12 ms·

Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

273 points by gw5815 6y ago

wcarss 6y ago
https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words -> this is where the PDF appears to be generated from, and it has searchable text of the content in its README on the main page, and links to docs on each, and the mobile content that got left off the PDF.
- sethvargo 6y ago
  Yup - I can confirm that's the source. Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.
vidanay 6y ago
"Cancelled" (They just haven't announced many of them yet)
- hateful 6y ago
  Thinking the same thing. Anyone compare last years with this years!
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Has to be four words. "I really miss it."
jnwatson 6y ago
Google Cloud really needs better marketing. I didn't have the most basic awareness of most of these services.
- folkrav 6y ago
  To be perfectly honest I also don't know 90% of AWS's services either.
  - BenoitP 6y ago
    On the other hand AWS and GCP services almost have a 1-to-1 mapping; so one only need to know one platform to be able to start working with the other.
    - folkrav 6y ago
      After 2-3 years of working with one then the other, yes and no. They can be quite similar on some accounts, but not quite the same. GCP also has that very Google thing of having very slightly different yet still kind of competing products at the same time.
      - abraxas 6y ago
        So does AWS. For just messaging there is SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Event Bridge, Kinesis, MSK and probably a couple more tied to product families like IoT and video streaming.
        folkrav 6y ago
        Yeah, true. It was more of a poke at Google's tendency to do this very thing even outside GCP.
    - ciguy 6y ago
      This isn't exactly true. I have worked extensively with Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. While many of their basic services do seem to map 1 to 1 there are enough differences in the details that it's almost like learning a completely new system. At a very high level the basics are relevant, but the differences are much greater than you might expect.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      GCP has a few products that AWS doesn't. BigQuery ML and Cloud Spanner are a few that I can think of. These might have approximations on AWS, but not 1-to-1 feature competitors. Plus GCP has one-click integrations with pretty much every Google API out there (analytics, ads, drive, etc). It's been a minute since I worked with AWS, but they have tons and tons of products. On the order of two, maybe three times as many. The basic stuff like VMs, storage, networking, and managed postgres/mysql SQL databases are close, but the specialized services can be very different when you look at them closely.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  They need to throw shade at AWS. "Google cancels everything" is a meme, but AWS releasing broken pre-alpha products, letting old ones rot on the vine, and having crazy monetization schemes that are utterly inconsistent with marketing is not a meme, even though they do these things all the time. If GCP wants to win, they need to fix that, because "will I be blamed for the next shitshow" is the key question on every architect / purchasing manager's mind, and right now AWS is winning that battle to a degree that they do not remotely deserve because google is just MIA. Hell, Google could coordinate with Walmart to hit AWS and Amazon at the same time because there is clearly, shall we say, a degree of cultural continuity between the Amazon and AWS business units.
  - crazysim 6y ago
    Do a Project Zero not for security but for usability, capability, and pricing against AWS?
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Sure, but it it has to be memeable. Imagine technical manages bickering in front of their managers. "Let me get this straight, Google canceled a service and you didn't see it coming?" ^ this needs a comeback. "Let me get this straight, you ran into another AWS scaling limit and you didn't see it coming?" or something.
      - abraxas 6y ago
        If I had a dime for every time I see a convoluted architecture in our code that only exists due to the arbitrary hard limits in AWS I'd be able to quit and never again worry about arbitrary AWS limits.
        jjoonathan 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure they aren't arbitrary at all and are mostly due to managed and serverless offerings backed by duct tape and chewing gum. On a few occasions I have been left with all-but-proof that behind the "let us handle scaling for you" smoke and mirrors is a bash script on an EC2 instance sized by guesswork and hardcoded until you complain, at which point support might be able to shuffle it between instance types to eek out a bit more vertical scaling.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  What kind of marketing? Google cloud is a highly complex B2B product. Do you know what salesforce or oracle sells? As both a developer and consumer, I have no idea.
