15 ms·

Amazon has long ruled the cloud – now it must fend off rivals

97 points by Bella-Xiang 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
http://archive.md/Gblhd http://archive.md/Gblhd
cpgeier 7y ago
Didn't realize Google Cloud was so far behind in revenue and growth. Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard.
- brightball 7y ago
  I understand the narrative that's going to carry after that article the other day, but I've really enjoyed working with GCP over the last 2 years. The structure for VM use and their Live Migrate capability for upgrading the hardware underneath with no downtime has been excellent on my more long-lived servers. My biggest wish is some equivalent of Aurora for PostgreSQL.
  - pm90 7y ago
    Another fairly happy GCP user. They have their issues (everyone does), but GKE is pretty amazing if you don’t have the resources for an in house k8s on AWS team. I am however fairly pessimistic about their chances. Especially considering the person at the helm is ex-Oracle VP. I also don’t understand their alternatives... do they want AWS to own the cloud market? They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light?
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      > They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light? Android has a lot more synergies with their consumer ads business. It's the extreme version of writing your own browser. GCP is completely different; it's in the B2B space, and it's a pretty standard business relationship between businesses and a supplier. Being customer-focused and business-focused isn't in Google's DNA.
    - ForHackernews 7y ago
      How is GKE different/better than Amazon's EKS? Am I wrong to think that 'hosted k8s' is an interchangeable commodity product?
      - inscrutable 7y ago
        On GKE, you don't need to define node-pools if you tick enable node-autoprovisioning. This is effectively an EKS fargate profile without any of the limitations (discrete node size, inability to mount volumes etc) On GKE there's no need for bastion hosts, you can connect to private nodes automatically by tunneling through identity-aware-proxy On GKE, there's no faffing about with aws-auth-configmap, nodes automatically join the cluster On GKE, you can use regional persistent disks if you need to store state rather than single zone EBS On GKE, you can use a single static ip for your nginx-ingress load balancer without needing to faff about with AWS global accelerator (which in any case gives you multiple ips) On GKE, managed node pools are automatically repaired and upgraded with the choice of google's OS or ubuntu unlike Amazon Linux which is currently the only choice for EKS' managed node pools. GKE can automatically use spot instances unlike the farce on AWS with a 3rd party (spotinst) charging a premium for the same functionality On GKE, managed istio is ticking a box versus a self-install on EKS On GKE you need to worry much less about ip exhaustion as they use alias ips vs dedicated ENIs for EKS Associating IAMs with kuberenetes service accounts is much easier with GKE workload identity than with EKS' oidc webhook GKE has several features which EKS doesn't (calico, vertical pod autoscaling, binary authorisation, export of cluster data to bigquery) https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/ejxxn5/has_anyone_done_a_thorough_diff_analysis_between/fd47cda?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/ejxxn5/has_any...
  - fairramone 7y ago
    GCP is fantastic! I've been especially pleased with their network (the GLB is awesome!), BigQuery, Bigtable, GCE live migration, and of course... GKE. I cringe at the thought of having to run Kubernetes myself or settle for an inferior managed solution from Azure or AWS.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard It's sort of a Catch-22 for them. They are this far behind in part because people fear they might not be around long term, and they might not be, because people don't want to sign up, because they fear it might not be. :)
  - toohotatopic 7y ago
    Could they win customers by implementing their APIs on AWS so that people can move to AWS should Google discontinue their services? They could still make money by being far more efficient when running their software natively on their own stack.
    - xur17 7y ago
      To some extent they are doing this by embracing Kubernetes. For us, almost all of our infrastructure other than databases is running directly on GKE, so moving to AWS or Azure would be fairly easy.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      Chasing AWS's APIs probably isn't a good use of their time, and wouldn't encourage a lot of people to move. API compatibility is not the biggest blocker to changing clouds -- moving one's data is. The could work out a deal where outbound data from Google to AWS is free, but that probably wouldn't be in their best interests either. I think their strategy of being the best place to run K8s is a good one. If you standardize on K8s you can run on any cloud, and they want to be the best place to do that. Still have the data problem though.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      You’re falling for the “OMG Lock In” fallacy. Even if all of the APIs are compatible, if you have any type of scale and even if you’re just running a bunch of VMs, the pain of migrating infrastructure, security, data, network, auditing, connecting back to your on prem network is often a painful multi month process with huge risks of regressions
