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Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes

140 points by kanishkdudeja 8y ago

stingraycharles 8y ago
So, as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space. UPS and FedEx, Coca Cola and Pepsi, Oracle and MSSQL, etc. From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS). Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete. I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper". What are HN's thought about this? (Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.) EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules? [1] "Law of Duality" https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp/0887306667 https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/d...
- Already__Taken 8y ago
  1. Google will do this anyway, because it's not going to run on AWS or azure, so why not keep some skin in the game? 2. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Kubernetes also run on the competing clouds, so it isn't that much of an advantage, unless they add GCE specific features.
    - jeremyjh 8y ago
      Well, they do. For example you can configure your node pool to automatically upgrade its members so you don't have to worry about kernel patches. They have a proxy service for their Cloud SQL product so you don't have to fiddle with configuration, its just another k8s service name. Of course Amazon could do these things but they simply haven't. I think their biggest advantage though is they abstract away the master - you just have a node pool and don't have to worry about the masters. With Amazon you will pay $300 a month just to have a HA master, before you launch even one node in your pool. Also once you start getting into k8s you will find so much more information in the community with specific instructions for GKE; its by far the best environment to learn in for that reason. Google falls down in so many other areas though that it probably doesn't matter how good GKE is. The biggest annoyance to me is their Postgres offering still has no point in time recovery. edit to add: One other big advantage I forgot to mention is that launching a GKE cluster takes only a couple of minutes. I have a Terraform configuration that will launch a GKE cluster and run my deployments and my app is up and running after less than 5 minutes. This makes it much more attractive to do things like spin up a new cluster for each pull request.
      - coredog64 8y ago
        EKS pricing is $0.20/hour, or ~ $144/month. Not free, but also not $300. I will agree that EKS startup is slow, but given the way it needs to run, I don’t think many customers will want to run more than a few clusters per VPC.
        jeremyjh 8y ago
        $144 a month gets you one master. As I said, an HA master is twice that. If you want to compare to GKE, you are starting at $288 a month.
  - lbriner 8y ago
    1. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into. Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems. Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one? This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.
    - pmart123 8y ago
      I completely agree with this. But, also in think Google does have some advantages. Out of the box, their NLP algorithms seem much better than AWS’s offering. They also offer custom search as an api. I haven’t used it, but bigquery seems very good. I do agree these are probably not enough to have an enterprise shift. Maybe if they specialize on a couple industries that won’t choose amazon (fedex, ups, target, Walmart, streaming/media). It does seem like google has made strong inroads in finance as well.
    - halbritt 8y ago
      There are technical reasons. Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe? However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.
      - colemickens 8y ago
        >However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave. Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.
        halbritt 8y ago
        Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very technical so when I press him on details, I get very little. However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress. The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented. The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough. My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP. A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS. I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences. There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.
  - jgalar 8y ago
    k8s feels much more like an effort to commoditize this space through standardization. It's a pretty common business strategy [1]. [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- fh973 8y ago
  This "law of duality" is not very convincing. He does not offer criteria where it applies not does he argue why it would apply for the examples given. How does his adoption curve apply to coke? Especially in the cloud market, I see rather more players in the future as the underlying technologies become commercially available or even commodity. In the other side customers value support and services, which does not scale well, and smaller players have an advantage.
- gretch 8y ago
  seems really poorly defined and argued Here are the author's examples: >McDonalds and Burger King McDonald's is far larger than BK. Also Wendy's is larger than BK according to this source: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart >GM and Ford Another non-example. We just gonna pretend toyota doesn't exist? >Nike and Reebok Again, wtf? Even when reebok stood alone, there was still Adidas in the picture. Not a duality
  - arethuza 8y ago
    Or indeed VW Group - which, as least as of last year, was the biggest car company: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38793253 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38793253
  - ElBarto 8y ago
    You should try to understand the point and the context of these examples. I would suggest you read Al Ries books. These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change. For example the US car market has long been largely dominated by GM and Ford with Toyota only recently breaking that (and VW is non-existent). GM and Ford are still the two largest manufacturers: https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufacturers-in-the-us-market-1961-2016 https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact... The point is that there is usually very few dominating brands in a market, with the top 2 (approximately) yielding the power and the others following and filling the gaps.
    - cbsmith 8y ago
      > These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change. ...like whether that claim is well founded or not.
      - ElBarto 8y ago
        In the tech sector this has often reduced to 1 single brand instead of 2. The worst mistake we engineers tend to make is to dismiss the 'wisdom' of professional marketers and branding experts...
- ElBarto 8y ago
  There's several aspects here. I quite agree that if Google does not get into the top 2 it will likely be irrelevant in that market. The other aspect, as discussed in the article, is that this is a completely new market and way of doing business for Google, which seems to create a clash of cultures. If that is indeed the case it may be extremely difficult for Google to overcome. "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" is a must-read, by the way, as is the one on branding.
- Andrex 8y ago
  "Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete." How naive would it be to say there's such potential in Firebase? It seems so different from what's out there now, and Google's putting a lot of effort and resources into it now too (including sunsetting existing products like Google Analytics Mobile in favor of the Firebase versions.)
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    and when is firebase going to be sunset for the newer shinier thing? google has a huge problem with sunsetting services that work for something marginally better
- pmart123 8y ago
  I’m not sure I agree with the rule of two. Industries typically consolidate over time. Also, anti-trust rules typically prevent a rule of one. Several industries have had multiple competitors thrive though. Banking would be a good example of this where Citi, JPM, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are competing in a landscape where many more competed 15 years ago. Automotives have consolidated, but there’s still more than two. I would also throw IBM into the MSFT and Oracle 90’s enterprise comparison. I think one of the biggest advantages of Google cloud as a business is the fact that most retailers will refuse to use AWS and more retailers are building out their technical abilities.