  - pionar 6y ago
    Salesforce sells a CRM. Oracle sells lawsuits.
    - paxys 6y ago
      Salesforce sells a CRM is about as descriptive as Google sells a cloud. The Salesforce ecosystem consists of hundreds of products which are together worth $200B+.
    - reilly3000 6y ago
      IBM sells promotions.
pibefision 6y ago
I need this but from AWS
- sytse 6y ago
  https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ might be a start
- tyingq 6y ago
  Not quite the same, but helpul: https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Periodic-Table/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Periodic-Table/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-History/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-History/ or, as JSON https://github.com/AwsGeek/aws-history/blob/master/services.json https://github.com/AwsGeek/aws-history/blob/master/services....
- stepri 6y ago
  Here you go https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2020/05/20/aws.html https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2020/05/20/aws.html
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    >File / object storage. Not primarily used for mounting as filesystem, but you can directly download files through HTTP. Woah, what is this, a novel?
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      Seriously. Simple Storage Service... And you still have room for another word.
idlewords 6y ago
"Good luck getting support"
- makecheck 6y ago
  Or perhaps “Soon to be cancelled”. :)
ciguy 6y ago
The major cloud providers REALLY need to focus on fixing years old bugs in their widely used offerings instead of launching new ones. I guess the incentives are out of whack tho, since a working and widely used but slightly broken offering will be used by their existing customers. But if a competitor beats them to the next major thing, they will lose customers as they migrate over to use it. So they're in a kind of arms race against each other to roll out new seemingly obscure offerings in case one of them becomes the next thing and sees widespread adoption.
- paxys 6y ago
  "Years old bugs" are now features
  - ciguy 6y ago
    This is somewhat true in that so many people have worked around them that a fix would likely break a lot of existing users implementations.
- jcims 6y ago
  I wonder if it would be possible to run a site where people submit and rate bugs/enhancements/workarounds in cloud products. E.g. AWS Config doesn't support service X or sharing ENIs across NLB target groups can ruin your day.
  - ciguy 6y ago
    The AWS forums used to have bug reports that were ranked by upvotes. AWS didn't seem to pay much attention though, the highest voted bugs stayed that way for years with no change or acknowledgement. I haven't personally been on their forums in years so I have no idea if this is still the case.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    Azure has the feedback forum: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback It supports ranking, and you can even assign 1, 2, or 3 votes for a specific issue depending on how important it is to you. Of course, this doesn't matter, because this is just where customers are told to go complain by support. It's like telling an upset child to shout at a wall to get their "feelings out". A casual stroll through the list of suggestions will quickly uncovers hundreds and hundreds that would be a trivial fix, but has a huge impact on customers. Some of these have languished for years with either no feedback or "WONTFIX". Azure Active Directory in particular has some shocking open issues. My favourite is that you can't stop an App Service so that it stops spending money! You can only delete it. If you downgrade it to the Free tier, that removes features by wiping and corrupting you configuration. This keeps coming up over and over, and the response is: "We don't want to, shh, go away" https://feedback.azure.com/forums/287593-logic-apps/suggestions/34102060-allow-us-to-stop-pause-an-app-service-plan https://feedback.azure.com/forums/287593-logic-apps/suggesti... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/31339084-azure-webapp-backup-stop-option https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/13550325-ability-to-suspend-app-service-plans-without-charg https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/11353470-don-t-charge-for-app-services-in-a-stopped-state https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... The next best one is that the Portal team absolutely refuses to implement a default region option in the GUI, forcing 100% of their GUI users to click through that unnecessary extra selection every single time. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal/suggestions/6715615-when-selecting-a-location-how-to-save-as-default https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal/sugges... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback/suggestions/39532030-default-region-of-service-based-on-region-of-resou https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback/su... It's a fun page to dig through, some of the gaps are just so glaring as to beggar belief.