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I worked for two shops that migrated to GCP, one from leased space in DCs, one from AWS. > Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard. Yeah, there's definitely that risk, and in one of those cases, I disagreed with the move because of it. That said, depending on what you're doing, GCP's key-value store (BigTable) and analytical DB (BigQuery) struck me as technically more sound than the AWS versions (DynamoDB, Redshift/Athena). As an ecosystem, AWS was far superior, there are more offerings, and they tend to have more features. It's just that they're most likely a managed version of an open-source project. One place moved specifically because of BigTable. They were on HBase (and not happy with it), so it was the least painful migration option.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Google is unparalleled at building efficient data centers. Cloud already has tons of enterprise customers with contracts. They've spent $$$$$$ creating the infrastructure to be able to cash in over the long term. Anyone who thinks Google will get out of Cloud (already more than an $8 billion business [1]), as if it were comparable to Reader (which made $0, AFAIK), isn't looking at the economic realities here. I repeat: Google Cloud has more than $8 billion in annual revenue. And AWS proves that clouds are a profitable business. I just can't understand how anyone can suggest with a straight face that Google might shut it down. [1] https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-annual-revenue-tops-8-billion/2019/07/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-annual...
  - djohnston 7y ago
    Because the mandate was to be top 2 by 2023 and that looks doubtful.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Mandates in a large company generally do not imply a threat to nuke the entire organization if the mandate isn't met.
      - crazygringo 7y ago
        Exactly this. Corporate leaders set stretch goals all the time -- that's part of their job. Not meeting them just means certain VP's might not get their full million-dollar bonuses -- not that a billions-dollar business will shutter and lay off 1000's of people.
      - djohnston 7y ago
        In a large company, sure, but in Google? They nuke their own stuff all the time, users be damned. Since AWS offers a larger ecosystem, and doesn't have the Google product TTL of like 5 years, I really don't know why anyone would use GCP unless they're going for multi-provider redundancy
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Google really dropped the ball on missing cloud computing. With their expertise, they should have owned the space, it's just never the sort of idea that would bubble up in that org. But balloons to deliver internet in rural areas? They're the leader in that space.
  - daxfohl 7y ago
    I think it's more they wanted to do it on their own terms. They wanted to provide the best most scalable cloud platform ever in GAE, but users wanted more of a dumbed-down lift-and-shift-friendly variant that AWS offered.
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      Which is kind of a different problem with Google: Ivory Tower, we know better than you thinking.
- bradleyjg 7y ago
  And what if some Google employees decide they don’t like your organization? Google has already demonstrated they will cave in to that kind of pressure. How can any non-trivial sized organization bet the farm on gcp after that?
pasttense01 7y ago
One thing to note is that the cloud is only about 5% of total IT expenditures. So getting data which has never been on the cloud is more important than taking data away from competitors.
samspenc 7y ago
My biggest takeaway from this article was that while Google publicly reports its "cloud" revenue (including GSuite revenue) as $8 billion a year, its cloud computing revenue (the portion that competes with AWS and Azure) is at $1-2 billion a year. That would explain why Google would be willing to shut down Google Cloud in 2023 if they are not one of the top 2 players in this space. (Additional context and previous discussion below.) [1] The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... [2] Discussed on Hacker News previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260
- haecceity 7y ago
  The rest of Google are Google cloud customers so I don't think they would shut it down.
  - sanxiyn 7y ago
    This is not true. The rest of Google does not run on GCP.
    - rossjudson 7y ago
      No, this is not true. There are parts of Google that run on GCP. And parts that don't.
      - haecceity 7y ago
