6 ms·

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

by jnwatson 6y ago

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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mrvenkman 6y ago
  Ditto! Sometimes I wonder if the one largest skillsets of becoming an AWS “engineer” is learning to memorise the service names and how they associate to the service offered!
- cwyers 6y ago
  I would love to see a version of this for AWS.
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.

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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mrvenkman 6y ago
Ditto! Sometimes I wonder if the one largest skillsets of becoming an AWS “engineer” is learning to memorise the service names and how they associate to the service offered!
cwyers 6y ago
I would love to see a version of this for AWS.

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.