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I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It's just kisses fingers. So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to st

I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It's just kisses fingers. So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly. If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that. The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ftc-antitrust-scrutiny-report-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...

daveFNbuck 7y ago
Microsoft and Amazon don't even need to do anything. Knowing that there might only be 3 years of service remaining, I definitely won't use Google Cloud and I'll tell everyone I know not to use it too.
- basch 7y ago
  Microsoft Azure: The cloud service that wont abruptly close out of nowhere with no transition plan leaving you stranded, and a service that actually comes with that thing you call when you need help and support. The marketing writes itself.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    They already wrote that marketing 8 years ago. Only gets more and more true over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4
    - basch 7y ago
      Half of that criticisms applies to Microsoft now. :/
    - vosper 7y ago
      I enjoyed that more than I thought I would :)
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Mostly all you need to know about Microsoft's support lifecycle is that my Windows Mobile phone just got a security patch on Patch Tuesday, and apparently Microsoft also extended its support an extra month into January just because. Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.
    - chupa-chups 7y ago
      Like the Microsoft Azure "German Cloud", assured to be GDPR compliant. We spent quite some time and money to migrate from AWS to that solution in 2017. Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019. We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
      - paulddraper 7y ago
        ?? They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
        chupa-chups 7y ago
        https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/germany/germany-welcome https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/germany/germany-welco... Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)
        paulddraper 7y ago
        > Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today, which we’ll maintain with necessary security updates. No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.
- eloff 7y ago
  They just lost my business. I was planning to use them over AWS for a new project. Now that I know they might cancel it like the other Google experiments, I'm not going to risk that investment. I'll stick with AWS. They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
Indeed. It's a self fulfilling prophecy now.
harryh 7y ago
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
- zelly 7y ago
  The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill
  - jethro_tell 7y ago
    It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'
  - cure 7y ago
    I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.
  - Youden 7y ago
    There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure". Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies. So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP). And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
- Despegar 7y ago
rb808 7y ago
I don't really understand why its a duopoly, if you restrict yourself to a few basic services surely you can easily switch?
peterwwillis 7y ago
"The Cloud" is just managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS. There are literally thousands of such providers in the world, and until everything about providing managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS becomes impossible to compete on, there always will be. The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones! I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.
- unreal37 7y ago
  That's not the modern cloud at all. There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    My job is managing infrastructure, services and products for large corporations in the cloud. It is managed hosting, and SaaS/PaaS, and yes, there are plenty of providers who have alternatives that we regularly use, in addition to being able to build our own with mostly open source tools. It's part of my job to find alternatives so we don't get into a jam when the one solution we use becomes unusable. The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.
UncleMeat 7y ago
This is a ridiculous interpretation. If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not. Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
- cranky_coder 7y ago
  How is it ridiculous? The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. It's a bit hard to grow without investing, so it smells to me like a precursor to sustained engineering.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Google is dumping billions into GCP right now. Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.
  - ajross 7y ago
    > The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?
    - pwinnski 7y ago
      Google has built a strong reputation as a company that shuts down any product or service that isn't #1 in the target market. it is not unreasonable to believe that might extend to their third- or fourth-place GCP product.
- mullingitover 7y ago
  Google has a well established track record of killing things that aren't working out.
kube-system 7y ago
There's no reason for anyone to preemptively colo their workload now in anticipation of higher prices. You can't predict the future. Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time. Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well. We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy. Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.
- Lammy 7y ago
  You don’t have to use multiple clouds day to day, but forcing yourself to design your applications in cloud-agnostic ways makes it worthwhile.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  We finally have a technical definition for what a professional software engineer is: someone who doesn't recommend "cloud-native" workloads.
40acres 7y ago
It's a punishing leak. Akin to publicizing the pull out dates of troops. Amazon and Microsoft will sit tight and enjoy their duopoly.
- mynegation 7y ago
  Rest assured they will not sit tight but rush to get customers migrating off of the Google Cloud.
  - marai2 7y ago
    Of all the comments about damage in this thread I think this is the most damaging. In other words if I were AWS and Microsoft sales I would be calling all the big clients on Google Cloud and scaring them about their future prospects and wooing them with some sweet deal. Even if Google does an about face in tomorrows news cycle the time for MS and AWS to strike is now.