        Customers and potential customers if it pleases you.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Doesn't Microsoft do the same thing? The last revenue numbers I remember seeing from them were for some category called "Intelligent Cloud", which includes: * Server products and cloud services, including Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related CALs, Microsoft Azure, and GitHub. * Enterprise Services, including Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q3/IRFinancialStatementsPopups?tag=us-gaap:SegmentReportingDisclosureTextBlock&title=Intelligent%20Cloud https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q3...)
smiljo 7y ago
It's actually a great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up (to some extent at least), despite AWS having a seven year head start. Bezos himself called this a business miracle (the seven year head start, that is): https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133 https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133 And this is against Amazon, which is known for execution. I suppose we're in for a fun couple of years, especially with the JEDI contract soap opera and all that.
- trhway 7y ago
  >great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up looking at the history i'd say it is in MS DNA to be the successful second. In many instances they overtook the first.
  - smiljo 7y ago
    Great observation, with a very minor caveat: when Gates & Allen started out in programming languages, they were an awesome first mover. I highly recommend the "Hard Drive" book which goes into a bit more detail. However, in everything after that very first stage they were an amazing second mover: DOS, Word, Excel, etc. And now Azure.
    - tbrock 7y ago
      And most famously: Windows
- jwilliams 7y ago
  Microsoft's great advantage is enterprise bundling. Not only do they already have sales relationships with every big IT shop in the world - they're selling both software and cloud (which means they can discount one or the other). To Microsoft's credit they maximized this advantage very well.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jedberg 7y ago
Using market share along isn't a very good measure, because it hides that fact that they entire market is growing significantly, far outpacing the market share loss. It's not that Microsoft is stealing customers from Amazon. It's that both companies are brining in lots of new to the cloud customers, and Microsoft is just doing it faster. But both businesses are growing at enviable rates.
- scarface74 7y ago
  As a hypothetical CTO worried about the political consequences of failure when choosing a cloud provider, why would I choose GCP? If I choose AWS and things go wrong , I made the safe choice “and no one ever got fired for choosing AWS”. If I’m already running a MS shop, Azure is a safe political choice. Every time something goes wrong, even if it could have happen with any provider, you will always be questioned about why you chose GCP. Besides I’m sure that AWS and Azure are some where in the right top corner of Gartner’s magic quadrant.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    Typically GCP is chosen for up front volume discounts and bundling deals with GSuite and other tools, even more so for companies that offer GSuite-as-service accounts within other products, like business tools or hosting platforms. The problem is Google can’t make up the market share from only pressuring “lackey” companies that it has leverage over to use their cloud, it has to have a big scale draw for otherwise unaffiliated customers, and to a lesser extent can’t sustain these initial volume & bundling discounts indefinitely.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Unfortunately, GSuite is both losing marketshare and not being adopted by larger companies.. http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-365-usage-goes-and-leaving-g-suite-behind-says-research/ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3... Also being the discount cloud provider is not an enviable position.
trophycase 7y ago
Just an anecdote, but for my small project I recently switched from AWS to DO and am saving about 60% or more.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  Likewise, we run everything in DO and it's around 30% less so far, but we're also able to afford managed databases at that rate. To make them redundant will bring us closer to our AWS rates, but... I'm very happy to have managed services at the moment, and the value is felt both in productivity and finances. I'm really happy we moved over.
NickKampe 7y ago
Have none of you used GCP? It's a fantastic platform and those who your AWS are blind to the cloud native world.
- bsder 7y ago
  Unless GCP is an order of magnitude better or cheaper (which I have seen no evidence of), the question becomes "Why take the risk?"
  - rossjudson 7y ago
    I suppose if you have an order of magnitude more cash floating around and nothing better to spend it on, that's true. Most businesses like to keep as much of their money as they can. They can use it to pay people and stuff.
    - bsder 7y ago