- paganel 8y ago
  I've also mentioned in another comment but in the market where I'm located (Eastern Europe) the Google Cloud sales-people are totally absent while MS has been very, very insistent in pushing Azure down people's throats. I think Google was expecting their cloud solution to be similar to how AdWords + Search worked for them, i.e. that they would need close to no sales-people down in the trenches because the product would almost sell by itself based on its technical merits alone, but apparently (as you well mention) the different cloud implementations are not that, well, different between them so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS).
  - gaius 8y ago
    so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS). That is not it at all. What typically happens is an organisation will run a pilot project and see how it goes. On Azure it’s easy to speak to a real person, and they will be knowledgeable and take you seriously, and be empowered and willing to help you. On Google even if you manage to speak to anyone, they’ll treat you like an idiot. Guess who that organisation is going to go to for bigger and bigger projects?
- halbritt 8y ago
  My thoughts are that I don't know anyone that's adopted Azure at scale that are happy with the service. N=1, YMMV, etc.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  Google cloud seems to be a better fit for startups while azure is for larger non-tech firms. I can’t imagine a new startup ever choosing azure over gcloud or aws and i can’t imagine some random all-microsoft insurance company choosing gcloud over azure.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  " as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space" The '22-laws-of-marketing' are not 'laws' - they're just called that by profs trying to hustle a book. It's a great book that everyone, especially Engineers should read, but it's not necessarily factual. There can be many 'leaders' it depends on the industry. Google is no slouch, they have a differentiated offer that may appeal to different kinds of orgs, particularly startups. To your own point: 'developer friendly' ... Google may be a choice for devs building 'cloud first' solutions, and the primary basis for could based companies. Remember that AWS and Azure have a lot of customers just porting over old-school software onto cloud instances. They need virtual instances in quantity and classic, straight forward easy ways to manage them. Not fancy new cloud gear. Cloud is big, and there's a lot of growth, moreover, as more services go cloud and we move away from legacy installations ... Google might even possibly have an advantage.
- yashap 8y ago
  As others have noted, hype from random marketing book != actual laws of anything. If I was starting a startup today, I’d choose Google Cloud. They’re a bit cheaper than AWS, they have all the big types of cloud services you need, and they tend to be more simple/plug-and-play than AWS, requiring less Ops expertise to manage. GKE is awesome, Big Query is easier to manage than Redshift, PubSub easier to both manage and use than Kinesis, if you ever want a truly global database Google has that while AWS doesn’t, etc. AWS has a larger product catalogue, and is more configurable for big enterprises with huge Ops/security teams, but for a startup that has mostly dev and little Ops expertise, I’d choose Google Cloud.
- SomewhatLikely 8y ago
  The rule might feel true as a consequence of Zipf's law that says the second biggest is roughly half as big, and the third biggest is 1/3 as big as #1, etc. So because of a power law, the #1 and #2 are big enough that many people will just dismiss the rest.
- iamgopal 8y ago
  Eventually All internet company will love and move to gcp. i.e. snap or Netflix or Salesforce or slack etc. All enterprise company will move to internet company. Google wins.
- ummonk 8y ago
  The law of duality just seems to be Zipf's law with an arbitrary cutoff at #2...
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space The problem with this “rule” is it’s a tautology. Any ordered list of N > 1 will have two leaders. (The better question, how are market shares distributed, is difficult to precisely answer given the inherent subjectivity of delineating markets.)
remote_phone 8y ago
Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses. She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job. The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.
- princetman 8y ago
  That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.
    - princetman 8y ago
      And she did deliver, a lot[0]. After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud. The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated. Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity. Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-diane-green-transformed-google-cloud-business/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...
crazygringo 8y ago
This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece... It complains Google wasn't good at sales, but then lists "numerous companies" brought on. It complains that the offerings are "learner than AWS" but then admits Google has shown up "extremely competitively". A competitor (of course) claims "Google is just not a factor" but close to the end the choice becomes a "close call". So which is it? Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.
- larrymcp 8y ago
  To me that's one ingredient in quality journalism, actually. I feel more confident in a piece if it tries to include multiple points of view, multiple interpretations etc. Always good to see the "critics said x, but supporters said y" habit as one indicator of impartial reporting.
  - chairmanwow 8y ago
    I want to walk away from an article not with the pre-packaged opinion ofthe journalist/editor but with enough information to make my own decision. I don’t look to journalists for their commentary on the world we live in, but for updates on what is happening.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I think everyone agrees that AWS is a clear leader, but both Microsoft and Google report bundled Office Suite/Cloud Computing revenue as a single number, so it's completely unclear who is actually in second place.
  - epynonymous 8y ago
    that's a great point, and as i was reading this, i was thinking that perhaps aws should get into cloud office as well.
  - oldmanhorton 8y ago
    https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/19/microsoft-reports-30-1-billion-in-q4-2018-revenue-azure-up-89-surface-up-25-and-windows-up-7/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/19/microsoft-reports-30-1-bi... As far as I’m aware, azure and office get reported separately. Azure is “intelligent cloud” and office (along with some others) is “more personal computing”
seanhunter 8y ago
In the US Google is often referred to as part of the "big 3", but my understanding is GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud. Alibaba is extremely dominant in South-East Asia and if you're doing any work in Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular which have "data sovereignty" regulations, they are the only game in town. AWS and Azure have some inroads (both have AZs in Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK and mainland China) but GCP is nowhere distinctively interesting (unless you want to do something in Taiwan I guess?). So at least if you're trying to roll out in Asia there's really little reason to even consider GCP. You'd go Alibaba if you want the dominant regional player and AWS or Azure if that's what you use everywhere else.
- delroth 8y ago
  GCP has zones in India, Singapore, HK, Taiwan and Tokyo (+ Osaka planned). https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ Disclaimer: I work at Google, am technically part of Cloud, do not work on anything related to GCP.
  - thesandlord 8y ago
    And Jakarta is also planned! (I _do_ work for GCP)
    - lesantoso 8y ago
      Cool. Any idea what products will be available in Jakarta region? Will App Engine be available?
- taf2 8y ago
  it looks like at least from here https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ Gcp has as many if not more presence in Asia ? What am I missing?
