17 ms·

Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years

251 points by clebio 8y ago

ak007 8y ago
interesting !
kjw 8y ago
A move that was necessary. Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. (Observable as reflected in their pricing, sales, and support challenges.) Thomas now has a similarly tough job navigating the organ rejection risk of transplanting anything that looks like Oracle culture and practices.
- mtgx 8y ago
  It seems that employee backlash against her support of Project Maven may have something to do with it, too: https://9to5google.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-diane-greene-leaving/ https://9to5google.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-diane-greene-...
- fierro 8y ago
  Diane Green put GCP firmly on the map as a cloud provider to reckon with.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Sure. But they are in 3rd place. And so very, very far behind AWS in the range of products, quality of service, developer ecosystem, number of regions etc. And while GCP is still focusing on the basics AWS is locking developers into their platform with paradigms like serverless. And once IBM launches their cloud I would actually put them ahead of GCP given how useful their Compose suite is.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      "And once IBM launches their cloud" Interesting. Is it just another rename (Softlayer -> BlueMix -> ?). Or something else?
      - catwell 8y ago
        Given recent news, I would be surprised if the future of IBM's cloud was not based on OpenShift...
    - vl 8y ago
      Yes, but 3rd place is not her fault, but Urs'es, Larry's and Eric's fault. She joined too late to affect that.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      IBM already has a cloud called Bluemix, and they bought/merged Softlayer into it. It's not great. Compose is just a managed database service which IBM also acquired. I don't see how that alone would put them ahead of any cloud, especially when they're already lacking in infrastructure and software.
      - threeseed 8y ago
        They also just acquired a tiny little company called Redhat who I am sure knows a thing or two about infrastructure and software. And Compose is the most useful database offering on any cloud IMHO.
        manigandham 8y ago
        Redhat is tiny compared to the clouds. Softlayer is aging and IBM does not have billions in infrastructure buildout to compete. Redhat can provide software but definitely not enough to put them ahead of GCP as you claim. And Compose manages databases on AWS and GCP too, similar to Aiven and others, so I don't see how that alone makes IBM special.
        warrenm 8y ago
- crazygringo 8y ago
  > Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. Citation needed -- from my knowledge, the culture shifted dramatically -- she did succeed, and now that's done. Granted, I'm referring to Google culture within Cloud/GSuite... obviously she didn't affect culture at YouTube or Search because those weren't her areas.
- vl 8y ago
  This is completely incorrect. Under Urs'es leadership it was hard to work on enterprise features due to explicit direction from him "we don't support enterprise because it's too hard". Diane completely changed that, developed coherent GCP/G Suite strategy, and now GCP organization is very enterprise-oriented. Hiring of Oracle dude kinda re-iterates this.
Zhenya 8y ago
Oracle culture is bad: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2500 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2500 Oracle money making abilities good
- tmikaeld 8y ago
  I don't know if it's a myth but, I've always heard consultants say that Oracle is run like a bank by bankers, even by Oracle consultants. A lot of lock-ins, contracts and security... for Oracle.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a totally different approach, for what it's worth. Feels no different from working at AWS etc. (other than OCI gives a damn about operational burden and paying down technical debt, rather than letting the fires keep on burning as long as the features are being pushed out) TK is very much old school Oracle though. Doesn't feel like a good cultural fit with Google.
  - posixplz 8y ago
    I agree completely, having worked at a few Seattle based cloud providers. Perhaps TK’s personality did not fit with the new direction of Oracle, centered around OCI and its ethos. Disclosure: I work at OCI.
- andrewbinstock 8y ago
  Oracle and TK understand one thing that GCP does not: the importance of great support. Oracle charges a ton for top-tier support, but if you have a problem they can't solve remotely, they'll send a team of engineers to your site and work night and day until it's fixed. In extreme cases, they'll duplicate your hardware and software setup at their expense and run in parallel until they can duplicate and solve the problem. That is serious enterprise commitment. Google has no cloud counterpart to that level of service. If TK brings an equivalent orientation that makes customers believe that GCP will do whatever is necessary to resolve a problem, he'll have contributed significantly to its success, IMHO.
perfmode 8y ago
diane and mendel are a powerhouse pair.
Arcsech 8y ago
Gonna be totally honest: From the headline and Google’s previous behavior, my first thought was “Huh, I didn’t expect them to shut GCP down already...” (To be clear, they are not shutting down GCP, this is just a leadership transition)
- Mononokay 8y ago
  My first reaction was "What a weird way to announce they're shutting dow...oh!"
- fosco 8y ago
  Funny, I had the same thought before reading. one day xkcd [0] will be considered a profit, that day is coming. [0] https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/
- sctb 8y ago
  We've added a “leadership” to the title to help clarify.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Might we say that it was an incredible journey? ;)
- CameronBanga 8y ago
  I think one of the big issues that Google is facing with GCP is exactly the perception they have in the market with respect to product shutdowns. I could never see myself making the decision to go with Google over Amazon or Azure, simply because I don't feel confident that the product won't be shutdown with minimal warning at any given time.
  - arbie 8y ago
    Have you considered a cloud abstraction that let's you change providers with less effort?
    - whorleater 8y ago
nowarninglabel 8y ago
There's a great episode of "Masters of Scale" with Diane Greene where she talks about her time at VMWare and then about how she ended up taking the job of leading Google Cloud. https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/ https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/
rawrmaan 8y ago
The new CEO is the former President of Product Development at Oracle...I wanna puke. Oracle has some of the most hated products in the industry. I hope he's able to adapt to Google's style and not the other way around.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  This isn't the first time Google has gone outside the company for a top leadership role. Vic Gundotra was another one--and that didn't work out too well. But this is happening with increasing frequency even for mid-level leadership positions, and it is showing more and more in the culture.
  - me551ah 8y ago
    Is there a reason to why google is doing this? From what I get from my friends Google has issues with employee growth and it's pretty easy to stagnate. If google keeps going outside for leadership roles then is it overlooking capable internal employees?
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      Companies typically hire outside people for leadership roles when they want to change their culture or gain some new industry connections. Promoting someone from within will reinforce the existing culture, for better or worse.
    - compiler-guy 8y ago