zbowling 6y ago
Mobile got left off the PDF but it's also a part of cloud: Mobile (Firebase) * Cloud Firestore: Document store and sync * Cloud Functions for Firebase: Event-driven serverless applications * Cloud Storage for Firebase: Object storage and serving Crashlytics: Crash reporting and analytics * Firebase A/B Testing: Create A/B test experiments * Firebase App Distribution: Trusted tester early access * Firebase Authentication: Drop-in authentication * Firebase Cloud Messaging: Send device notifications * Firebase Dynamic Links: Link to app content * Firebase Extensions: Pre-packaged development solutions * Firebase Hosting: Web hosting with CDN/SSL * Firebase In-App Messaging: Send in-app contextual messages * Firebase Performance Monitoring: App/web performance monitoring * Firebase Predictions: Predict user targeting * Firebase Realtime Database: Real-time data synchronization * Firebase Remote Config: Remotely configure installed apps * Firebase Test Lab: Mobile testing device farm * Google Analytics for Firebase: Mobile app analytics * ML Kit for Firebase: ML APIs for mobile
- musicale 6y ago
  I've always liked Firebase. I'm glad it's still around.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Firebase is kind of weird. It's like a Cloud in a Cloud.
    - sa46 6y ago
      I figured the characterization is Firebase is a PaaS (similar to Heroku) where Google Cloud is IaaS.
      - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
        Not exactly. Yes, I would probably characterize Firebase as a PaaS, but Google Cloud is much more than just IaaS, as it includes some PaaS components, like App Engine. I would say the general idea behind Firebase is that it is designed to build fully functional applications without any additional components. E.g. you could serve your static web app using Firebase Hosting, manage users with Firebase Auth, use Firestore for data storage (the syncing features of Firestore are truly amazing if you're not familiar with them), and tie things together with Cloud Functions. Also, note that while Firebase was originally pretty heavily focused on mobile, especially native mobile, most of their services work great on the web regardless. The other thing about Firebase (referencing the previous comment about it being a little weird as a "Cloud in a Cloud"), is that it essentially exists on top of GCP. For example, a Firebase Project is really a GCP project under the covers, Cloud Functions for Firebase are really some syntactic sugar on top of GCP functions, etc. While that can be a little confusing at first, it can provide some great value. We have apps where most of our backend is in GCP (e.g. running Node in App Engine Flexible, using Cloud SQL Postgres for our DB, using Cloud PubSub topics for our eventing system, etc.) but then we use Firebase Auth for our user authentication, Firebase Hosting to serve our React app, etc. Yes, I'm a definite Firebase fan boy, but that's because I feel like I can be so productive with it, without needing to worry much about underlying infrastructure, while still being easy to integrate with the horsepower of GCP.
duxup 6y ago
Now I actually want to look at some of these, I didn't know what some of these were / existed ... best marketing ever.
jariel 6y ago
If you need to publish this you have a product management problem. Arguably, some of these things are features not products, and should not be branded. The level of complexity is overwhelming, especially for the decreasing marginal returns to effort for most companies for most of these services, I suggest that G and AWS need to take a new approach here.
- dash2 6y ago
  This. It reminded me of the Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators, another "advert" that really isn't: https://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/ https://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
follower 6y ago
It's Not Killed Yet
udev 6y ago
Conveniently on black background for easy printing!
- jtylr 6y ago
  Light version here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words/master/Poster-lowres.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregsramblings/google-clou...
meddlepal 6y ago
What's the use case for something like "VMWare on Google Compute" is it just a API shim to translate VMWare API calls to GCE for companies that are trying to lift and shift to the cloud?
- callesgg 6y ago
  Yeah. Pretty much.
- mrtrustor 6y ago
  GCVE is not an API shim, it's an actual VMWare environment. And yes, it's mainly used for lift and shift.
- longcommonname 6y ago