  - seanhunter 8y ago
    The only one in South-East Asia that AWS and Azure don't have is Taiwan. My point is they are trailing, so they need to do something more than having the same locations as the others. They need something distinctive to have any sort of edge.
throwaway487548 8y ago
They literally should stop pilling up crap like kubernetes and look back at what 9P and Plan9 were and why. Especially that they have almost the whole Plan9 team employed. Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way. It is against intelligence.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It is the return of the mainframe and time-sharing, just with prettier interfaces. Enterprise loves them. As for Plan 9, the end of the road was Inferno and Limbo actually. Plan 9 was the stepping stone.
the_duke 8y ago
To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle... (for 12 years!) Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to deal with enterprise customers. But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  To be fair the worst parts of Oracle are probably quite far (organizationally speaking) from product development. The draconian pursuit of licensing at the cost of customer trust probably being the worst aspect.
- vasac 8y ago
  Here’s testimony from Cameron Purdy, he used to work for Kurian at Oracle - https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He-is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-O...
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Quite interesting, thanks!
  - mooreds 8y ago
    "the results speak for themselves" :)
  - gaius 8y ago
    Some people speak quietly, and use words that do not convey exactly what they are feeling. TK is very good at speaking at an amply audible level and using very efficient words (often no more than 4 letters long)
beauzero 8y ago
I personally didn't understand their niche until I went to work for a county school district and saw how embedded they were. Surprisingly there are a lot of business opportunities to sell to school districts if you are GCP friendly. Unfortunately the sales model is very phobic to monthly subscriptions, which doesn't fit the cloud very well.
- mips_avatar 8y ago
  Could you elaborate on your experience? I’ve heard a lot about how well google got into schools with gdocs and chrome books but I’ve never heard much more.
joejerryronnie 8y ago
The primary issue is Google’s complete lack of knowledge and apathy regarding Enterprise sales. I’m sure they have plenty of employees with experience and understanding of the Enterprise business but their entire culture and management layer is way too heavily weighted toward engineering to successfully sell to the Enterprise. Slootman was probably right in that Google needs a major aquisition to bring in a global sales culture rather than trying to build it from scratch. And then the old guard needs to not crush that culture. Activist employees won’t make it any easier to grow their Enterprise business as every company in the world has things you can protest about. Perhaps Google should focus on undercutting Amazon and Micosoft at the low end while building up their cloud capabilities and Enterprise sales culture. And then really go after the large customers 2 years from now.
- kenhwang 8y ago
  Amazon/Microsoft will happily price match Google for enterprise customers when there's overlap in offerings because they can still profit off their far larger selection of unique offerings.
- jakegarelick 8y ago
  I keep hearing that Google seems to be lacking in the enterprise sales area, but from what I’ve heard, G Suite seems to be doing quite well. What explains that?
  - joejerryronnie 8y ago
    G Suite basically sells itself and doesn’t really require an enterprise sales force in the traditional sense. This works because G Suite is implemented from the bottom up, i.e. individuals and workgroups begin using G Suite and then pressure management to adopt it department/company wide. This is very different from large scale enterprise software or infrastructure sales (cloud in this case) where you need to respond to RFPs, establish a relationship with the C suite, run POCs tailored to the customer’s particular use cases, present a compelling product roadmap, convince the customer that you’re in it for the long term partnership, etc. These are not things Google currently excels at.
0xCMP 8y ago
Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three factoring cost and reliability of their features. For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings. For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer some really good benefits and work correctly. Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience using GCP like?
- bdibs 8y ago
  I’ve only been using GCP for a few weeks now, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service. As for the products themselves, everything just works. For their Kubernetes platform, GKE, they provide an excellent UI to do almost anything. Auto scaling any workloads, deploying new workloads all through the UI (no manual YAML creation), performing rolling updates, it all just works. Their Stackdriver product automatically logs all output from your GKE pods, and can even alert you with a concise summary of crashing errors (I caught a couple panics from a Go service with it). Overall I’d say it’s been great so far, and much cheaper than AWS. I haven’t used Azure in any capacity, so I’m unsure how it would stack up.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    > So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service. There is a reason for this. AWS moves early and moves quickly. Whereas Google may wait until a product is perfectly designed AWS gets it out in beta in one region and then expands from there. And they bring this pace to product improvement which is pretty amazing: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      I hear the opposite from most people, that gcp moves more quickly and has alpha and beta products and aws doesn't. So this confused me.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
it's weird.. tech really brings out humanity's greed locusts
manigandham 8y ago
> ...while AWS and Microsoft are geared toward serving customers and responding quickly to their requests, Google touts its own technology, selling what it thinks clients need. This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP. Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.
golemiprague 8y ago
I don't understand this posturing "we are not selling for weapons". Google is protected by the US army which use weapons. They are also protected by people who are willing to die for them using those weapons. So how exactly does it make Google more moral when they don't want to help those people? Do they want others to do the dirty work but not make their own hands dirty? It is akin to someone who buys a stake but will not supply software to butchers because they kill animals. Hypocrisy and virtue signalling of the worst kind.
erikb 8y ago
Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...
pier25 8y ago
People here are complaining about the enterprise, but I'm not really part of that segment (the complete IT dept of my company is about 10 employees) and I also feel ignored by Google in my small microcosm. With the change of leadership I guess small dev teams like mine will become even more ignored as it seems GCP's will focus on the big whales instead of small fish with different needs. Anyway, from my perspective, it really feels like GCP is living 5 years ago and has zero ambition or understanding of what's going on in the dev space. Also I have to say its marketing is generally doing a poor job at convincing people to use their services. Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points: I want a simple and convenient Heroku-like service (and hopefully a better price). For years I had no idea App Engine even existed and after checking it out a couple of times I still have no idea how it compares in terms of pricing. I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero GraphQL services (AFAIK). I want serverless solutions like AWS Lambda or like Zeit Now v2. AWS recently even announced Aurora serverless (a relational database unlike the usual NoSQL). The serverless offerings by Google are quite frankly mediocre. Our team is moving away from Firebase and Google's cloud functions offerings are really lagging behind Lambda.