      I think Google just can't find people internally who want to do it. I know of two groups (one of maybe 10, and another maybe 30 engineers) that sat essentially leaderless for several months each before Google hired a manager from outside the company. Neither one of these, in my opinion, have a good handle on Google culture. There is no real reward for becoming a manager (no more pay, no more level, no more nothing), but a lot of hassle, so very few engineers want to do it. At least that is what I see from my limited vantage point.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pbiggar 8y ago
Notwithstanding that they are 3rd in terms of revenue, GCP has gotten to a great place in the last few years. The products are fantastic. Great docs, super consistent APIs and products, great pricing. Really a joy to use. The bet on GKE really paid off too. During her tenure it moved from something I wouldn't even consider using, to first choice for my new startup.
- p0rkbelly 8y ago
  ...and I think that's the problem. Despite all the greatness, they are losing the enterprise $$ battle.
- outime 8y ago
  While I agree their offering is quite good, I understand why enterprises do not want to invest on it. Some reasons that come to mind: - Much less people with proper platform knowledge (not even talking about certified). - Not much trust on deprecation policies (AWS keeps running very old and deprecated services virtually forever, there’s no guarantee GCloud would do the same given Google history). - Not from personal experience but customer support is not top notch as with other providers from what I have read and heard. In my opinion those three reasons alone are big flags for many corporations, which might prevent them from getting the big contracts. Edit: formatting
  - snovv_crash 8y ago
    Re: deprecation, I deployed a personal project 7 years ago to AppEngine, and it has run continuously since then, costing me a few cents each month above what the free tier provides. Since then I've redeployed a few times with little bugfixes or features, and all the infrastructure changes together have required a few lines to be removed from config files, and that's it. It still runs exactly as designed, 7 years later. By far one of the best effort/reward ratios I've had on any platform. No OS upgrades, no package version conflicts, no downtime (that I've noticed), just deploy and forget. That said, I'm not sure I'd use it for anything that might scale heavily with datastore writes. They get expensive very quickly if you can't cache and group the writes.
whoisjuan 8y ago
This is Google's problem. Total and complete lack of long-term view. Just look at how many projects they shut down every year. Do they really think they were going to become market leaders in three years? Come on. The market for cloud infrastructure is in its infancy. The opportunities are there. But you don't build a large business within a potentially multi-trillion dollar industry by being impatient. And hiring a former Oracle executive just shows how impatient they are... It a complete change of the playbook and it likely means that they are scrapping a huge chunk of Greene's original go to market strategy for Google Cloud.
- briffle 8y ago
  Which google cloud projects have shut down this past year? Or Ever, for that matter?
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    Apigee API BaaS, Fabric, Google Search Appliance... However, I was referring more to Google's general tendency to shut down projects across the board. The list of consumer products shut down by Google is pretty long (Google Reader, iGoogle, Aardvark, Google Inbox, Orkut, etc..)
    - bitpush 8y ago
      Isnt it a little hypocritical for you to say this? I went through your profile and saw that you were involved with Contactive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096597) which doesnt exist anymore. I'm assuming that doesnt exist today because of very good reasons. Same for other companies as well.
      - whoisjuan 8y ago
        Yes, I'm a hypocrite for having worked for a company that failed to find product-market fit and having the nerve to give an opinion about why I believe a company like Google should be more consistent with their product offering and the long-term vision of their ventures. Thanks for pointing out my hypocrisy and why I don't have the right to have an opinion about anything anymore. I also checked your profile and you're pretty good at defending everything Google does, but I don't judge you for having those opinions, nor I think you're a hypocrite for thinking in a certain way.
sheeshkebab 8y ago
I wonder what does Oracle fusion middleware guy have to do with selling cloud tech
- chevman 8y ago
  A zillion high level contacts at all the enterprise clients they want to sell to?
  - p0rkbelly 8y ago
    That didn't help Oracle's cloud very much...
    - luckylittle 8y ago
      I agree. He is an old dinosaur who has no idea about cloud. I don't know what was Google thinking??? As mentioned above, this is a huge red flag for me. Source: Ex-Oracle working under his leadership seeing his decisions first hand.
luka-birsa 8y ago
I would really hate to see anything bad happen to GCP after the changes in leadership. Based on my own experience as the CTO: After being an Azure shop for a year we've migrated ~50-100 VMs to GCP and I love the GCP products. GCP is: - Simpler to use - More tailored to people with Linux environment - Leader in K8S - Has good support - So much cheaper (in our case we saved ~60%) - Has great UI and understandable primitives. My only pet peeve is the fact that exporing your spend is practically impossible unless you're a BQ guy that can work directly with report exports. PS: We're building our future infra on K8S to allow us to migrate more easily to a different could if something goes awry with GCP, I really hope there won't be a need to migrate back to Azure and its arcane and high pricing, strange UI, worse tooling...
- true_tuna 8y ago
  Wait what? Good support? Not in my experience. Leader in k8s? Not for production. I defy you to do a gcp gke deployment without using beta or alpha features (that specifically say don’t use this for production). Stackdriver error reporting springs to mind. And working with SSL certs/let’s encrypt is a close second. If you want a couple more peeves for your list how about documentation? I regularly find documentation heavy on theory light on specifics. GCP is my favorite thing that is almost good enough to use. I’m hoping the change of leadership actually improves things. GCP could stand to re-focus on a “customer first” philosophy.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Lack of IPv6 support is what keeps us off GCP or AWS, HTTP fronting is great, but when it comes to realtime interactive streams to mobile devices, the ability to save significant latency and avoid the hot mess of CGNAT is invaluble.
    - becauseiam 8y ago
      IPv6 is not a first-class protocol on AWS, but it is absolutely doable for most scenarios. It still requires having something of a dual-stack network in place (you definitely can't have a v6 only network of anything meaningful).
yazr 8y ago
Will this lead to price hikes (a-la Oracle death by a thousand cuts of "improved plans", surcharges, etc) Wondering what people think about this.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  my guess is that won’t happen until they have significant market share. right now they are playing catch up and having higher prices wouldn’t help
ilovecaching 8y ago
GCP is reflective of Google's internal architecture, just as Azure and AWS are reflective of Microsoft and Amazon. This isn't surprising, they're leveraging the same foundation they used to launch their flagship products in terms of infrastructure, knowledge, and culture. Google is very different internally from the enterprise loving Microsoft, and they're more technically fluent than the customer focused Amazon. Googles edge targeting and process scheduling are also very different. These differences make GCP a very different product than it's competition. Azure is essentially leveraging the ecosystem fracture that Microsoft already holds, and the fact that Microsoft knows how to speak the slow drawl of enterprise. GCP is situated to solve things the Google way, which isn't the way most people run their infra.
- mirceal 8y ago