  We use it, I'm not on the team that uses it. Basically a lift and shift of our backup data center which came with all sorts of improvements. It's quite a bit more expensive, the projects that it runs in cost more than the rest of our cloud costs in total. But the man hours we've done to set up those other cloud systems (Terraform) are much more costly.
- lode 6y ago
  It's a full managed (bare metal) VMware environment. Basically you get a dedicated cluster of vSphere hosts, with VSAN storage. Some use cases are: migrating to cloud (for all kinds of reasons, like not wanting to invest in own datacenters and HW anymore) without having to refactor applications, hybrid applications where the front end lives in Google Cloud but the backend requires a more 'traditional' environment, using the cloud for DR, ... Similar offerings exist at other hyperscalers: * Amazon: VMware Cloud on AWS - https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws * Azure: Azure VMware Solution - https://cloud.vmware.com/azure-vmware-solution https://cloud.vmware.com/azure-vmware-solution * IBM: IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions - https://cloud.vmware.com/ibm-cloud https://cloud.vmware.com/ibm-cloud * Oracle: Oracle Cloud VMware Solution https://cloud.vmware.com/oracle-cloud https://cloud.vmware.com/oracle-cloud * Alicloud: Alibaba Cloud VMware Solution https://www.alibabacloud.com/press-room/vmware-based-cloud-tech-now-available-on-alibaba-cloud https://www.alibabacloud.com/press-room/vmware-based-cloud-t... [Disclaimer: I work at VMware]
azhenley 6y ago
Can I get this for AWS?
jabo 6y ago
I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share: There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this just a HN crowd concern) and if so, are there steps being taken to address this perception head on? [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- mrtrustor 6y ago
  When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-deutsche-bank-agree-to-10-year-alliance-including-cloud https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-de... (Google Cloud employee here)
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    That actually doesn't mean anything to me when I personally have had to deal with the shut off of many, many Google products and your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.
    - yesbabyyes 6y ago
      > your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way. Is that really true? I don't have a lot of experience with Firebase, just notifications and analytics, but working with Cognito and Amplify one- two years ago was like a bad joke, more similar to a fledgling startup than a well-rounded offering. It rather seems to me that a lot of organisations are moving to GCP; BigQuery and its integrations with other Google products seems like a killer app, and GKE is seen as the better choice for hosted Kubernetes. I'm still a fan of Red Hat's OpenShift, but I'm actually surprised how well Google seems to be managing their {S,P,I}aaS offerings and strategy in this space.
ssijak 6y ago
There are some which are explained in more than 4 words.
andrewprock 6y ago
This looks like the kind of documentation I see in code: int x; // variable x stores ints
- Clewza313 6y ago
  This is a point in GCP's favor, since it generally has sane product names. By comparison, to quote some recent Corey Quinn snark, AWS has Lookout for Equipment, Trainium, Glue Elastic Views and SageMaker Data Wrangler.
ss64 6y ago
I'm trying to figure out what the different colour headings mean. Perhaps green means they are keeping it, red means 'scheduled for retirement' and orange is 'we arent sure yet'.
simonw 6y ago
I tried searching with Ctrl+F and it didn't work because it's an image - but there's a searchable version of it here: https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words
senectus1 6y ago
is there one of these for Azure?
Anther 6y ago
Here’s one for all of them: Not going to last.
rrdharan 6y ago
Missed opportunity: Bigtable -> Big Table
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
imwillofficial 6y ago
Anyone have this for AWS? I think it’s a great idea.
irrational 6y ago
Does anyone know of a place where the cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are shown side by side? For instance, what are AWS Lambdas called in Azure and Google Cloud?
lultimouomo 6y ago
> petabyte-scale, low-latency, non-relational That's glaringly cheating.
decafbad 6y ago
Fire everyone in marketing department.
nobrains 6y ago
vpc data constraints migrate VMs to GKE containers cloud API gateway dynamic web maps managed service mesh Yeah, I will need a "Google Cloud products in 4 words or less" in 32 words or less, for some cases. On serious note, I also think it will be good for them, if they mention the 4 word explanation as a sub-title where ever they mention the name. Also applies to AWS.
collyw 6y ago
Couldn't they have put it in HTML?