140 points by kanishkdudeja 8y ago

So, as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space. UPS and FedEx, Coca Cola and Pepsi, Oracle and MSSQL, etc. From my professional perspective (integration specialist of a database vendor), all enterprises are either going to AWS or Azure. I think this is almost inevitable: the differences between the clouds are simply not big enough to make a difference from an executive's perspective, so to manage risk, you either go with what you know (Azure) or the market leader (AWS). Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete. I just don't see this happening under their new cloud leadership (former Oracle, sales-oriented exec). It would have to be driven by massive innovation, not by "doing the same stuff as AWS but then slightly better/cheaper". What are HN's thought about this? (Obligatory disclaimer: on a personal level I absolutely love Google Cloud and think it's a much more developer-friendly environment, but professionally I just can't make a strong case for why, say, a financial institution should use Google Cloud rather than AWS or Azure.) EDIT: Did not expect this topic to be downvoted this far. Is this not an appropriate discussion / violate any rules? [1] "Law of Duality" https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp/0887306667 https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/d...

Already__Taken 8y ago
1. Google will do this anyway, because it's not going to run on AWS or azure, so why not keep some skin in the game? 2. Isn't k8s a play to reinvent this space?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Kubernetes also run on the competing clouds, so it isn't that much of an advantage, unless they add GCE specific features.
  - jeremyjh 8y ago
    Well, they do. For example you can configure your node pool to automatically upgrade its members so you don't have to worry about kernel patches. They have a proxy service for their Cloud SQL product so you don't have to fiddle with configuration, its just another k8s service name. Of course Amazon could do these things but they simply haven't. I think their biggest advantage though is they abstract away the master - you just have a node pool and don't have to worry about the masters. With Amazon you will pay $300 a month just to have a HA master, before you launch even one node in your pool. Also once you start getting into k8s you will find so much more information in the community with specific instructions for GKE; its by far the best environment to learn in for that reason. Google falls down in so many other areas though that it probably doesn't matter how good GKE is. The biggest annoyance to me is their Postgres offering still has no point in time recovery. edit to add: One other big advantage I forgot to mention is that launching a GKE cluster takes only a couple of minutes. I have a Terraform configuration that will launch a GKE cluster and run my deployments and my app is up and running after less than 5 minutes. This makes it much more attractive to do things like spin up a new cluster for each pull request.
    - coredog64 8y ago
      EKS pricing is $0.20/hour, or ~ $144/month. Not free, but also not $300. I will agree that EKS startup is slow, but given the way it needs to run, I don’t think many customers will want to run more than a few clusters per VPC.
      - jeremyjh 8y ago
        $144 a month gets you one master. As I said, an HA master is twice that. If you want to compare to GKE, you are starting at $288 a month.
- lbriner 8y ago
  1. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into. Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems. Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one? This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.
  - pmart123 8y ago
    I completely agree with this. But, also in think Google does have some advantages. Out of the box, their NLP algorithms seem much better than AWS’s offering. They also offer custom search as an api. I haven’t used it, but bigquery seems very good. I do agree these are probably not enough to have an enterprise shift. Maybe if they specialize on a couple industries that won’t choose amazon (fedex, ups, target, Walmart, streaming/media). It does seem like google has made strong inroads in finance as well.
  - halbritt 8y ago
    There are technical reasons. Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe? However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.
    - colemickens 8y ago
      >However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave. Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.
      - halbritt 8y ago
        Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very technical so when I press him on details, I get very little. However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress. The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented. The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough. My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP. A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS. I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences. There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.
- jgalar 8y ago
  k8s feels much more like an effort to commoditize this space through standardization. It's a pretty common business strategy [1]. [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
fh973 8y ago
This "law of duality" is not very convincing. He does not offer criteria where it applies not does he argue why it would apply for the examples given. How does his adoption curve apply to coke? Especially in the cloud market, I see rather more players in the future as the underlying technologies become commercially available or even commodity. In the other side customers value support and services, which does not scale well, and smaller players have an advantage.
gretch 8y ago
seems really poorly defined and argued Here are the author's examples: >McDonalds and Burger King McDonald's is far larger than BK. Also Wendy's is larger than BK according to this source: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2017-top-50-chart >GM and Ford Another non-example. We just gonna pretend toyota doesn't exist? >Nike and Reebok Again, wtf? Even when reebok stood alone, there was still Adidas in the picture. Not a duality
- arethuza 8y ago
  Or indeed VW Group - which, as least as of last year, was the biggest car company: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38793253 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38793253
- ElBarto 8y ago
  You should try to understand the point and the context of these examples. I would suggest you read Al Ries books. These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change. For example the US car market has long been largely dominated by GM and Ford with Toyota only recently breaking that (and VW is non-existent). GM and Ford are still the two largest manufacturers: https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufacturers-in-the-us-market-1961-2016 https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact... The point is that there is usually very few dominating brands in a market, with the top 2 (approximately) yielding the power and the others following and filling the gaps.