  Yes, yes. The Google “way”. Because everyone has the same issues google has and wants to solve them in the same manner. /s Google lost the Cloud Train. They need to focus on things that work and I would not be surprised if GCP was not a thing 5 years from now.
- halbritt 8y ago
  "...slow drawl of the enterprise." Not sure that I've ever seen this articulated so brilliantly.
  - Zee2 8y ago
    This truly is an incredible bit of literary imagery. I've never heard it before yet it is so very accurate.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I wish Diane well in her future endeavors and I certainly agree it would be great to see more women in the C suite. I would be curious to know if her passions are intertwined with her departure, specifically if she felt that Google had structural issues with women in leadership roles. She is essentially being fired as the lead of this organization and being replaced with a fairly prototypical male lead. I am not implying that Thomas isn't qualified, his LinkedIn profile suggests he have very relevant experience, Diane also has the experience in her resume as well. What will help Thomas succeed in this role? The bottom line is I would like to see more women in leadership positions and I am sad to see us lose one. I would like to understand (although I realize that isn't possible) if her departure was preventable, and if so what would have had to be different.
- tw04 8y ago
  >Diane also has the experience in her resume as well. Nothing in her resume actually suggests she had the experience for what Google needed. VMware became popular in a similar way to Redhat, in that it solved a technical issue nobody else was solving at the time. It didn't have explosive growth until EMC took over and with it EMC management style/structure. She was just along for the ride the second the company was sold to EMC. >What will help Thomas succeed in this role? He was in a position of power in what is one of the most successful sales organizations in the history of tech. I don't like Oracle, in fact my post history will show that I loathe them. But their salesforce has absolutely dominated the tech industry for 2 decades+. Google needs someone that knows how to sell to enterprise, they don't just need another nerd at the top. Based on my experiences with Diane she was an extremely gifted technical talent and an extremely poor saleswoman and leader.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    GCP doesn't need to figure out how to sell to enterprises. They need to offer a better product with more features, support etc. Because adoption within the enterprise isn't driven by the CEO or CTO. It's driven by individual architects and developers.
    - 8y ago
miracle2k 8y ago
It is always worth pointing out, since few people are aware of this, that the servers you rent from Google Cloud do not accept any network packets from US-sanctioned countries; if you are ideologically inclined to the idea of an internet with few borders, free software and so forth, then Google Cloud is arbitrarily crippled infrastructure. In any case, people should be aware of those limitations when choosing a provider.
- pier25 8y ago
  I was hit by this. One of my projects needed to be used by some users in Cuba, and guess what? GCP doesn't work from Cuba. I had to adapt one of the features of the project to upload files to AWS S3 which works perfectly there.
  - dsl 8y ago
    The Cuban citizens that have access to the internet do so through Nauta, a government ran network of wifi hotspots. This network is heavily filtered and operates basically on a whitelist. Even if GCP accepted packets from Cuba, your problems probably would have persisted on the Cuban end too.
    - pier25 8y ago
      I'm not certain of that. Like I said, AWS S3 works fine.
- rcfox 8y ago
  "Sanctioned" is a weird word, meaning both "approved" and "punished". I always have to look extra hard at it...
- briffle 8y ago
  wait.. Does AWS or Azure? that seems like a good way to get someone fined..
  - miracle2k 8y ago
urda 8y ago
Based on how Google is quick to mothball products, I can't honestly trust the GCP for production-grade services. Unfortunately, there's not much the Cloud team at Google can do. Google as a whole needs to demonstrate long-term support in a superior fashion before I can trust their products for building my products. Why is this getting downvoted? Provide some input on it, has Google suddenly stopped killing projects that are in their infancy? Why should I entrust my platform to that behavior? Anything instead of just mass downvoting. HN you're better than this.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  My trust of Google is so low, whenever I read a HN thread which is mostly supportive of them I assume they're using paid shills. Even on HN.
  - urda 8y ago
    I don't care to "hunt" for shills anyway, but it's real frustrating to make a comment against Google, get hit for it, and the best "response" is a wall of text just making it "OK" for them to kill products off left and right early. As if this company-wide behavior should just be discounted because "Google". There's a reason they are 3rd in cloud tech.
- dajonker 8y ago
  You're getting downvoted because you don't base your statement on anything. Google sometimes cancels Early Access or Alpha stage products. Beta products may change before they are made Generally Available (GA), but I cannot personally remember any beta product being significantly changed or cancelled before GA. Any GA product will be stable for quite some time, you will get at least a 1 year notice before they deprecate anything, as can be read from their terms: https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/ section 7. But I understand hat some customers require enterprisey products that stay exactly the same for at least 10 years, and a 1 year notice might not be enough to make adjustments.
moretosee 8y ago
a new leader from oracle? google cloud will be doomed...
- romed 8y ago
  How can it be worse than a leader from VMWare? Have you ever seen VMWare's cloud product? It literally has little pictures of pretend computers that you click the reset buttons of with your mouse.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    Diane was the founder of VMWare, back in the day when virtualization was as shiny and new as containers are today.
    - romed 8y ago
      And VMWare is a fine product, but VMWare Cloud is kinda not.
  - moretosee 8y ago
    do you know oracle's culture? politics, bureaucracy, nepotism, hierarchy, ... you name it.
alexnewman 8y ago
I hate to be a negative nancy, but this is a huge blow to GCP. People really underestimate how badass she is/was. I really worry that GCP will really hurt Google Morale since they were so sure that they would win this market. "Those the gods wish to destroy, they first make arrogant"
kenhwang 8y ago
The "Google is the new Oracle" phrase sure rings more true with this change.
- magicalist 8y ago
  > The "Google is the new Oracle" phrase bings "Google is the new Oracle" yeah, nobody says that.
  - scarmig 8y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q="Google+is+the+new+Oracle" https://www.google.com/search?q="Google+is+the+new+Oracle" To be fair, there was a single tweet in March that used the phrase, so it's been said once in history.
- crucifiction 8y ago
  Google is the new 2005 Microsoft
alexnewman 8y ago
Am I the only one who has had much better experience with kops or just straitup kubeadm then aks/eks/gke? Stock k8s in my opinion is not hard to bootstrap.
- alexnewman 8y ago
  Hackernews, i'm sick of being downvoted for no apparent reason. What exactly is going on? Why am I being downvoted here?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    They are fake internet points and don't matter. Making comments about downvotes usually means more downvotes. While votes are usually reserved for content quality, HN also finds them acceptable for disagreement in opinion, so most likely people disagree that stock K8S is easier to setup than the managed offerings.
    - alexnewman 8y ago
      Ah fair point . I agree it's fake points, but I can't help but feel as though downvoting without any response is.... Disturbing.
- ttmb 8y ago
  I think this was downvoted because it's not really the topic at hand.