273 points by gw5815 6y ago

https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words -> this is where the PDF appears to be generated from, and it has searchable text of the content in its README on the main page, and links to docs on each, and the mobile content that got left off the PDF.

sethvargo 6y ago
Yup - I can confirm that's the source. Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.

vidanay 6y ago

"Cancelled" (They just haven't announced many of them yet)

hateful 6y ago
Thinking the same thing. Anyone compare last years with this years!
ceejayoz 6y ago
Has to be four words. "I really miss it."

jnwatson 6y ago

Google Cloud really needs better marketing. I didn't have the most basic awareness of most of these services.

folkrav 6y ago
To be perfectly honest I also don't know 90% of AWS's services either.
- BenoitP 6y ago
  On the other hand AWS and GCP services almost have a 1-to-1 mapping; so one only need to know one platform to be able to start working with the other.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    After 2-3 years of working with one then the other, yes and no. They can be quite similar on some accounts, but not quite the same. GCP also has that very Google thing of having very slightly different yet still kind of competing products at the same time.
    - abraxas 6y ago
      So does AWS. For just messaging there is SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Event Bridge, Kinesis, MSK and probably a couple more tied to product families like IoT and video streaming.
      - folkrav 6y ago
        Yeah, true. It was more of a poke at Google's tendency to do this very thing even outside GCP.
  - ciguy 6y ago
    This isn't exactly true. I have worked extensively with Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. While many of their basic services do seem to map 1 to 1 there are enough differences in the details that it's almost like learning a completely new system. At a very high level the basics are relevant, but the differences are much greater than you might expect.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    GCP has a few products that AWS doesn't. BigQuery ML and Cloud Spanner are a few that I can think of. These might have approximations on AWS, but not 1-to-1 feature competitors. Plus GCP has one-click integrations with pretty much every Google API out there (analytics, ads, drive, etc). It's been a minute since I worked with AWS, but they have tons and tons of products. On the order of two, maybe three times as many. The basic stuff like VMs, storage, networking, and managed postgres/mysql SQL databases are close, but the specialized services can be very different when you look at them closely.
jjoonathan 6y ago
They need to throw shade at AWS. "Google cancels everything" is a meme, but AWS releasing broken pre-alpha products, letting old ones rot on the vine, and having crazy monetization schemes that are utterly inconsistent with marketing is not a meme, even though they do these things all the time. If GCP wants to win, they need to fix that, because "will I be blamed for the next shitshow" is the key question on every architect / purchasing manager's mind, and right now AWS is winning that battle to a degree that they do not remotely deserve because google is just MIA. Hell, Google could coordinate with Walmart to hit AWS and Amazon at the same time because there is clearly, shall we say, a degree of cultural continuity between the Amazon and AWS business units.
- crazysim 6y ago
  Do a Project Zero not for security but for usability, capability, and pricing against AWS?
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Sure, but it it has to be memeable. Imagine technical manages bickering in front of their managers. "Let me get this straight, Google canceled a service and you didn't see it coming?" ^ this needs a comeback. "Let me get this straight, you ran into another AWS scaling limit and you didn't see it coming?" or something.
    - abraxas 6y ago
      If I had a dime for every time I see a convoluted architecture in our code that only exists due to the arbitrary hard limits in AWS I'd be able to quit and never again worry about arbitrary AWS limits.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure they aren't arbitrary at all and are mostly due to managed and serverless offerings backed by duct tape and chewing gum. On a few occasions I have been left with all-but-proof that behind the "let us handle scaling for you" smoke and mirrors is a bash script on an EC2 instance sized by guesswork and hardcoded until you complain, at which point support might be able to shuffle it between instance types to eek out a bit more vertical scaling.
enos_feedler 6y ago
What kind of marketing? Google cloud is a highly complex B2B product. Do you know what salesforce or oracle sells? As both a developer and consumer, I have no idea.
- pionar 6y ago
  Salesforce sells a CRM. Oracle sells lawsuits.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Salesforce sells a CRM is about as descriptive as Google sells a cloud. The Salesforce ecosystem consists of hundreds of products which are together worth $200B+.
  - reilly3000 6y ago
    IBM sells promotions.