  - cbsmith 8y ago
    > These examples were picked in the early 1990s, and are specific to the US market. Things change. ...like whether that claim is well founded or not.
    - ElBarto 8y ago
      In the tech sector this has often reduced to 1 single brand instead of 2. The worst mistake we engineers tend to make is to dismiss the 'wisdom' of professional marketers and branding experts...
ElBarto 8y ago
There's several aspects here. I quite agree that if Google does not get into the top 2 it will likely be irrelevant in that market. The other aspect, as discussed in the article, is that this is a completely new market and way of doing business for Google, which seems to create a clash of cultures. If that is indeed the case it may be extremely difficult for Google to overcome. "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" is a must-read, by the way, as is the one on branding.
Andrex 8y ago
"Where would this possibly leave Google? All I can see is that, since it would be impossible for them to get a decent position in the cloud market, they will have to completely reinvent this space and create their own, new market which makes the cloud as we know it obsolete." How naive would it be to say there's such potential in Firebase? It seems so different from what's out there now, and Google's putting a lot of effort and resources into it now too (including sunsetting existing products like Google Analytics Mobile in favor of the Firebase versions.)
- kkarakk 8y ago
  and when is firebase going to be sunset for the newer shinier thing? google has a huge problem with sunsetting services that work for something marginally better
pmart123 8y ago
I’m not sure I agree with the rule of two. Industries typically consolidate over time. Also, anti-trust rules typically prevent a rule of one. Several industries have had multiple competitors thrive though. Banking would be a good example of this where Citi, JPM, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are competing in a landscape where many more competed 15 years ago. Automotives have consolidated, but there’s still more than two. I would also throw IBM into the MSFT and Oracle 90’s enterprise comparison. I think one of the biggest advantages of Google cloud as a business is the fact that most retailers will refuse to use AWS and more retailers are building out their technical abilities.
paganel 8y ago
I've also mentioned in another comment but in the market where I'm located (Eastern Europe) the Google Cloud sales-people are totally absent while MS has been very, very insistent in pushing Azure down people's throats. I think Google was expecting their cloud solution to be similar to how AdWords + Search worked for them, i.e. that they would need close to no sales-people down in the trenches because the product would almost sell by itself based on its technical merits alone, but apparently (as you well mention) the different cloud implementations are not that, well, different between them so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS).
- gaius 8y ago
  so it all comes down to which company was first in the market (AWS) and which company has got the best and most aggressive sales-people (MS). That is not it at all. What typically happens is an organisation will run a pilot project and see how it goes. On Azure it’s easy to speak to a real person, and they will be knowledgeable and take you seriously, and be empowered and willing to help you. On Google even if you manage to speak to anyone, they’ll treat you like an idiot. Guess who that organisation is going to go to for bigger and bigger projects?
halbritt 8y ago
My thoughts are that I don't know anyone that's adopted Azure at scale that are happy with the service. N=1, YMMV, etc.
alasdair_ 8y ago
Google cloud seems to be a better fit for startups while azure is for larger non-tech firms. I can’t imagine a new startup ever choosing azure over gcloud or aws and i can’t imagine some random all-microsoft insurance company choosing gcloud over azure.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
" as far as I always understood, there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space" The '22-laws-of-marketing' are not 'laws' - they're just called that by profs trying to hustle a book. It's a great book that everyone, especially Engineers should read, but it's not necessarily factual. There can be many 'leaders' it depends on the industry. Google is no slouch, they have a differentiated offer that may appeal to different kinds of orgs, particularly startups. To your own point: 'developer friendly' ... Google may be a choice for devs building 'cloud first' solutions, and the primary basis for could based companies. Remember that AWS and Azure have a lot of customers just porting over old-school software onto cloud instances. They need virtual instances in quantity and classic, straight forward easy ways to manage them. Not fancy new cloud gear. Cloud is big, and there's a lot of growth, moreover, as more services go cloud and we move away from legacy installations ... Google might even possibly have an advantage.
yashap 8y ago
As others have noted, hype from random marketing book != actual laws of anything. If I was starting a startup today, I’d choose Google Cloud. They’re a bit cheaper than AWS, they have all the big types of cloud services you need, and they tend to be more simple/plug-and-play than AWS, requiring less Ops expertise to manage. GKE is awesome, Big Query is easier to manage than Redshift, PubSub easier to both manage and use than Kinesis, if you ever want a truly global database Google has that while AWS doesn’t, etc. AWS has a larger product catalogue, and is more configurable for big enterprises with huge Ops/security teams, but for a startup that has mostly dev and little Ops expertise, I’d choose Google Cloud.
SomewhatLikely 8y ago
The rule might feel true as a consequence of Zipf's law that says the second biggest is roughly half as big, and the third biggest is 1/3 as big as #1, etc. So because of a power law, the #1 and #2 are big enough that many people will just dismiss the rest.
iamgopal 8y ago
Eventually All internet company will love and move to gcp. i.e. snap or Netflix or Salesforce or slack etc. All enterprise company will move to internet company. Google wins.
ummonk 8y ago
The law of duality just seems to be Zipf's law with an arbitrary cutoff at #2...
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> there is a rule [1] that says there can always be only two leaders in a single space The problem with this “rule” is it’s a tautology. Any ordered list of N > 1 will have two leaders. (The better question, how are market shares distributed, is difficult to precisely answer given the inherent subjectivity of delineating markets.)

