5 ms·

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 cons

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.
  - outime 8y ago
    Google offers a one-year deprecation policy for a bunch of services, including AppEngine: https://developers.googleblog.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2012/04/changes-to-depreca.... One year is not enough for many enterprise customers. On top of this, there is the not-so-distant issue with the sudden price hike of Google Maps API, which made many companies struggle (in this case especially small ones).
  - nonplus 8y ago
    That's because Google has not updated appengine classic in 7 years...
    - sayhello 8y ago
      As an engineer working on App Engine, I can assure you that's not true. We've been changing a lot of infrastructure, adding features, fixing bugs, all without users being affected. I'm personally very excited about the Second Generation Runtimes, which have been worked on in parallel, and run the runtimes unmodified.
      - BareNakedCoder 8y ago
        Hey sayhello, ... is it likely GAE-Std-Py3 will ever get ndb, memcache, etc like we had with GAE-Std-Py27?
    - snovv_crash 8y ago
      For Enterprise that can be considered a good thing.
  - jontro 8y ago
    The maste/slave datastore deprecation burnt us. The migration couldn't be staged and when migrating the db locked up. The issue had to be fixed on googles end and caused us a bit of downtime. The engineering resources to migrate was also a problem with the whole stack having needed to be updated.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  I think if some Microsoft, Amazon, and Google employees didn’t like my business for whatever reason and pressed their leadership to kick my company off their platform, Google would be far and away most likely to give in and close the account.
- tensor 8y ago
  What is "proper platform knowledge"? Certifications are generally far inferior to hiring actual good engineers, which in my experience Google does. Comparing AWS to Google, our Google support is way higher touch and they give us way more experienced people (actual engineers). Most enterprises don't have a clue about computing though, so I can buy that they would prefer bling like certificates to getting a contact who is a real engineer.
  - pas 8y ago
    OP probably means big corps can't hire GCP experts, whereas you can find "AWS experts", because there is a cert and folks with that on their CVs.
- crucifiction 8y ago
  I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.
zjaffee 8y ago
Are they really third? for some reason I thought IBM was third even though they're not growing nearly as quickly?
- xx_alpha_xx 8y ago
  I'm sure IBM's marketing department would love you to believe that ;-)
fierro 8y ago
This. She did so much for both mindshare and market share. She will be truly missed!

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.
- outime 8y ago
  Google offers a one-year deprecation policy for a bunch of services, including AppEngine: https://developers.googleblog.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2012/04/changes-to-depreca.... One year is not enough for many enterprise customers. On top of this, there is the not-so-distant issue with the sudden price hike of Google Maps API, which made many companies struggle (in this case especially small ones).
- nonplus 8y ago
  That's because Google has not updated appengine classic in 7 years...
  - sayhello 8y ago
    As an engineer working on App Engine, I can assure you that's not true. We've been changing a lot of infrastructure, adding features, fixing bugs, all without users being affected. I'm personally very excited about the Second Generation Runtimes, which have been worked on in parallel, and run the runtimes unmodified.
    - BareNakedCoder 8y ago
      Hey sayhello, ... is it likely GAE-Std-Py3 will ever get ndb, memcache, etc like we had with GAE-Std-Py27?
  - snovv_crash 8y ago
    For Enterprise that can be considered a good thing.
- jontro 8y ago
  The maste/slave datastore deprecation burnt us. The migration couldn't be staged and when migrating the db locked up. The issue had to be fixed on googles end and caused us a bit of downtime. The engineering resources to migrate was also a problem with the whole stack having needed to be updated.
bradleyjg 8y ago
I think if some Microsoft, Amazon, and Google employees didn’t like my business for whatever reason and pressed their leadership to kick my company off their platform, Google would be far and away most likely to give in and close the account.
tensor 8y ago
What is "proper platform knowledge"? Certifications are generally far inferior to hiring actual good engineers, which in my experience Google does. Comparing AWS to Google, our Google support is way higher touch and they give us way more experienced people (actual engineers). Most enterprises don't have a clue about computing though, so I can buy that they would prefer bling like certificates to getting a contact who is a real engineer.
- pas 8y ago
  OP probably means big corps can't hire GCP experts, whereas you can find "AWS experts", because there is a cert and folks with that on their CVs.
crucifiction 8y ago
I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.

zjaffee 8y ago

Are they really third? for some reason I thought IBM was third even though they're not growing nearly as quickly?

xx_alpha_xx 8y ago
I'm sure IBM's marketing department would love you to believe that ;-)

fierro 8y ago

This. She did so much for both mindshare and market share. She will be truly missed!