notavalleyman 8y ago
Can anyone help me think this through: it seems Google/Alphabet shouldn't just be #3 cloud provider, but the cloud itself. It should have been difficult for consumers to separate the concepts of cloud/Alphabet, as cloud is so integral to the Alphabet business. Instead the gold podium is occupied by a book re-seller. But the entire Alphabet product line, from the amazing distributed Big Tables to the stitching of 3rd party satellite polygons, is just a front-end cloud use case. So why didn't it happen? Departing CEO Greene writes in the OP link that she was only supposed to be running GCP for 2 years. Why on earth was an interim CEO there in the first place
- mehrdada 8y ago
  Google acquired her company without any real product for $380MM. She cashed out, now she is gone. Simple as that. It's going to be harsh ride from here with no upside.
  - rrdharan 8y ago
    Diane was already a billionaire prior to the acquisition. She also donated all of the Bebop money to charity anyway[1]. And she’s retaining her Google board seat. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-charity-2016-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-...
- vl 8y ago
  Google missed cloud in the same way Microsoft missed internet. Google entire product strategy is defense of Ads/Search revenues and napalming any emerging threats. Through this perspective when cloud technologies started to emerge, they didn't seem important. Then it became clear that cloud providers grow and consolidate so fast, that Google is not going to be hardware buyer #1 anymore and will lose access to best hardware discounts, threatening profitability of Ads/Search itself! This was pivotal moment: backwards Cloud PA nobody cared about (fun story: Cloud PA was once forgotten at company-wide key result meeting, it was fun to see how couple hundreds of people watching video-cast in the auditorium looked at each other and like "meeting is over, they didn't mention or PA once, what is going on!") suddenly became the priority, was merged with TI (Tech Infrastructure) and everything became "Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!".
gigatexal 8y ago
GCP is great but we couldn’t find a way to get logs to go anywhere but to StackDriver and it being so expensive we had to jump ship because of it. Basically try as we might all the pods that ran our containers had stderror and stdout hijacked by StackDriver
- manigandham 8y ago
  You mention pods so are you talking about GKE clusters? If so, Stackdriver integration is just another service installed when you setup your cluster (using fluentd as the agent). There's also an updated beta version of this monitoring, but you can disable all of it easily in the GKE console with a few clicks. Container output isn't hijacked, it's all logged to files, and those files are tailed by the logging agents. You can run multiple logging agents, for example we use https://logdna.com/ https://logdna.com/ (highly recommended) and it works fine in addition to stackdriver logs.
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    Ok this might be embarrassing to admit but when we used GKE about 8 months ago we tried to do this but we couldn’t get our own logging to get anything from the pods. Maybe the tech lead was biased and wanted to go to AWS all along. I’ll have to take another look at it because I liked the service. What I didn’t like is that I on many occasions saught help from Google but got no response. We didn’t pay for support but just an email a few days later from support showing the methods to disable it and maybe a look into why our on cluster logging tools weren’t ingesting anything would have been nice.
    - xdominator 8y ago
      It looks like you can disable logging for specific clusters if needed https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/logging#disabling_logging https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/loggi..., or set up log exclusion to reduce costs https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/exclusions/ https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/exclusions/ The logs are still available in the cluster (not hijacked) and you can configure your own export mechanism.
pier25 8y ago
I prefer using GPC than AWS, by far. But I will have to admit that AWS seems a lot more committed to their cloud products than Google. New GCP products and features take forever to be introduced or phased out of beta. For example, cloud functions entered beta some 2 years ago and went out of beta a year later. Even today it's only possible to use Node and Python. Only recently the Node runtime was upgraded from old Node 6 to Node 8. https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/ During that same time, a small company like Zeit has created a number of complete cloud products for developers. Not only that, but Zeit Now v2 is better in many aspects than Google Cloud Functions. Why isn't google invested in GraphQL? They could have come up with something like Prisma with all their talent and resources.
- blaisio 8y ago
  I agree, I think for most people that's the main hesitation with Google Cloud. Especially when there are outages, it feels as if Google has very few people working on the product.
mathattack 8y ago
Google’s Cloud weakspot is Sales and Support - the handholding to get clients over the finish line. The new hire should be able to layer this on to Google’s existing technical strength.
- dajonker 8y ago
  In my experience Google has awesome sales people, but the ones I've spoken to have an engineering background. Convincing other engineers that GCP is technically superior isn't that hard, but (unfortunately) engineers aren't usually the decision makers.
  - mathattack 8y ago
    Exactly
- pas 8y ago
  Not just support. Error handling. People expect Google to work, as Google trained people to expect its things to just work. Like Google.com, Gmail, Android. And GCP is complex, it will break down. And then people just get frustrated. Yes, it works from the CLI, but fuck that. I know AWS is slow and expensive, but at least it does the basics. GCP was unable to launch VMs - for fuck's sake - on the UI just a few days ago with mysterious resource not available errors. (Anecdotal first hand experience, I've spent at least 1-1 hour trying to get an instance in a EU zone, to no avail. Even waited half a day between.)
trhway 8y ago
A VMWare founder couldn't force Google culture to be enterprise-y enough, now an Oracle exec will try that ... If he fails, i guess the next guy will be a 4-star Marine general. As far as i heard, the VMWare people Diane brought into the Google Cloud org were screaming from the pain of being an adapter between the hard place of the rest of the Google (i.e. the infrastructure, etc.) and the sledgehammer of enterprise customers who, still mentally being unenlightened dwellers of the Dark Ages, fail to understand the 30 seconds shutdown notice suddenly coming from deep inside the Google infra guts as an "advanced maintenance notice". Lets see what happens to the Oracle guys who are already coming upon the Google Cloud like Viking drakkars upon Northumbria shores.
- coredog64 8y ago
  > If [TK] fails, I guess the next guy will be a 4-star Marine general. James Mattis will use his knife hands to convince enterprise customers of the seriousness of Google’s support team.
mavelikara 8y ago
TK has a reputation for bad temper. I have heard senior execs at Oracle say that they take great care to ensure that star engineers don't come into contact with him directly, lest they lose those engineers. Would be interesting to see how this plays out at Google.
- fooker 8y ago
  Here is a Quora answer which supports your statement, admittedly snidely. https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He-is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like/answer/Cameron-Purdy https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-O...
pwarner 8y ago
They can carpool to work. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-kurian-twins-won-the-valley-2016-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-kurian-twins-won-the...
notatoad 8y ago
I assume new leadership means they'll be rebranding again?