remote_phone 8y ago

Diane Greene is and never was a good executive to lead an enterprise business. She is more of a technologist/scientist and better at small/medium sized businesses. She built VMware which was a great technology but stupidly sold to EMC for $60M, leaving a lot of money on the table. EMC rightly fired her because she couldn’t scale and replaced her with Paul Maritz who was more suitable for this job. The idea that she could handle a large and diverse org like GCP was a gamble at best, and it looks like it lost, again.

princetman 8y ago
That’s a little harsh. I mean hindsight is always 20-20. Under her leadership Google Cloud did acquire big name customers. Google’s struggle to gain foothold in enterprises and reasons are well discussed on various HN threads over years. It’s a lot to expect from one executive to turn it around in face of fierce competition.
- shanghaiaway 8y ago
  No, that's exactly what should be expected from a CEO.
  - princetman 8y ago
    And she did deliver, a lot[0]. After Diane took over the reins, Google Cloud managed to get solid enterprise wins. 20th Century Fox, Colgate, Disney, eBay, HSBC, LATAM Airlines, LG CNS, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Schlumberger, Target and Verizon are some of the key enterprises using Google Cloud. The most notable win for Google Cloud came from Twitter which has moved large-scale Hadoop clusters to GCP, with a total of about 300 PB of data migrated. Netflix, a loyal AWS customer, is using Google Cloud Platform for disaster recovery and business continuity. Google Cloud made impressive progress in establishing itself as an enterprise cloud platform. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-diane-green-transformed-google-cloud-business/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/11/18/5-ways-...