      An "order of magnitude superior" is generally the minimum that causes me to start expending engineering effort to move from something implemented and nominally working to something unfamiliar and unimplemented. 10% savings is almost never worth engineering effort. Those engineers are probably worth more than 10% by implementing features or fixing a bug for a customer. However, even if 10% savings is $1 million, the edge odds probably still aren't in your favor. You may burn engineering time and the project fails or takes 3 times as long. Those engineers are effectively "dead" during that time and whatever contribution they could have made elsewhere is lost. For some reason, nobody ever factors that into their "savings projections". Obviously, if I've reached the point that 10% savings is $10 million, I'm in a different bucket. But having $100 million in cloud spend probably indicates a lot more problems than AWS vs GCP.
- cassianoleal 7y ago
  Am using it at current client. It's very good. GKE is absolutely brilliant, and some of the other stuff is also great. On the other hand, some stuff is not quite there yet. The metadata server to handle instance/pod IAM (i.e. Workload Identity) is wobbly at best. To be fair, it's in beta - but then most of their offerings seem to be - which then means you can't rely on it for business-critical applications since it may wobble at the wrong time and there's no SLA. This is just one example off the top of my head - I'm on holiday and not making massive mental effort to remember work. :) AWS is still my preferred cloud provider. Their APIs can be daunting at times and you have to build off many lower level concepts until you get something working but when you do it tends to be rock solid - and under your control. I prefer their approach of giving you the best lowest level services to build on, and then building on top of those themselves for those who want more abstraction than the Google way of "we're building something you'll want to use - we'll tell you when it's available but it will probably be another year or two until it's GA and covered by any SLA."
c3534l 7y ago
Here's the thing though, they actually don't have to fend off rivals. Amazon's cloud business is based on excess capacity that they have as one of the internet's biggest chokepoint in traffic (post-Thanksgiving holiday spending). When I took managerial accounting classes, we looked at situations where it would seem on paper that producing a certain good would lose money, but when you compared total profitability in letting excess capacity sit idle and distributing fixed costs like rent and overhead, you can actually sell a good for a loss. Amazon doesn't have to make more money than they spend on cloud computing, they only have to make more money than what they would have had to spend on cloud computing without competing on the market.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  >Amazon's cloud business is based on excess capacity that they have as one of the internet's biggest chokepoint in traffic This meme needs to die. It is not true and it has never been true that AWS was built out of excess Amazon infrastructure. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
  - c3534l 7y ago
    I stand corrected.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
http://archive.is/Gblhd http://archive.is/Gblhd
psaux 7y ago
Financial inquire: I would like to see the breakout from MSFT on what is actual Azure revenue. That would be a good comparison with AWS on the revenue side. MSFT now includes the O365 entire suite and other SAAS products with their cloud revenue. Office is huge alone. Also, genius tactic, MSFT gives you free SQL Server, Windows Server, and Exchange when you buy Azure credits. I have friends with expiring Azure credits coming up soon, waiting to see how MSFT handles. MSFT has massive cash, so prob extend for free or some other magic move. Edit: For context, these are multi millions dollars in Azure credits, some 20M+, not being used.
rossdavidh 7y ago
So, there's a thing I wonder about cloud businesses, Amazon or anyone else's. How much of this is funded by businesses that are not profitable, but are running on VC money? I recall the IPO documentation for companies like Uber stating a stupendous amount of their $$ going for AWS. I am reminded of Paul Graham's description of Yahoo's advertising business in 1999. Lots of paying customers, things seem great, you're solidly profitable. But what if most of your customers aren't profitable? What happens when the next recession comes? Not saying cloud computing is going away, but I think its current apparent growth rates are being propped up by a lot of Softbank (and similarly unprofitable) investments, which will go away fast when the next recession comes. Until then, we don't really know how profitable cloud computing is as a business. It may not be as good as it looks right now.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I thought uber ran their own data centres, and Lyft was the one running on AWS.
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97 points by Bella-Xiang 7y ago