251 points by clebio 8y ago

interesting !

kjw 8y ago

A move that was necessary. Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. (Observable as reflected in their pricing, sales, and support challenges.) Thomas now has a similarly tough job navigating the organ rejection risk of transplanting anything that looks like Oracle culture and practices.

mtgx 8y ago
It seems that employee backlash against her support of Project Maven may have something to do with it, too: https://9to5google.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-diane-greene-leaving/ https://9to5google.com/2018/11/16/google-cloud-diane-greene-...
fierro 8y ago
Diane Green put GCP firmly on the map as a cloud provider to reckon with.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Sure. But they are in 3rd place. And so very, very far behind AWS in the range of products, quality of service, developer ecosystem, number of regions etc. And while GCP is still focusing on the basics AWS is locking developers into their platform with paradigms like serverless. And once IBM launches their cloud I would actually put them ahead of GCP given how useful their Compose suite is.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    "And once IBM launches their cloud" Interesting. Is it just another rename (Softlayer -> BlueMix -> ?). Or something else?
    - catwell 8y ago
      Given recent news, I would be surprised if the future of IBM's cloud was not based on OpenShift...
  - vl 8y ago
    Yes, but 3rd place is not her fault, but Urs'es, Larry's and Eric's fault. She joined too late to affect that.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    IBM already has a cloud called Bluemix, and they bought/merged Softlayer into it. It's not great. Compose is just a managed database service which IBM also acquired. I don't see how that alone would put them ahead of any cloud, especially when they're already lacking in infrastructure and software.
    - threeseed 8y ago
      They also just acquired a tiny little company called Redhat who I am sure knows a thing or two about infrastructure and software. And Compose is the most useful database offering on any cloud IMHO.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        Redhat is tiny compared to the clouds. Softlayer is aging and IBM does not have billions in infrastructure buildout to compete. Redhat can provide software but definitely not enough to put them ahead of GCP as you claim. And Compose manages databases on AWS and GCP too, similar to Aiven and others, so I don't see how that alone makes IBM special.
      - warrenm 8y ago
crazygringo 8y ago
> Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. Citation needed -- from my knowledge, the culture shifted dramatically -- she did succeed, and now that's done. Granted, I'm referring to Google culture within Cloud/GSuite... obviously she didn't affect culture at YouTube or Search because those weren't her areas.
vl 8y ago
This is completely incorrect. Under Urs'es leadership it was hard to work on enterprise features due to explicit direction from him "we don't support enterprise because it's too hard". Diane completely changed that, developed coherent GCP/G Suite strategy, and now GCP organization is very enterprise-oriented. Hiring of Oracle dude kinda re-iterates this.

Zhenya 8y ago

Oracle culture is bad: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2500 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2500 Oracle money making abilities good

tmikaeld 8y ago
I don't know if it's a myth but, I've always heard consultants say that Oracle is run like a bank by bankers, even by Oracle consultants. A lot of lock-ins, contracts and security... for Oracle.
Twirrim 8y ago
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a totally different approach, for what it's worth. Feels no different from working at AWS etc. (other than OCI gives a damn about operational burden and paying down technical debt, rather than letting the fires keep on burning as long as the features are being pushed out) TK is very much old school Oracle though. Doesn't feel like a good cultural fit with Google.
- posixplz 8y ago
  I agree completely, having worked at a few Seattle based cloud providers. Perhaps TK’s personality did not fit with the new direction of Oracle, centered around OCI and its ethos. Disclosure: I work at OCI.
andrewbinstock 8y ago
Oracle and TK understand one thing that GCP does not: the importance of great support. Oracle charges a ton for top-tier support, but if you have a problem they can't solve remotely, they'll send a team of engineers to your site and work night and day until it's fixed. In extreme cases, they'll duplicate your hardware and software setup at their expense and run in parallel until they can duplicate and solve the problem. That is serious enterprise commitment. Google has no cloud counterpart to that level of service. If TK brings an equivalent orientation that makes customers believe that GCP will do whatever is necessary to resolve a problem, he'll have contributed significantly to its success, IMHO.

perfmode 8y ago

diane and mendel are a powerhouse pair.

Arcsech 8y ago

Gonna be totally honest: From the headline and Google’s previous behavior, my first thought was “Huh, I didn’t expect them to shut GCP down already...” (To be clear, they are not shutting down GCP, this is just a leadership transition)

Mononokay 8y ago
My first reaction was "What a weird way to announce they're shutting dow...oh!"
fosco 8y ago
Funny, I had the same thought before reading. one day xkcd [0] will be considered a profit, that day is coming. [0] https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/
sctb 8y ago
We've added a “leadership” to the title to help clarify.
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
Might we say that it was an incredible journey? ;)
CameronBanga 8y ago
I think one of the big issues that Google is facing with GCP is exactly the perception they have in the market with respect to product shutdowns. I could never see myself making the decision to go with Google over Amazon or Azure, simply because I don't feel confident that the product won't be shutdown with minimal warning at any given time.
- arbie 8y ago
  Have you considered a cloud abstraction that let's you change providers with less effort?
  - whorleater 8y ago

nowarninglabel 8y ago

There's a great episode of "Masters of Scale" with Diane Greene where she talks about her time at VMWare and then about how she ended up taking the job of leading Google Cloud. https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/ https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/

rawrmaan 8y ago

The new CEO is the former President of Product Development at Oracle...I wanna puke. Oracle has some of the most hated products in the industry. I hope he's able to adapt to Google's style and not the other way around.

compiler-guy 8y ago
This isn't the first time Google has gone outside the company for a top leadership role. Vic Gundotra was another one--and that didn't work out too well. But this is happening with increasing frequency even for mid-level leadership positions, and it is showing more and more in the culture.
- me551ah 8y ago
  Is there a reason to why google is doing this? From what I get from my friends Google has issues with employee growth and it's pretty easy to stagnate. If google keeps going outside for leadership roles then is it overlooking capable internal employees?
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Companies typically hire outside people for leadership roles when they want to change their culture or gain some new industry connections. Promoting someone from within will reinforce the existing culture, for better or worse.
  - compiler-guy 8y ago
    I think Google just can't find people internally who want to do it. I know of two groups (one of maybe 10, and another maybe 30 engineers) that sat essentially leaderless for several months each before Google hired a manager from outside the company. Neither one of these, in my opinion, have a good handle on Google culture. There is no real reward for becoming a manager (no more pay, no more level, no more nothing), but a lot of hassle, so very few engineers want to do it. At least that is what I see from my limited vantage point.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pbiggar 8y ago

