y ago
    I agree on the UI part, it is quite horrendous. But any major enterprise organisation should be / probably is using some sort of automation tool such as Terraform or something similar. You just don't go and click around in the UI to set up your stuff manually, that's not how big projects in enterprise work (all cloud stuff is automated without depending on UI) so bad UI is a con but it's less important that other more technical features.
    • sandGorgon 8y ago
      ha ha - fair enough. Pretty much justifies Hashicorp's valuation ;) But here's some stuff that's really missing. In Google's dashboard (and their API), you can add ssh keys after creation of an instance. Its a fairly basic functionality made possible by the "accounts daemon" (which is opensource https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-packages/tree/master/google_compute_engine/accounts https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-package...) Azure doesnt have this, etc.
• markbnj 8y ago
  Microsoft is much better positioned than Google to build a large cloud business off their enterprise customers. IT execs need a "cloud strategy." MS can move their existing apps right into Azure. Presto, you have a good story for the board. Their success in this sphere doesn't surprise me. Google's cloud business growth is nothing to sneeze at, and I don't know whether it matters that they are in third place or not.
• pier25 8y ago
  AWS may be the better service, but the console is a huge mess.
• tyler_larson 8y ago
  I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number that you see in all the graphs. Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
  • Bucephalus355 8y ago
    This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to “juice” the numbers. Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.
  • baseballMan 8y ago
    Yeah this is definitely true. I think I read that they now include "Commercial" LinkedIn revenue in Cloud revenue reporting. Pretty sure Google does this too to a lesser extent with including G-Suite in their 'Google Cloud' revenue.
• tzury 8y ago
  From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure. As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple: GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure. For every dollar you pay: - You get more compute power per core, while paying less. - You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP. - You get the best "data processing at scale". Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me, In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win. In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will. Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far. Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business. All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
  • scirocco 8y ago
    As someone who works in sales, I totally agree. People in procurement are often measured on the amount of discount they can get. Try getting that when you purchase online. In the Nordics you can't compare the "salesforce" of AWS and Google with the army that is the Azure-team.
  • a_imho 8y ago
    Didn't they suffer a global outage just the other day?
    • Artemis2 8y ago
      Caused by a bad BGP route announcement [1]; this is outside of the control of Google. However, they do seem to have global incidents more often than the competition (for example [2] last July) 1: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18018 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18... 2: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18012 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/18...
• asien 8y ago
  Honestly , they deserve that place. While I’m a huge G cloud fan , there is too many things that frustrate me with GCloud. Whether it’s Firebase that doesn’t have a way to limit user bandwidth or Google Staff taking you for a dummy because the guy is a « Google Engineer » or the performance of European Datacenter... there is a just countless stuff that makes GCloud overall an « okay » experience but nowhere similar to what AWS or’Azure offers
• gandutraveler 8y ago
  Imo. GCP-> Geeks, hackers, beginners . AWS -> Small Businesses, Startups . Azure-> Large Enterprise Businesses.
• PeterHK 8y ago
  for sure all of them have pros/cons. i have been using AWS for many years across multiple companies now. Over the years i got the feeling that the quality has degraded. New services are half-baked (ES, EKS), some newer API's are overly complicated (VPC peering is overloaded for cross-account AND internal instead of 2 abstractions on top of it - why do i need to get confused about all these extra API args which are not needed for internal VPC peering and have to spend hours to finally understand it). Overall AWS feels that they got more sales focused. i just started to get nightmares with Azure recently, luckily i was able to get rid of almost everything of it (only keyvault remains, since azure does for now have the best offering for HSM). The UI is absolute terrible from front-end caching bugs to strange permissions. MS seems to have to invent their own vocabulary for everything instead of using terminology that most of the rest of the internet uses (which makes finding things very hard), same goes for their API's, its almost impossible to use their API's without these super huge and often buggy libs (try to use REST API auth without a lib...). I am personally also having a hard time to read their documentation. I did not had the chance to try GC yet but i want to. I know that google services sometimes can be a bit complex to start with, but there is good documentation and reference docs - its usually very easy to just use REST api if you dont wanna use some heavy libs. We recently moved to k8s (i am loving it - continues deploying apps with autoscaling and 0 downtime was never that easy), so as we move more into k8s i hopefully get the chance to try out GC
• callesgg 8y ago
  GCP is mainly sold to engineers it being the best one on a price per feature, AWS is sold on market force they where the first big one. Azure is sold on being a vmware setup replacement.
• mrweasel 8y ago
  There's a large number of companies that have a "Microsoft Strategy", meaning that if Microsoft have a solution that sort of fits the problem, that's what they pick. Google simply can't sell to these customers, because... They aren't Microsoft. The weird part is that a large number of these companies will outsource their operations, their own staff will never use Azure services directly. It would make zero difference if their applications run on Amazons, Googles or Microsofts cloud offering, but they have a "Microsoft Strategy", so it has to run on Azure.
• netwanderer3 8y ago
  Microsoft were able to leverage their Office 365 cloud products that most companies are already using to gain momentum. Google have shifted their focus toward AI in their recent years and I believe once it is ready, Google will come out with a breakthrough AI application on its cloud platform that will make a lot of businesses flock to them. Right now they just really don't have a way to differentiate themselves among other providers yet. It's still early in the game but that time will come.
• PaulHoule 8y ago
  I find Google's products harder to use than competitors. A year ago I did a shootout between visual recognition APIs by the like of IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google, Clarifai, etc. Every API other than Google took less than 20 minutes to get logged in and running API calls. To log into Google cloud services I had to install complex proprietary code just to be able to log in. Then when I installed the Python GCS API it destroyed my anaconda installation even though I wasn't working in the base environment. I was able to get it to work but it took 10x longer than competing APIs. It seems to be the same way for other GCS services. I think people at Google think they are so smart that developer ergonomics doesn't matter.