http://archive.md/Gblhd http://archive.md/Gblhd

Didn't realize Google Cloud was so far behind in revenue and growth. Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard.

brightball 7y ago
I understand the narrative that's going to carry after that article the other day, but I've really enjoyed working with GCP over the last 2 years. The structure for VM use and their Live Migrate capability for upgrading the hardware underneath with no downtime has been excellent on my more long-lived servers. My biggest wish is some equivalent of Aurora for PostgreSQL.
- pm90 7y ago
  Another fairly happy GCP user. They have their issues (everyone does), but GKE is pretty amazing if you don’t have the resources for an in house k8s on AWS team. I am however fairly pessimistic about their chances. Especially considering the person at the helm is ex-Oracle VP. I also don’t understand their alternatives... do they want AWS to own the cloud market? They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light?
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light? Android has a lot more synergies with their consumer ads business. It's the extreme version of writing your own browser. GCP is completely different; it's in the B2B space, and it's a pretty standard business relationship between businesses and a supplier. Being customer-focused and business-focused isn't in Google's DNA.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    How is GKE different/better than Amazon's EKS? Am I wrong to think that 'hosted k8s' is an interchangeable commodity product?
    - inscrutable 7y ago
      On GKE, you don't need to define node-pools if you tick enable node-autoprovisioning. This is effectively an EKS fargate profile without any of the limitations (discrete node size, inability to mount volumes etc) On GKE there's no need for bastion hosts, you can connect to private nodes automatically by tunneling through identity-aware-proxy On GKE, there's no faffing about with aws-auth-configmap, nodes automatically join the cluster On GKE, you can use regional persistent disks if you need to store state rather than single zone EBS On GKE, you can use a single static ip for your nginx-ingress load balancer without needing to faff about with AWS global accelerator (which in any case gives you multiple ips) On GKE, managed node pools are automatically repaired and upgraded with the choice of google's OS or ubuntu unlike Amazon Linux which is currently the only choice for EKS' managed node pools. GKE can automatically use spot instances unlike the farce on AWS with a 3rd party (spotinst) charging a premium for the same functionality On GKE, managed istio is ticking a box versus a self-install on EKS On GKE you need to worry much less about ip exhaustion as they use alias ips vs dedicated ENIs for EKS Associating IAMs with kuberenetes service accounts is much easier with GKE workload identity than with EKS' oidc webhook GKE has several features which EKS doesn't (calico, vertical pod autoscaling, binary authorisation, export of cluster data to bigquery) https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/ejxxn5/has_anyone_done_a_thorough_diff_analysis_between/fd47cda?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/ejxxn5/has_any...
- fairramone 7y ago
  GCP is fantastic! I've been especially pleased with their network (the GLB is awesome!), BigQuery, Bigtable, GCE live migration, and of course... GKE. I cringe at the thought of having to run Kubernetes myself or settle for an inferior managed solution from Azure or AWS.
jedberg 7y ago
> Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard It's sort of a Catch-22 for them. They are this far behind in part because people fear they might not be around long term, and they might not be, because people don't want to sign up, because they fear it might not be. :)
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  Could they win customers by implementing their APIs on AWS so that people can move to AWS should Google discontinue their services? They could still make money by being far more efficient when running their software natively on their own stack.
  - xur17 7y ago
    To some extent they are doing this by embracing Kubernetes. For us, almost all of our infrastructure other than databases is running directly on GKE, so moving to AWS or Azure would be fairly easy.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Chasing AWS's APIs probably isn't a good use of their time, and wouldn't encourage a lot of people to move. API compatibility is not the biggest blocker to changing clouds -- moving one's data is. The could work out a deal where outbound data from Google to AWS is free, but that probably wouldn't be in their best interests either. I think their strategy of being the best place to run K8s is a good one. If you standardize on K8s you can run on any cloud, and they want to be the best place to do that. Still have the data problem though.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You’re falling for the “OMG Lock In” fallacy. Even if all of the APIs are compatible, if you have any type of scale and even if you’re just running a bunch of VMs, the pain of migrating infrastructure, security, data, network, auditing, connecting back to your on prem network is often a painful multi month process with huge risks of regressions
dehrmann 7y ago
I worked for two shops that migrated to GCP, one from leased space in DCs, one from AWS. > Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard. Yeah, there's definitely that risk, and in one of those cases, I disagreed with the move because of it. That said, depending on what you're doing, GCP's key-value store (BigTable) and analytical DB (BigQuery) struck me as technically more sound than the AWS versions (DynamoDB, Redshift/Athena). As an ecosystem, AWS was far superior, there are more offerings, and they tend to have more features. It's just that they're most likely a managed version of an open-source project. One place moved specifically because of BigTable. They were on HBase (and not happy with it), so it was the least painful migration option.
crazygringo 7y ago
Google is unparalleled at building efficient data centers. Cloud already has tons of enterprise customers with contracts. They've spent $$$$$$ creating the infrastructure to be able to cash in over the long term. Anyone who thinks Google will get out of Cloud (already more than an $8 billion business [1]), as if it were comparable to Reader (which made $0, AFAIK), isn't looking at the economic realities here. I repeat: Google Cloud has more than $8 billion in annual revenue. And AWS proves that clouds are a profitable business. I just can't understand how anyone can suggest with a straight face that Google might shut it down. [1] https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-annual-revenue-tops-8-billion/2019/07/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-annual...
- djohnston 7y ago
  Because the mandate was to be top 2 by 2023 and that looks doubtful.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Mandates in a large company generally do not imply a threat to nuke the entire organization if the mandate isn't met.
    - crazygringo 7y ago
      Exactly this. Corporate leaders set stretch goals all the time -- that's part of their job. Not meeting them just means certain VP's might not get their full million-dollar bonuses -- not that a billions-dollar business will shutter and lay off 1000's of people.
    - djohnston 7y ago
      In a large company, sure, but in Google? They nuke their own stuff all the time, users be damned. Since AWS offers a larger ecosystem, and doesn't have the Google product TTL of like 5 years, I really don't know why anyone would use GCP unless they're going for multi-provider redundancy
dehrmann 7y ago
Google really dropped the ball on missing cloud computing. With their expertise, they should have owned the space, it's just never the sort of idea that would bubble up in that org. But balloons to deliver internet in rural areas? They're the leader in that space.
- daxfohl 7y ago
  I think it's more they wanted to do it on their own terms. They wanted to provide the best most scalable cloud platform ever in GAE, but users wanted more of a dumbed-down lift-and-shift-friendly variant that AWS offered.
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    Which is kind of a different problem with Google: Ivory Tower, we know better than you thinking.
bradleyjg 7y ago
And what if some Google employees decide they don’t like your organization? Google has already demonstrated they will cave in to that kind of pressure. How can any non-trivial sized organization bet the farm on gcp after that?