Notwithstanding that they are 3rd in terms of revenue, GCP has gotten to a great place in the last few years. The products are fantastic. Great docs, super consistent APIs and products, great pricing. Really a joy to use. The bet on GKE really paid off too. During her tenure it moved from something I wouldn't even consider using, to first choice for my new startup.

p0rkbelly 8y ago
...and I think that's the problem. Despite all the greatness, they are losing the enterprise $$ battle.
outime 8y ago
While I agree their offering is quite good, I understand why enterprises do not want to invest on it. Some reasons that come to mind: - Much less people with proper platform knowledge (not even talking about certified). - Not much trust on deprecation policies (AWS keeps running very old and deprecated services virtually forever, there’s no guarantee GCloud would do the same given Google history). - Not from personal experience but customer support is not top notch as with other providers from what I have read and heard. In my opinion those three reasons alone are big flags for many corporations, which might prevent them from getting the big contracts. Edit: formatting
- snovv_crash 8y ago
  Re: deprecation, I deployed a personal project 7 years ago to AppEngine, and it has run continuously since then, costing me a few cents each month above what the free tier provides. Since then I've redeployed a few times with little bugfixes or features, and all the infrastructure changes together have required a few lines to be removed from config files, and that's it. It still runs exactly as designed, 7 years later. By far one of the best effort/reward ratios I've had on any platform. No OS upgrades, no package version conflicts, no downtime (that I've noticed), just deploy and forget. That said, I'm not sure I'd use it for anything that might scale heavily with datastore writes. They get expensive very quickly if you can't cache and group the writes.

whoisjuan 8y ago

This is Google's problem. Total and complete lack of long-term view. Just look at how many projects they shut down every year. Do they really think they were going to become market leaders in three years? Come on. The market for cloud infrastructure is in its infancy. The opportunities are there. But you don't build a large business within a potentially multi-trillion dollar industry by being impatient. And hiring a former Oracle executive just shows how impatient they are... It a complete change of the playbook and it likely means that they are scrapping a huge chunk of Greene's original go to market strategy for Google Cloud.

briffle 8y ago
Which google cloud projects have shut down this past year? Or Ever, for that matter?
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Apigee API BaaS, Fabric, Google Search Appliance... However, I was referring more to Google's general tendency to shut down projects across the board. The list of consumer products shut down by Google is pretty long (Google Reader, iGoogle, Aardvark, Google Inbox, Orkut, etc..)
  - bitpush 8y ago
    Isnt it a little hypocritical for you to say this? I went through your profile and saw that you were involved with Contactive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8096597) which doesnt exist anymore. I'm assuming that doesnt exist today because of very good reasons. Same for other companies as well.
    - whoisjuan 8y ago
      Yes, I'm a hypocrite for having worked for a company that failed to find product-market fit and having the nerve to give an opinion about why I believe a company like Google should be more consistent with their product offering and the long-term vision of their ventures. Thanks for pointing out my hypocrisy and why I don't have the right to have an opinion about anything anymore. I also checked your profile and you're pretty good at defending everything Google does, but I don't judge you for having those opinions, nor I think you're a hypocrite for thinking in a certain way.

sheeshkebab 8y ago

I wonder what does Oracle fusion middleware guy have to do with selling cloud tech

chevman 8y ago
A zillion high level contacts at all the enterprise clients they want to sell to?
- p0rkbelly 8y ago
  That didn't help Oracle's cloud very much...
  - luckylittle 8y ago
    I agree. He is an old dinosaur who has no idea about cloud. I don't know what was Google thinking??? As mentioned above, this is a huge red flag for me. Source: Ex-Oracle working under his leadership seeing his decisions first hand.

luka-birsa 8y ago

I would really hate to see anything bad happen to GCP after the changes in leadership. Based on my own experience as the CTO: After being an Azure shop for a year we've migrated ~50-100 VMs to GCP and I love the GCP products. GCP is: - Simpler to use - More tailored to people with Linux environment - Leader in K8S - Has good support - So much cheaper (in our case we saved ~60%) - Has great UI and understandable primitives. My only pet peeve is the fact that exporing your spend is practically impossible unless you're a BQ guy that can work directly with report exports. PS: We're building our future infra on K8S to allow us to migrate more easily to a different could if something goes awry with GCP, I really hope there won't be a need to migrate back to Azure and its arcane and high pricing, strange UI, worse tooling...

true_tuna 8y ago
Wait what? Good support? Not in my experience. Leader in k8s? Not for production. I defy you to do a gcp gke deployment without using beta or alpha features (that specifically say don’t use this for production). Stackdriver error reporting springs to mind. And working with SSL certs/let’s encrypt is a close second. If you want a couple more peeves for your list how about documentation? I regularly find documentation heavy on theory light on specifics. GCP is my favorite thing that is almost good enough to use. I’m hoping the change of leadership actually improves things. GCP could stand to re-focus on a “customer first” philosophy.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Lack of IPv6 support is what keeps us off GCP or AWS, HTTP fronting is great, but when it comes to realtime interactive streams to mobile devices, the ability to save significant latency and avoid the hot mess of CGNAT is invaluble.
  - becauseiam 8y ago
    IPv6 is not a first-class protocol on AWS, but it is absolutely doable for most scenarios. It still requires having something of a dual-stack network in place (you definitely can't have a v6 only network of anything meaningful).

yazr 8y ago

Will this lead to price hikes (a-la Oracle death by a thousand cuts of "improved plans", surcharges, etc) Wondering what people think about this.

oculusthrift 8y ago
my guess is that won’t happen until they have significant market share. right now they are playing catch up and having higher prices wouldn’t help

ilovecaching 8y ago

GCP is reflective of Google's internal architecture, just as Azure and AWS are reflective of Microsoft and Amazon. This isn't surprising, they're leveraging the same foundation they used to launch their flagship products in terms of infrastructure, knowledge, and culture. Google is very different internally from the enterprise loving Microsoft, and they're more technically fluent than the customer focused Amazon. Googles edge targeting and process scheduling are also very different. These differences make GCP a very different product than it's competition. Azure is essentially leveraging the ecosystem fracture that Microsoft already holds, and the fact that Microsoft knows how to speak the slow drawl of enterprise. GCP is situated to solve things the Google way, which isn't the way most people run their infra.

