5 ms·

I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g

I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g. still being distant 3rd in cloud).

a012 6y ago
Do they? I see their GKE and then now with Anthos thingy got a lot of attention.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  What matters is sales, not attention.
  - akoncius 6y ago
    without attention there will be no sales
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Well it doesn't seem to be working then.
      - harpratap 6y ago
        How can you be so certain? The project is barely 6 years old and so many APIs are JUST reaching v1. And companies are still using mostly barebones K8s, we are yet to see how RedHat, Azure differentiate on top of it and we get to see all the "distros"
        pjmlp 6y ago
        By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.
        harpratap 6y ago
        Cloud is still very much a blue ocean domain. Azure's rise has been driven by bringing in companies from the huge on-prem market into Cloud, not by attracting users away from AWS. We are nowhere near maturity level to even consider that current market leaders will stay in place for next 5 years.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Hope is good I guess, maybe by then Google has managed to finally provide enterprise level confidence on their offerings.
Macha 6y ago
To profit from cloud services at the level AWS/MS do, you need big customers, the long tail is just marketing that happens to make you some pocket money. To get big customers, Google's reputation for losing interest and moving into the next big shiny plays very hard against them.
fcantournet 6y ago
Google did profit massively from kubernetes, moreso than any other big company (Hello Red Hat lol) It was (for better and for worse) the #1 reason to adopt GCP for our main cloud platform, and we're not alone. It's has seen immense adoption that it wouldn't have had if it hadn't been in a neutral foundation. The work was definitely not done by Google alone (~30%). IS GCP "still" #3 ? Yes. Is it because they didn't get a tighter grip on k8s and try to use it as a competitive advantage ? absolutely not. Nobody would have touched k8s with a 10 foot pole in that situation. The strength of k8s is in its eco-system and that wouldn't have happened without the CNCF. And I'm saying this as an early adopter of k8s, it's insane for the Google brass to see anything other than an immense success in the handling of k8s, at least from the perspective of how much money it made Google (indirectly) It's not because of K8S strategy that GCP is #3. It's just because MS & AWS are better. PERIOD. Better at service, better at marketing, better at some product design sometimes, better at abusing their current dominant position (hehe it sucks doesn't Goog ? heh? Doesn't it ?)
- koffiezet 6y ago
  > (Hello Red Hat lol) I think you underestimate the revenue OpenShift is generating... If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that.
  - znpy 6y ago
    If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that. yeah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on a more serious note: in order to compare apples to apples you should compare red hat support bills with GCP support bills (i think they call that "professional services"). I guess they aren't cheap either.
    - koffiezet 6y ago
      > eah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sadly, also my experience. Response SLA of 2 hours? Please attach sosreport is ALWAYS the first reply. Even if you attached it in the original ticket (which we always do). The technical quality of the support is sub-par, most of the time when we include technical information, they don't seem to understand it at all...
tedk-42 6y ago
Pretty much my feeling about the whole thing. It's someone's attempt within Google to not let the horse out so fast when there was a buck to be made on it. Android brought people into Google's ecosystem. Kubernetes could have positioned Google better in the cloud space but I think they were late to the party due to their failure to understand what customers want.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
They're third because of their poor track record with support and a penchant for killing things. They should concentrate on that first.

I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g. still being distant 3rd in cloud).

a012 6y ago

Do they? I see their GKE and then now with Anthos thingy got a lot of attention.

pjmlp 6y ago
What matters is sales, not attention.
- akoncius 6y ago
  without attention there will be no sales
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Well it doesn't seem to be working then.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      How can you be so certain? The project is barely 6 years old and so many APIs are JUST reaching v1. And companies are still using mostly barebones K8s, we are yet to see how RedHat, Azure differentiate on top of it and we get to see all the "distros"
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.
        harpratap 6y ago
        Cloud is still very much a blue ocean domain. Azure's rise has been driven by bringing in companies from the huge on-prem market into Cloud, not by attracting users away from AWS. We are nowhere near maturity level to even consider that current market leaders will stay in place for next 5 years.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Hope is good I guess, maybe by then Google has managed to finally provide enterprise level confidence on their offerings.

Macha 6y ago

To profit from cloud services at the level AWS/MS do, you need big customers, the long tail is just marketing that happens to make you some pocket money. To get big customers, Google's reputation for losing interest and moving into the next big shiny plays very hard against them.

fcantournet 6y ago

Google did profit massively from kubernetes, moreso than any other big company (Hello Red Hat lol) It was (for better and for worse) the #1 reason to adopt GCP for our main cloud platform, and we're not alone. It's has seen immense adoption that it wouldn't have had if it hadn't been in a neutral foundation. The work was definitely not done by Google alone (~30%). IS GCP "still" #3 ? Yes. Is it because they didn't get a tighter grip on k8s and try to use it as a competitive advantage ? absolutely not. Nobody would have touched k8s with a 10 foot pole in that situation. The strength of k8s is in its eco-system and that wouldn't have happened without the CNCF. And I'm saying this as an early adopter of k8s, it's insane for the Google brass to see anything other than an immense success in the handling of k8s, at least from the perspective of how much money it made Google (indirectly) It's not because of K8S strategy that GCP is #3. It's just because MS & AWS are better. PERIOD. Better at service, better at marketing, better at some product design sometimes, better at abusing their current dominant position (hehe it sucks doesn't Goog ? heh? Doesn't it ?)

koffiezet 6y ago
> (Hello Red Hat lol) I think you underestimate the revenue OpenShift is generating... If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that.
- znpy 6y ago
  If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that. yeah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on a more serious note: in order to compare apples to apples you should compare red hat support bills with GCP support bills (i think they call that "professional services"). I guess they aren't cheap either.
  - koffiezet 6y ago
    > eah with no support lol, and when something goes wrong... oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sadly, also my experience. Response SLA of 2 hours? Please attach sosreport is ALWAYS the first reply. Even if you attached it in the original ticket (which we always do). The technical quality of the support is sub-par, most of the time when we include technical information, they don't seem to understand it at all...

tedk-42 6y ago

Pretty much my feeling about the whole thing. It's someone's attempt within Google to not let the horse out so fast when there was a buck to be made on it. Android brought people into Google's ecosystem. Kubernetes could have positioned Google better in the cloud space but I think they were late to the party due to their failure to understand what customers want.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

They're third because of their poor track record with support and a penchant for killing things. They should concentrate on that first.