pibefision 6y ago

I need this but from AWS

sytse 6y ago
https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ might be a start
tyingq 6y ago
Not quite the same, but helpul: https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Periodic-Table/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Periodic-Table/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-History/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-History/ or, as JSON https://github.com/AwsGeek/aws-history/blob/master/services.json https://github.com/AwsGeek/aws-history/blob/master/services....
stepri 6y ago
Here you go https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2020/05/20/aws.html https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2020/05/20/aws.html
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >File / object storage. Not primarily used for mounting as filesystem, but you can directly download files through HTTP. Woah, what is this, a novel?
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Seriously. Simple Storage Service... And you still have room for another word.

idlewords 6y ago

"Good luck getting support"

makecheck 6y ago
Or perhaps “Soon to be cancelled”. :)

ciguy 6y ago

The major cloud providers REALLY need to focus on fixing years old bugs in their widely used offerings instead of launching new ones. I guess the incentives are out of whack tho, since a working and widely used but slightly broken offering will be used by their existing customers. But if a competitor beats them to the next major thing, they will lose customers as they migrate over to use it. So they're in a kind of arms race against each other to roll out new seemingly obscure offerings in case one of them becomes the next thing and sees widespread adoption.

paxys 6y ago
"Years old bugs" are now features
- ciguy 6y ago
  This is somewhat true in that so many people have worked around them that a fix would likely break a lot of existing users implementations.
jcims 6y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to run a site where people submit and rate bugs/enhancements/workarounds in cloud products. E.g. AWS Config doesn't support service X or sharing ENIs across NLB target groups can ruin your day.
- ciguy 6y ago
  The AWS forums used to have bug reports that were ranked by upvotes. AWS didn't seem to pay much attention though, the highest voted bugs stayed that way for years with no change or acknowledgement. I haven't personally been on their forums in years so I have no idea if this is still the case.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  Azure has the feedback forum: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback It supports ranking, and you can even assign 1, 2, or 3 votes for a specific issue depending on how important it is to you. Of course, this doesn't matter, because this is just where customers are told to go complain by support. It's like telling an upset child to shout at a wall to get their "feelings out". A casual stroll through the list of suggestions will quickly uncovers hundreds and hundreds that would be a trivial fix, but has a huge impact on customers. Some of these have languished for years with either no feedback or "WONTFIX". Azure Active Directory in particular has some shocking open issues. My favourite is that you can't stop an App Service so that it stops spending money! You can only delete it. If you downgrade it to the Free tier, that removes features by wiping and corrupting you configuration. This keeps coming up over and over, and the response is: "We don't want to, shh, go away" https://feedback.azure.com/forums/287593-logic-apps/suggestions/34102060-allow-us-to-stop-pause-an-app-service-plan https://feedback.azure.com/forums/287593-logic-apps/suggesti... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/31339084-azure-webapp-backup-stop-option https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/13550325-ability-to-suspend-app-service-plans-without-charg https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestions/11353470-don-t-charge-for-app-services-in-a-stopped-state https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion... The next best one is that the Portal team absolutely refuses to implement a default region option in the GUI, forcing 100% of their GUI users to click through that unnecessary extra selection every single time. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal/suggestions/6715615-when-selecting-a-location-how-to-save-as-default https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal/sugges... https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback/suggestions/39532030-default-region-of-service-based-on-region-of-resou https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback/su... It's a fun page to dig through, some of the gaps are just so glaring as to beggar belief.