pasttense01 7y ago

One thing to note is that the cloud is only about 5% of total IT expenditures. So getting data which has never been on the cloud is more important than taking data away from competitors.

samspenc 7y ago

My biggest takeaway from this article was that while Google publicly reports its "cloud" revenue (including GSuite revenue) as $8 billion a year, its cloud computing revenue (the portion that competes with AWS and Azure) is at $1-2 billion a year. That would explain why Google would be willing to shut down Google Cloud in 2023 if they are not one of the top 2 players in this space. (Additional context and previous discussion below.) [1] The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202... [2] Discussed on Hacker News previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

haecceity 7y ago
The rest of Google are Google cloud customers so I don't think they would shut it down.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  This is not true. The rest of Google does not run on GCP.
  - rossjudson 7y ago
    No, this is not true. There are parts of Google that run on GCP. And parts that don't.
    - haecceity 7y ago
      Customers and potential customers if it pleases you.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Doesn't Microsoft do the same thing? The last revenue numbers I remember seeing from them were for some category called "Intelligent Cloud", which includes: * Server products and cloud services, including Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related CALs, Microsoft Azure, and GitHub. * Enterprise Services, including Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q3/IRFinancialStatementsPopups?tag=us-gaap:SegmentReportingDisclosureTextBlock&title=Intelligent%20Cloud https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q3...)