mirceal 8y ago
Yes, yes. The Google “way”. Because everyone has the same issues google has and wants to solve them in the same manner. /s Google lost the Cloud Train. They need to focus on things that work and I would not be surprised if GCP was not a thing 5 years from now.
halbritt 8y ago
"...slow drawl of the enterprise." Not sure that I've ever seen this articulated so brilliantly.
- Zee2 8y ago
  This truly is an incredible bit of literary imagery. I've never heard it before yet it is so very accurate.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I wish Diane well in her future endeavors and I certainly agree it would be great to see more women in the C suite. I would be curious to know if her passions are intertwined with her departure, specifically if she felt that Google had structural issues with women in leadership roles. She is essentially being fired as the lead of this organization and being replaced with a fairly prototypical male lead. I am not implying that Thomas isn't qualified, his LinkedIn profile suggests he have very relevant experience, Diane also has the experience in her resume as well. What will help Thomas succeed in this role? The bottom line is I would like to see more women in leadership positions and I am sad to see us lose one. I would like to understand (although I realize that isn't possible) if her departure was preventable, and if so what would have had to be different.

tw04 8y ago
>Diane also has the experience in her resume as well. Nothing in her resume actually suggests she had the experience for what Google needed. VMware became popular in a similar way to Redhat, in that it solved a technical issue nobody else was solving at the time. It didn't have explosive growth until EMC took over and with it EMC management style/structure. She was just along for the ride the second the company was sold to EMC. >What will help Thomas succeed in this role? He was in a position of power in what is one of the most successful sales organizations in the history of tech. I don't like Oracle, in fact my post history will show that I loathe them. But their salesforce has absolutely dominated the tech industry for 2 decades+. Google needs someone that knows how to sell to enterprise, they don't just need another nerd at the top. Based on my experiences with Diane she was an extremely gifted technical talent and an extremely poor saleswoman and leader.
- threeseed 8y ago
  GCP doesn't need to figure out how to sell to enterprises. They need to offer a better product with more features, support etc. Because adoption within the enterprise isn't driven by the CEO or CTO. It's driven by individual architects and developers.
  - 8y ago

miracle2k 8y ago

It is always worth pointing out, since few people are aware of this, that the servers you rent from Google Cloud do not accept any network packets from US-sanctioned countries; if you are ideologically inclined to the idea of an internet with few borders, free software and so forth, then Google Cloud is arbitrarily crippled infrastructure. In any case, people should be aware of those limitations when choosing a provider.

pier25 8y ago
I was hit by this. One of my projects needed to be used by some users in Cuba, and guess what? GCP doesn't work from Cuba. I had to adapt one of the features of the project to upload files to AWS S3 which works perfectly there.
- dsl 8y ago
  The Cuban citizens that have access to the internet do so through Nauta, a government ran network of wifi hotspots. This network is heavily filtered and operates basically on a whitelist. Even if GCP accepted packets from Cuba, your problems probably would have persisted on the Cuban end too.
  - pier25 8y ago
    I'm not certain of that. Like I said, AWS S3 works fine.
rcfox 8y ago
"Sanctioned" is a weird word, meaning both "approved" and "punished". I always have to look extra hard at it...
briffle 8y ago
wait.. Does AWS or Azure? that seems like a good way to get someone fined..
- miracle2k 8y ago

urda 8y ago

Based on how Google is quick to mothball products, I can't honestly trust the GCP for production-grade services. Unfortunately, there's not much the Cloud team at Google can do. Google as a whole needs to demonstrate long-term support in a superior fashion before I can trust their products for building my products. Why is this getting downvoted? Provide some input on it, has Google suddenly stopped killing projects that are in their infancy? Why should I entrust my platform to that behavior? Anything instead of just mass downvoting. HN you're better than this.

Jedi72 8y ago
My trust of Google is so low, whenever I read a HN thread which is mostly supportive of them I assume they're using paid shills. Even on HN.
- urda 8y ago
  I don't care to "hunt" for shills anyway, but it's real frustrating to make a comment against Google, get hit for it, and the best "response" is a wall of text just making it "OK" for them to kill products off left and right early. As if this company-wide behavior should just be discounted because "Google". There's a reason they are 3rd in cloud tech.
dajonker 8y ago
You're getting downvoted because you don't base your statement on anything. Google sometimes cancels Early Access or Alpha stage products. Beta products may change before they are made Generally Available (GA), but I cannot personally remember any beta product being significantly changed or cancelled before GA. Any GA product will be stable for quite some time, you will get at least a 1 year notice before they deprecate anything, as can be read from their terms: https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/ section 7. But I understand hat some customers require enterprisey products that stay exactly the same for at least 10 years, and a 1 year notice might not be enough to make adjustments.

moretosee 8y ago

a new leader from oracle? google cloud will be doomed...

romed 8y ago
How can it be worse than a leader from VMWare? Have you ever seen VMWare's cloud product? It literally has little pictures of pretend computers that you click the reset buttons of with your mouse.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Diane was the founder of VMWare, back in the day when virtualization was as shiny and new as containers are today.
  - romed 8y ago
    And VMWare is a fine product, but VMWare Cloud is kinda not.
- moretosee 8y ago
  do you know oracle's culture? politics, bureaucracy, nepotism, hierarchy, ... you name it.

alexnewman 8y ago

I hate to be a negative nancy, but this is a huge blow to GCP. People really underestimate how badass she is/was. I really worry that GCP will really hurt Google Morale since they were so sure that they would win this market. "Those the gods wish to destroy, they first make arrogant"

kenhwang 8y ago

The "Google is the new Oracle" phrase sure rings more true with this change.

magicalist 8y ago
> The "Google is the new Oracle" phrase bings "Google is the new Oracle" yeah, nobody says that.
- scarmig 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q="Google+is+the+new+Oracle" https://www.google.com/search?q="Google+is+the+new+Oracle" To be fair, there was a single tweet in March that used the phrase, so it's been said once in history.
crucifiction 8y ago
Google is the new 2005 Microsoft

alexnewman 8y ago

Am I the only one who has had much better experience with kops or just straitup kubeadm then aks/eks/gke? Stock k8s in my opinion is not hard to bootstrap.

alexnewman 8y ago
Hackernews, i'm sick of being downvoted for no apparent reason. What exactly is going on? Why am I being downvoted here?
- manigandham 8y ago
  They are fake internet points and don't matter. Making comments about downvotes usually means more downvotes. While votes are usually reserved for content quality, HN also finds them acceptable for disagreement in opinion, so most likely people disagree that stock K8S is easier to setup than the managed offerings.
  - alexnewman 8y ago
    Ah fair point . I agree it's fake points, but I can't help but feel as though downvoting without any response is.... Disturbing.
ttmb 8y ago
I think this was downvoted because it's not really the topic at hand.