daveFNbuck 7y ago

Microsoft and Amazon don't even need to do anything. Knowing that there might only be 3 years of service remaining, I definitely won't use Google Cloud and I'll tell everyone I know not to use it too.

basch 7y ago
Microsoft Azure: The cloud service that wont abruptly close out of nowhere with no transition plan leaving you stranded, and a service that actually comes with that thing you call when you need help and support. The marketing writes itself.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  They already wrote that marketing 8 years ago. Only gets more and more true over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4
  - basch 7y ago
    Half of that criticisms applies to Microsoft now. :/
  - vosper 7y ago
    I enjoyed that more than I thought I would :)
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Mostly all you need to know about Microsoft's support lifecycle is that my Windows Mobile phone just got a security patch on Patch Tuesday, and apparently Microsoft also extended its support an extra month into January just because. Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.
  - chupa-chups 7y ago
    Like the Microsoft Azure "German Cloud", assured to be GDPR compliant. We spent quite some time and money to migrate from AWS to that solution in 2017. Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019. We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      ?? They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
      - chupa-chups 7y ago
        https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/germany/germany-welcome https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/germany/germany-welco... Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)
        paulddraper 7y ago
        > Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today, which we’ll maintain with necessary security updates. No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.
eloff 7y ago
They just lost my business. I was planning to use them over AWS for a new project. Now that I know they might cancel it like the other Google experiments, I'm not going to risk that investment. I'll stick with AWS. They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

Indeed. It's a self fulfilling prophecy now.

harryh 7y ago

If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.

zelly 7y ago
The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'
- cure 7y ago
  I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.
- Youden 7y ago
  There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure". Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies. So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP). And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
Despegar 7y ago

rb808 7y ago

I don't really understand why its a duopoly, if you restrict yourself to a few basic services surely you can easily switch?

peterwwillis 7y ago

"The Cloud" is just managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS. There are literally thousands of such providers in the world, and until everything about providing managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS becomes impossible to compete on, there always will be. The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones! I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.

unreal37 7y ago
That's not the modern cloud at all. There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  My job is managing infrastructure, services and products for large corporations in the cloud. It is managed hosting, and SaaS/PaaS, and yes, there are plenty of providers who have alternatives that we regularly use, in addition to being able to build our own with mostly open source tools. It's part of my job to find alternatives so we don't get into a jam when the one solution we use becomes unusable. The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.

UncleMeat 7y ago

This is a ridiculous interpretation. If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not. Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?

cranky_coder 7y ago
How is it ridiculous? The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. It's a bit hard to grow without investing, so it smells to me like a precursor to sustained engineering.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Google is dumping billions into GCP right now. Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.
- ajross 7y ago
  > The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    Google has built a strong reputation as a company that shuts down any product or service that isn't #1 in the target market. it is not unreasonable to believe that might extend to their third- or fourth-place GCP product.
mullingitover 7y ago
Google has a well established track record of killing things that aren't working out.

kube-system 7y ago

There's no reason for anyone to preemptively colo their workload now in anticipation of higher prices. You can't predict the future. Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time. Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well. We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy. Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.
Lammy 7y ago
You don’t have to use multiple clouds day to day, but forcing yourself to design your applications in cloud-agnostic ways makes it worthwhile.
ben_jones 7y ago
We finally have a technical definition for what a professional software engineer is: someone who doesn't recommend "cloud-native" workloads.

40acres 7y ago

It's a punishing leak. Akin to publicizing the pull out dates of troops. Amazon and Microsoft will sit tight and enjoy their duopoly.

mynegation 7y ago
Rest assured they will not sit tight but rush to get customers migrating off of the Google Cloud.
- marai2 7y ago
  Of all the comments about damage in this thread I think this is the most damaging. In other words if I were AWS and Microsoft sales I would be calling all the big clients on Google Cloud and scaring them about their future prospects and wooing them with some sweet deal. Even if Google does an about face in tomorrows news cycle the time for MS and AWS to strike is now.