smiljo 7y ago

It's actually a great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up (to some extent at least), despite AWS having a seven year head start. Bezos himself called this a business miracle (the seven year head start, that is): https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133 https://youtu.be/f3NBQcAqyu4?t=2133 And this is against Amazon, which is known for execution. I suppose we're in for a fun couple of years, especially with the JEDI contract soap opera and all that.

trhway 7y ago
>great testament to Microsoft's execution that they were able to catch up looking at the history i'd say it is in MS DNA to be the successful second. In many instances they overtook the first.
- smiljo 7y ago
  Great observation, with a very minor caveat: when Gates & Allen started out in programming languages, they were an awesome first mover. I highly recommend the "Hard Drive" book which goes into a bit more detail. However, in everything after that very first stage they were an amazing second mover: DOS, Word, Excel, etc. And now Azure.
  - tbrock 7y ago
    And most famously: Windows
jwilliams 7y ago
Microsoft's great advantage is enterprise bundling. Not only do they already have sales relationships with every big IT shop in the world - they're selling both software and cloud (which means they can discount one or the other). To Microsoft's credit they maximized this advantage very well.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jedberg 7y ago

Using market share along isn't a very good measure, because it hides that fact that they entire market is growing significantly, far outpacing the market share loss. It's not that Microsoft is stealing customers from Amazon. It's that both companies are brining in lots of new to the cloud customers, and Microsoft is just doing it faster. But both businesses are growing at enviable rates.

scarface74 7y ago
As a hypothetical CTO worried about the political consequences of failure when choosing a cloud provider, why would I choose GCP? If I choose AWS and things go wrong , I made the safe choice “and no one ever got fired for choosing AWS”. If I’m already running a MS shop, Azure is a safe political choice. Every time something goes wrong, even if it could have happen with any provider, you will always be questioned about why you chose GCP. Besides I’m sure that AWS and Azure are some where in the right top corner of Gartner’s magic quadrant.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  Typically GCP is chosen for up front volume discounts and bundling deals with GSuite and other tools, even more so for companies that offer GSuite-as-service accounts within other products, like business tools or hosting platforms. The problem is Google can’t make up the market share from only pressuring “lackey” companies that it has leverage over to use their cloud, it has to have a big scale draw for otherwise unaffiliated customers, and to a lesser extent can’t sustain these initial volume & bundling discounts indefinitely.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Unfortunately, GSuite is both losing marketshare and not being adopted by larger companies.. http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-365-usage-goes-and-leaving-g-suite-behind-says-research/ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3... Also being the discount cloud provider is not an enviable position.

trophycase 7y ago

Just an anecdote, but for my small project I recently switched from AWS to DO and am saving about 60% or more.

steve_adams_86 7y ago
Likewise, we run everything in DO and it's around 30% less so far, but we're also able to afford managed databases at that rate. To make them redundant will bring us closer to our AWS rates, but... I'm very happy to have managed services at the moment, and the value is felt both in productivity and finances. I'm really happy we moved over.