zbowling 6y ago

Mobile got left off the PDF but it's also a part of cloud: Mobile (Firebase) * Cloud Firestore: Document store and sync * Cloud Functions for Firebase: Event-driven serverless applications * Cloud Storage for Firebase: Object storage and serving Crashlytics: Crash reporting and analytics * Firebase A/B Testing: Create A/B test experiments * Firebase App Distribution: Trusted tester early access * Firebase Authentication: Drop-in authentication * Firebase Cloud Messaging: Send device notifications * Firebase Dynamic Links: Link to app content * Firebase Extensions: Pre-packaged development solutions * Firebase Hosting: Web hosting with CDN/SSL * Firebase In-App Messaging: Send in-app contextual messages * Firebase Performance Monitoring: App/web performance monitoring * Firebase Predictions: Predict user targeting * Firebase Realtime Database: Real-time data synchronization * Firebase Remote Config: Remotely configure installed apps * Firebase Test Lab: Mobile testing device farm * Google Analytics for Firebase: Mobile app analytics * ML Kit for Firebase: ML APIs for mobile

musicale 6y ago
I've always liked Firebase. I'm glad it's still around.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Firebase is kind of weird. It's like a Cloud in a Cloud.
  - sa46 6y ago
    I figured the characterization is Firebase is a PaaS (similar to Heroku) where Google Cloud is IaaS.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      Not exactly. Yes, I would probably characterize Firebase as a PaaS, but Google Cloud is much more than just IaaS, as it includes some PaaS components, like App Engine. I would say the general idea behind Firebase is that it is designed to build fully functional applications without any additional components. E.g. you could serve your static web app using Firebase Hosting, manage users with Firebase Auth, use Firestore for data storage (the syncing features of Firestore are truly amazing if you're not familiar with them), and tie things together with Cloud Functions. Also, note that while Firebase was originally pretty heavily focused on mobile, especially native mobile, most of their services work great on the web regardless. The other thing about Firebase (referencing the previous comment about it being a little weird as a "Cloud in a Cloud"), is that it essentially exists on top of GCP. For example, a Firebase Project is really a GCP project under the covers, Cloud Functions for Firebase are really some syntactic sugar on top of GCP functions, etc. While that can be a little confusing at first, it can provide some great value. We have apps where most of our backend is in GCP (e.g. running Node in App Engine Flexible, using Cloud SQL Postgres for our DB, using Cloud PubSub topics for our eventing system, etc.) but then we use Firebase Auth for our user authentication, Firebase Hosting to serve our React app, etc. Yes, I'm a definite Firebase fan boy, but that's because I feel like I can be so productive with it, without needing to worry much about underlying infrastructure, while still being easy to integrate with the horsepower of GCP.

duxup 6y ago

Now I actually want to look at some of these, I didn't know what some of these were / existed ... best marketing ever.

jariel 6y ago

If you need to publish this you have a product management problem. Arguably, some of these things are features not products, and should not be branded. The level of complexity is overwhelming, especially for the decreasing marginal returns to effort for most companies for most of these services, I suggest that G and AWS need to take a new approach here.

dash2 6y ago
This. It reminded me of the Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators, another "advert" that really isn't: https://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/ https://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

follower 6y ago

It's Not Killed Yet

udev 6y ago

Conveniently on black background for easy printing!

jtylr 6y ago
Light version here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words/master/Poster-lowres.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregsramblings/google-clou...

meddlepal 6y ago

What's the use case for something like "VMWare on Google Compute" is it just a API shim to translate VMWare API calls to GCE for companies that are trying to lift and shift to the cloud?