notavalleyman 8y ago

Can anyone help me think this through: it seems Google/Alphabet shouldn't just be #3 cloud provider, but the cloud itself. It should have been difficult for consumers to separate the concepts of cloud/Alphabet, as cloud is so integral to the Alphabet business. Instead the gold podium is occupied by a book re-seller. But the entire Alphabet product line, from the amazing distributed Big Tables to the stitching of 3rd party satellite polygons, is just a front-end cloud use case. So why didn't it happen? Departing CEO Greene writes in the OP link that she was only supposed to be running GCP for 2 years. Why on earth was an interim CEO there in the first place

mehrdada 8y ago
Google acquired her company without any real product for $380MM. She cashed out, now she is gone. Simple as that. It's going to be harsh ride from here with no upside.
- rrdharan 8y ago
  Diane was already a billionaire prior to the acquisition. She also donated all of the Bebop money to charity anyway[1]. And she’s retaining her Google board seat. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-charity-2016-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-...
vl 8y ago
Google missed cloud in the same way Microsoft missed internet. Google entire product strategy is defense of Ads/Search revenues and napalming any emerging threats. Through this perspective when cloud technologies started to emerge, they didn't seem important. Then it became clear that cloud providers grow and consolidate so fast, that Google is not going to be hardware buyer #1 anymore and will lose access to best hardware discounts, threatening profitability of Ads/Search itself! This was pivotal moment: backwards Cloud PA nobody cared about (fun story: Cloud PA was once forgotten at company-wide key result meeting, it was fun to see how couple hundreds of people watching video-cast in the auditorium looked at each other and like "meeting is over, they didn't mention or PA once, what is going on!") suddenly became the priority, was merged with TI (Tech Infrastructure) and everything became "Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!".

gigatexal 8y ago

GCP is great but we couldn’t find a way to get logs to go anywhere but to StackDriver and it being so expensive we had to jump ship because of it. Basically try as we might all the pods that ran our containers had stderror and stdout hijacked by StackDriver

manigandham 8y ago
You mention pods so are you talking about GKE clusters? If so, Stackdriver integration is just another service installed when you setup your cluster (using fluentd as the agent). There's also an updated beta version of this monitoring, but you can disable all of it easily in the GKE console with a few clicks. Container output isn't hijacked, it's all logged to files, and those files are tailed by the logging agents. You can run multiple logging agents, for example we use https://logdna.com/ https://logdna.com/ (highly recommended) and it works fine in addition to stackdriver logs.
- gigatexal 8y ago
  Ok this might be embarrassing to admit but when we used GKE about 8 months ago we tried to do this but we couldn’t get our own logging to get anything from the pods. Maybe the tech lead was biased and wanted to go to AWS all along. I’ll have to take another look at it because I liked the service. What I didn’t like is that I on many occasions saught help from Google but got no response. We didn’t pay for support but just an email a few days later from support showing the methods to disable it and maybe a look into why our on cluster logging tools weren’t ingesting anything would have been nice.
  - xdominator 8y ago
    It looks like you can disable logging for specific clusters if needed https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/logging#disabling_logging https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/loggi..., or set up log exclusion to reduce costs https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/exclusions/ https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/exclusions/ The logs are still available in the cluster (not hijacked) and you can configure your own export mechanism.

pier25 8y ago

I prefer using GPC than AWS, by far. But I will have to admit that AWS seems a lot more committed to their cloud products than Google. New GCP products and features take forever to be introduced or phased out of beta. For example, cloud functions entered beta some 2 years ago and went out of beta a year later. Even today it's only possible to use Node and Python. Only recently the Node runtime was upgraded from old Node 6 to Node 8. https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/ During that same time, a small company like Zeit has created a number of complete cloud products for developers. Not only that, but Zeit Now v2 is better in many aspects than Google Cloud Functions. Why isn't google invested in GraphQL? They could have come up with something like Prisma with all their talent and resources.

blaisio 8y ago
I agree, I think for most people that's the main hesitation with Google Cloud. Especially when there are outages, it feels as if Google has very few people working on the product.

mathattack 8y ago

Google’s Cloud weakspot is Sales and Support - the handholding to get clients over the finish line. The new hire should be able to layer this on to Google’s existing technical strength.

dajonker 8y ago
In my experience Google has awesome sales people, but the ones I've spoken to have an engineering background. Convincing other engineers that GCP is technically superior isn't that hard, but (unfortunately) engineers aren't usually the decision makers.
- mathattack 8y ago
  Exactly
pas 8y ago
Not just support. Error handling. People expect Google to work, as Google trained people to expect its things to just work. Like Google.com, Gmail, Android. And GCP is complex, it will break down. And then people just get frustrated. Yes, it works from the CLI, but fuck that. I know AWS is slow and expensive, but at least it does the basics. GCP was unable to launch VMs - for fuck's sake - on the UI just a few days ago with mysterious resource not available errors. (Anecdotal first hand experience, I've spent at least 1-1 hour trying to get an instance in a EU zone, to no avail. Even waited half a day between.)

trhway 8y ago

A VMWare founder couldn't force Google culture to be enterprise-y enough, now an Oracle exec will try that ... If he fails, i guess the next guy will be a 4-star Marine general. As far as i heard, the VMWare people Diane brought into the Google Cloud org were screaming from the pain of being an adapter between the hard place of the rest of the Google (i.e. the infrastructure, etc.) and the sledgehammer of enterprise customers who, still mentally being unenlightened dwellers of the Dark Ages, fail to understand the 30 seconds shutdown notice suddenly coming from deep inside the Google infra guts as an "advanced maintenance notice". Lets see what happens to the Oracle guys who are already coming upon the Google Cloud like Viking drakkars upon Northumbria shores.

coredog64 8y ago
> If [TK] fails, I guess the next guy will be a 4-star Marine general. James Mattis will use his knife hands to convince enterprise customers of the seriousness of Google’s support team.

mavelikara 8y ago

TK has a reputation for bad temper. I have heard senior execs at Oracle say that they take great care to ensure that star engineers don't come into contact with him directly, lest they lose those engineers. Would be interesting to see how this plays out at Google.

fooker 8y ago
Here is a Quora answer which supports your statement, admittedly snidely. https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He-is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like/answer/Cameron-Purdy https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-O...

pwarner 8y ago

They can carpool to work. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-kurian-twins-won-the-valley-2016-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-kurian-twins-won-the...

notatoad 8y ago

I assume new leadership means they'll be rebranding again?