crazygringo 8y ago

This just feels like an internally contradictory hit piece... It complains Google wasn't good at sales, but then lists "numerous companies" brought on. It complains that the offerings are "learner than AWS" but then admits Google has shown up "extremely competitively". A competitor (of course) claims "Google is just not a factor" but close to the end the choice becomes a "close call". So which is it? Considering how late Google got into the cloud game, it seems to be doing respectably well, given all of the catch-up it's needed to do first.

larrymcp 8y ago
To me that's one ingredient in quality journalism, actually. I feel more confident in a piece if it tries to include multiple points of view, multiple interpretations etc. Always good to see the "critics said x, but supporters said y" habit as one indicator of impartial reporting.
- chairmanwow 8y ago
  I want to walk away from an article not with the pre-packaged opinion ofthe journalist/editor but with enough information to make my own decision. I don’t look to journalists for their commentary on the world we live in, but for updates on what is happening.
Eridrus 8y ago
I think everyone agrees that AWS is a clear leader, but both Microsoft and Google report bundled Office Suite/Cloud Computing revenue as a single number, so it's completely unclear who is actually in second place.
- epynonymous 8y ago
  that's a great point, and as i was reading this, i was thinking that perhaps aws should get into cloud office as well.
- oldmanhorton 8y ago
  https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/19/microsoft-reports-30-1-billion-in-q4-2018-revenue-azure-up-89-surface-up-25-and-windows-up-7/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/19/microsoft-reports-30-1-bi... As far as I’m aware, azure and office get reported separately. Azure is “intelligent cloud” and office (along with some others) is “more personal computing”

seanhunter 8y ago

In the US Google is often referred to as part of the "big 3", but my understanding is GCP is globally in 4th place behind AWS, Azure and Alibaba cloud. Alibaba is extremely dominant in South-East Asia and if you're doing any work in Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular which have "data sovereignty" regulations, they are the only game in town. AWS and Azure have some inroads (both have AZs in Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK and mainland China) but GCP is nowhere distinctively interesting (unless you want to do something in Taiwan I guess?). So at least if you're trying to roll out in Asia there's really little reason to even consider GCP. You'd go Alibaba if you want the dominant regional player and AWS or Azure if that's what you use everywhere else.

delroth 8y ago
GCP has zones in India, Singapore, HK, Taiwan and Tokyo (+ Osaka planned). https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ Disclaimer: I work at Google, am technically part of Cloud, do not work on anything related to GCP.
- thesandlord 8y ago
  And Jakarta is also planned! (I _do_ work for GCP)
  - lesantoso 8y ago
    Cool. Any idea what products will be available in Jakarta region? Will App Engine be available?
taf2 8y ago
it looks like at least from here https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ Gcp has as many if not more presence in Asia ? What am I missing?
- seanhunter 8y ago
  The only one in South-East Asia that AWS and Azure don't have is Taiwan. My point is they are trailing, so they need to do something more than having the same locations as the others. They need something distinctive to have any sort of edge.

throwaway487548 8y ago

They literally should stop pilling up crap like kubernetes and look back at what 9P and Plan9 were and why. Especially that they have almost the whole Plan9 team employed. Making analogues of J2EE Application Servers for native code is the wrong way. It is against intelligence.

pjmlp 8y ago
It is the return of the mainframe and time-sharing, just with prettier interfaces. Enterprise loves them. As for Plan 9, the end of the road was Inferno and Limbo actually. Plan 9 was the stepping stone.

the_duke 8y ago

To be succeeded by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle... (for 12 years!) Now I know nothing about the man, and Google definitely needs to learn how to deal with enterprise customers. But this doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

brazzledazzle 8y ago
To be fair the worst parts of Oracle are probably quite far (organizationally speaking) from product development. The draconian pursuit of licensing at the cost of customer trust probably being the worst aspect.
vasac 8y ago
Here’s testimony from Cameron Purdy, he used to work for Kurian at Oracle - https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-Oracle-He-is-the-new-CEO-of-Google-Cloud-What-is-he-like https://www.quora.com/Have-you-worked-for-Thomas-Kurian-at-O...
- the_duke 8y ago
  Quite interesting, thanks!
- mooreds 8y ago
  "the results speak for themselves" :)
- gaius 8y ago
  Some people speak quietly, and use words that do not convey exactly what they are feeling. TK is very good at speaking at an amply audible level and using very efficient words (often no more than 4 letters long)

beauzero 8y ago

I personally didn't understand their niche until I went to work for a county school district and saw how embedded they were. Surprisingly there are a lot of business opportunities to sell to school districts if you are GCP friendly. Unfortunately the sales model is very phobic to monthly subscriptions, which doesn't fit the cloud very well.

mips_avatar 8y ago
Could you elaborate on your experience? I’ve heard a lot about how well google got into schools with gdocs and chrome books but I’ve never heard much more.