callesgg 6y ago
Yeah. Pretty much.
mrtrustor 6y ago
GCVE is not an API shim, it's an actual VMWare environment. And yes, it's mainly used for lift and shift.
longcommonname 6y ago
We use it, I'm not on the team that uses it. Basically a lift and shift of our backup data center which came with all sorts of improvements. It's quite a bit more expensive, the projects that it runs in cost more than the rest of our cloud costs in total. But the man hours we've done to set up those other cloud systems (Terraform) are much more costly.
lode 6y ago
It's a full managed (bare metal) VMware environment. Basically you get a dedicated cluster of vSphere hosts, with VSAN storage. Some use cases are: migrating to cloud (for all kinds of reasons, like not wanting to invest in own datacenters and HW anymore) without having to refactor applications, hybrid applications where the front end lives in Google Cloud but the backend requires a more 'traditional' environment, using the cloud for DR, ... Similar offerings exist at other hyperscalers: * Amazon: VMware Cloud on AWS - https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws * Azure: Azure VMware Solution - https://cloud.vmware.com/azure-vmware-solution https://cloud.vmware.com/azure-vmware-solution * IBM: IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions - https://cloud.vmware.com/ibm-cloud https://cloud.vmware.com/ibm-cloud * Oracle: Oracle Cloud VMware Solution https://cloud.vmware.com/oracle-cloud https://cloud.vmware.com/oracle-cloud * Alicloud: Alibaba Cloud VMware Solution https://www.alibabacloud.com/press-room/vmware-based-cloud-tech-now-available-on-alibaba-cloud https://www.alibabacloud.com/press-room/vmware-based-cloud-t... [Disclaimer: I work at VMware]

azhenley 6y ago

Can I get this for AWS?

jabo 6y ago

I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share: There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this just a HN crowd concern) and if so, are there steps being taken to address this perception head on? [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

mrtrustor 6y ago
When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-deutsche-bank-agree-to-10-year-alliance-including-cloud https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-de... (Google Cloud employee here)
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  That actually doesn't mean anything to me when I personally have had to deal with the shut off of many, many Google products and your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.
  - yesbabyyes 6y ago
    > your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way. Is that really true? I don't have a lot of experience with Firebase, just notifications and analytics, but working with Cognito and Amplify one- two years ago was like a bad joke, more similar to a fledgling startup than a well-rounded offering. It rather seems to me that a lot of organisations are moving to GCP; BigQuery and its integrations with other Google products seems like a killer app, and GKE is seen as the better choice for hosted Kubernetes. I'm still a fan of Red Hat's OpenShift, but I'm actually surprised how well Google seems to be managing their {S,P,I}aaS offerings and strategy in this space.

ssijak 6y ago

There are some which are explained in more than 4 words.

andrewprock 6y ago

This looks like the kind of documentation I see in code: int x; // variable x stores ints

Clewza313 6y ago
This is a point in GCP's favor, since it generally has sane product names. By comparison, to quote some recent Corey Quinn snark, AWS has Lookout for Equipment, Trainium, Glue Elastic Views and SageMaker Data Wrangler.

ss64 6y ago

I'm trying to figure out what the different colour headings mean. Perhaps green means they are keeping it, red means 'scheduled for retirement' and orange is 'we arent sure yet'.

simonw 6y ago

I tried searching with Ctrl+F and it didn't work because it's an image - but there's a searchable version of it here: https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words

senectus1 6y ago

is there one of these for Azure?

Anther 6y ago

Here’s one for all of them: Not going to last.

rrdharan 6y ago

Missed opportunity: Bigtable -> Big Table

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

imwillofficial 6y ago

Anyone have this for AWS? I think it’s a great idea.

irrational 6y ago

Does anyone know of a place where the cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are shown side by side? For instance, what are AWS Lambdas called in Azure and Google Cloud?

lultimouomo 6y ago

> petabyte-scale, low-latency, non-relational That's glaringly cheating.

decafbad 6y ago

Fire everyone in marketing department.

nobrains 6y ago

vpc data constraints migrate VMs to GKE containers cloud API gateway dynamic web maps managed service mesh Yeah, I will need a "Google Cloud products in 4 words or less" in 32 words or less, for some cases. On serious note, I also think it will be good for them, if they mention the 4 word explanation as a sub-title where ever they mention the name. Also applies to AWS.

collyw 6y ago

Couldn't they have put it in HTML?