NickKampe 7y ago

Have none of you used GCP? It's a fantastic platform and those who your AWS are blind to the cloud native world.

bsder 7y ago
Unless GCP is an order of magnitude better or cheaper (which I have seen no evidence of), the question becomes "Why take the risk?"
- rossjudson 7y ago
  I suppose if you have an order of magnitude more cash floating around and nothing better to spend it on, that's true. Most businesses like to keep as much of their money as they can. They can use it to pay people and stuff.
  - bsder 7y ago
    An "order of magnitude superior" is generally the minimum that causes me to start expending engineering effort to move from something implemented and nominally working to something unfamiliar and unimplemented. 10% savings is almost never worth engineering effort. Those engineers are probably worth more than 10% by implementing features or fixing a bug for a customer. However, even if 10% savings is $1 million, the edge odds probably still aren't in your favor. You may burn engineering time and the project fails or takes 3 times as long. Those engineers are effectively "dead" during that time and whatever contribution they could have made elsewhere is lost. For some reason, nobody ever factors that into their "savings projections". Obviously, if I've reached the point that 10% savings is $10 million, I'm in a different bucket. But having $100 million in cloud spend probably indicates a lot more problems than AWS vs GCP.
cassianoleal 7y ago
Am using it at current client. It's very good. GKE is absolutely brilliant, and some of the other stuff is also great. On the other hand, some stuff is not quite there yet. The metadata server to handle instance/pod IAM (i.e. Workload Identity) is wobbly at best. To be fair, it's in beta - but then most of their offerings seem to be - which then means you can't rely on it for business-critical applications since it may wobble at the wrong time and there's no SLA. This is just one example off the top of my head - I'm on holiday and not making massive mental effort to remember work. :) AWS is still my preferred cloud provider. Their APIs can be daunting at times and you have to build off many lower level concepts until you get something working but when you do it tends to be rock solid - and under your control. I prefer their approach of giving you the best lowest level services to build on, and then building on top of those themselves for those who want more abstraction than the Google way of "we're building something you'll want to use - we'll tell you when it's available but it will probably be another year or two until it's GA and covered by any SLA."

c3534l 7y ago

Here's the thing though, they actually don't have to fend off rivals. Amazon's cloud business is based on excess capacity that they have as one of the internet's biggest chokepoint in traffic (post-Thanksgiving holiday spending). When I took managerial accounting classes, we looked at situations where it would seem on paper that producing a certain good would lose money, but when you compared total profitability in letting excess capacity sit idle and distributing fixed costs like rent and overhead, you can actually sell a good for a loss. Amazon doesn't have to make more money than they spend on cloud computing, they only have to make more money than what they would have had to spend on cloud computing without competing on the market.

cthalupa 7y ago
>Amazon's cloud business is based on excess capacity that they have as one of the internet's biggest chokepoint in traffic This meme needs to die. It is not true and it has never been true that AWS was built out of excess Amazon infrastructure. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
- c3534l 7y ago
  I stand corrected.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

http://archive.is/Gblhd http://archive.is/Gblhd

psaux 7y ago

Financial inquire: I would like to see the breakout from MSFT on what is actual Azure revenue. That would be a good comparison with AWS on the revenue side. MSFT now includes the O365 entire suite and other SAAS products with their cloud revenue. Office is huge alone. Also, genius tactic, MSFT gives you free SQL Server, Windows Server, and Exchange when you buy Azure credits. I have friends with expiring Azure credits coming up soon, waiting to see how MSFT handles. MSFT has massive cash, so prob extend for free or some other magic move. Edit: For context, these are multi millions dollars in Azure credits, some 20M+, not being used.

rossdavidh 7y ago

So, there's a thing I wonder about cloud businesses, Amazon or anyone else's. How much of this is funded by businesses that are not profitable, but are running on VC money? I recall the IPO documentation for companies like Uber stating a stupendous amount of their $$ going for AWS. I am reminded of Paul Graham's description of Yahoo's advertising business in 1999. Lots of paying customers, things seem great, you're solidly profitable. But what if most of your customers aren't profitable? What happens when the next recession comes? Not saying cloud computing is going away, but I think its current apparent growth rates are being propped up by a lot of Softbank (and similarly unprofitable) investments, which will go away fast when the next recession comes. Until then, we don't really know how profitable cloud computing is as a business. It may not be as good as it looks right now.

enitihas 7y ago
I thought uber ran their own data centres, and Lyft was the one running on AWS.

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