joejerryronnie 8y ago

The primary issue is Google’s complete lack of knowledge and apathy regarding Enterprise sales. I’m sure they have plenty of employees with experience and understanding of the Enterprise business but their entire culture and management layer is way too heavily weighted toward engineering to successfully sell to the Enterprise. Slootman was probably right in that Google needs a major aquisition to bring in a global sales culture rather than trying to build it from scratch. And then the old guard needs to not crush that culture. Activist employees won’t make it any easier to grow their Enterprise business as every company in the world has things you can protest about. Perhaps Google should focus on undercutting Amazon and Micosoft at the low end while building up their cloud capabilities and Enterprise sales culture. And then really go after the large customers 2 years from now.

kenhwang 8y ago
Amazon/Microsoft will happily price match Google for enterprise customers when there's overlap in offerings because they can still profit off their far larger selection of unique offerings.
jakegarelick 8y ago
I keep hearing that Google seems to be lacking in the enterprise sales area, but from what I’ve heard, G Suite seems to be doing quite well. What explains that?
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  G Suite basically sells itself and doesn’t really require an enterprise sales force in the traditional sense. This works because G Suite is implemented from the bottom up, i.e. individuals and workgroups begin using G Suite and then pressure management to adopt it department/company wide. This is very different from large scale enterprise software or infrastructure sales (cloud in this case) where you need to respond to RFPs, establish a relationship with the C suite, run POCs tailored to the customer’s particular use cases, present a compelling product roadmap, convince the customer that you’re in it for the long term partnership, etc. These are not things Google currently excels at.

0xCMP 8y ago

Interesting, I'm in the US and I think of GCP as the best of the three factoring cost and reliability of their features. For AWS it seems like to get things that "work" you almost always need to do it yourself instead of using Amazon's offerings. For Google you may not want to get locked in, but the offerings seem to offer some really good benefits and work correctly. Maybe this is just "grass is greener" thinking, but what is the experience using GCP like?

bdibs 8y ago
I’ve only been using GCP for a few weeks now, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service. As for the products themselves, everything just works. For their Kubernetes platform, GKE, they provide an excellent UI to do almost anything. Auto scaling any workloads, deploying new workloads all through the UI (no manual YAML creation), performing rolling updates, it all just works. Their Stackdriver product automatically logs all output from your GKE pods, and can even alert you with a concise summary of crashing errors (I caught a couple panics from a Go service with it). Overall I’d say it’s been great so far, and much cheaper than AWS. I haven’t used Azure in any capacity, so I’m unsure how it would stack up.
- threeseed 8y ago
  > So far, I really enjoy how the UI seems consistent, compared to AWS where different products seem like they are from a completely different service. There is a reason for this. AWS moves early and moves quickly. Whereas Google may wait until a product is perfectly designed AWS gets it out in beta in one region and then expands from there. And they bring this pace to product improvement which is pretty amazing: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    I hear the opposite from most people, that gcp moves more quickly and has alpha and beta products and aws doesn't. So this confused me.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

it's weird.. tech really brings out humanity's greed locusts

manigandham 8y ago

> ...while AWS and Microsoft are geared toward serving customers and responding quickly to their requests, Google touts its own technology, selling what it thinks clients need. This sums it up, and is the core problem with GCP. Unfortunately the replacement CEO is the person who ran Oracle Cloud, which is far worse currently than GCP. The future does not look bright.

golemiprague 8y ago

I don't understand this posturing "we are not selling for weapons". Google is protected by the US army which use weapons. They are also protected by people who are willing to die for them using those weapons. So how exactly does it make Google more moral when they don't want to help those people? Do they want others to do the dirty work but not make their own hands dirty? It is akin to someone who buys a stake but will not supply software to butchers because they kill animals. Hypocrisy and virtue signalling of the worst kind.

erikb 8y ago

Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...

pier25 8y ago

People here are complaining about the enterprise, but I'm not really part of that segment (the complete IT dept of my company is about 10 employees) and I also feel ignored by Google in my small microcosm. With the change of leadership I guess small dev teams like mine will become even more ignored as it seems GCP's will focus on the big whales instead of small fish with different needs. Anyway, from my perspective, it really feels like GCP is living 5 years ago and has zero ambition or understanding of what's going on in the dev space. Also I have to say its marketing is generally doing a poor job at convincing people to use their services. Some concrete examples to expand on the previous points: I want a simple and convenient Heroku-like service (and hopefully a better price). For years I had no idea App Engine even existed and after checking it out a couple of times I still have no idea how it compares in terms of pricing. I want GraphQL services like AWS AppSync, Prisma, or Hasura. Google has zero GraphQL services (AFAIK). I want serverless solutions like AWS Lambda or like Zeit Now v2. AWS recently even announced Aurora serverless (a relational database unlike the usual NoSQL). The serverless offerings by Google are quite frankly mediocre. Our team is moving away from Firebase and Google's cloud functions offerings are really lagging behind Lambda.