20 ms·

A year is _crazy short_ for enterprise business, which is where most of cloud growth is right now. It's worse if that component is core to the business in any

A year is _crazy short_ for enterprise business, which is where most of cloud growth is right now. It's worse if that component is core to the business in any way. Think about components you rely on for your service. How long would it take you to stand up or migrate to an alternative. Consider that you've also got all your other business to do too. You can't spent a year just spinning your wheels from a business perspective, while you're migrating stuff between services because your upstream provider decided to stop building something. You've still got to keep growing. If you're lucky, you've got staffing for meeting your business growth needs, but odds are that's barely true. On top of having to migrate, what are your replacement's performance characteristics? Are you replacing it with your own solution instead, and if so how do you operate it, what happens under load, how do you ensure durability? etc. etc. lots and lots of questions and you've got scant 12 months to figure out what you're doing and how to get off it _on top of your existing business needs_. This criticism has been brought up so many times, and yet routinely we still see GCP saying "but we promise to give you a whole year's notice!" as if that's a good thing. (disclaimer: I work for another cloud provider)

kyrra 6y ago
Does any cloud provider provide a blanket "all released features will be supported for X years" to all users without a contract (as part of the terms)? I have never looked into other cloud providers, so I honestly don't know. Also, I'm guessing larger companies could push for certain longer deprecation policies as part of their contracts on certain features. I have no insights here, just assuming from what other people on this thread are saying. (Googler, opinions are my own)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  Well that’s hardly the problem honestly. AWS is surprisingly good at not dropping services or creating long-term deprecation plans. They don’t have to enter into a contract to guarantee the longevity of their services. It’s definitely what makes AWS so trustworthy. Amazon in general is pretty good at supporting both business and consumer services in the long run, even when some of those services are clearly money losing units. That’s because the company is basically designed like a synergistic portfolio where even money-losing businesses have a purpose in the big picture. And that’s where Google fails. It’s very well known how ruthless Google can be at killing business that don’t produce tangible results. The Alphabet re-org clearly showcases that they are playing a game of optimizing the allocation of their assets. That mentality bleeds down. Unfortunately, you can’t run a Cloud Business like that. To Google’s merit, it seems that they are not running their cloud unit with that mentality (I don’t think I have heard about GCP services that shut down). But it’s clear there’s a generalized feeling in the industry that Google can at any point become impatient with GCP, leaving many stranded. For Google to be a distant third in the Cloud game must be pretty hard. This is something that plays to their strengths and yet they are hardly closing the gap. The big difference is that the companies that are winning (Amazon and Microsoft) are willing to lose in some areas to win in others. They excel at that. Google on the other hand seems to have a hard time with that shit...
  - Corrado 6y ago
    > AWS is surprisingly good at not dropping services or creating long-term deprecation plans. Case in point; AWS SimpleDB. SimpleDB hasn't been available on the AWS console for years (since 2015?) but is still accessible through the SDKs and API calls. They don't promote it or even update it (AFAIK) but it's still there and you can still use it. Amazing!
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Yeah, while it's not (AFAIK) a written commitment anywhere, what I've heard is that Amazon hasn't spun down any AWS service that still has any use, just reduced visibility and stopped new work and provided a migration path for those who choose to get off. As long as they don't visibly break it, that provides a reputation that is hard to beat without something much more than one year notice as a binding commitment.
- shandor 6y ago
  I have no idea if any of the others have such promises, but wouldn't you agree that Google kind of stands out from the Three Big cloud providers when looking at the historical rate of service deprecation? It's not an accident that Google is rather (in)famous regarding that, and MS & Amazon are not.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    No. Amazon and Microsoft are equally happy to kill their failed consumer products as Google. And none of them have a high rate of killing their business-focused cloud products. But for whatever reason, when Bezos brags about how making failed products is a core part of the company culture because it shows you’re tajing risks, HN shrugs. When MS kills off billion dollar consumer bets after only a couple of years, HN just goes “lol, why would anyone have used Mixer”. It is a clear double standard that seems to have happened since memes are self-reinforcing.
- CaptainZapp 6y ago
  Probably not. But Google has an absolutely dreadful image to drop products and features at the drop of a hat. Take Microsoft as a counter example, which went through absolute crazy length to provide backward compatibility for their products. Google just doesn't have that credibility on long term commitments to bank your entire enterprise on its products.
  - tharne 6y ago
    This is very true. People forget that enterprises, especially large ones, will take it on the chin in a lot of other areas in exchange for long-term stability. I think this is one of the reasons MS Teams has been so successful, even when there are better apps out there that provide all the same functionality and more.
ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
An example of this is how long it took Amazon to remove oracle, it was only recently - if a non-tech focused enterprise move to gcp and they get a year to move everything to azure/aws that is a killer.
Rule35 6y ago
Disclaimer: So do I. Occupational hazard on HN. A year is crazy short if your job is to architect an ideal solution, but insanely long if your job is to simply migrate your employer onto a roughly equivalent solution. If a cloud customer isn't continuously testing a migration they're naive. General best practice is to have a current best setup using all the first-party services on cloud-provider #1 using all their hosted services, and a fallback on cp#2 that self-hosts the services from cp#1 and uses their built-in services where better. It's what you should already be doing for benchmarking and testing but for a fallback if needed. And once you've got the fallback planned you're free to move the active service around, almost at a whim. Even for a fortune 50 with petabytes of data - if your data isn't already hosted everywhere you're just begging to be wiped out with a simple account problem.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Imagine working for a cloud company and then also saying "If a cloud customer isn't continuously testing a migration they're naive.", not knowing that every user of your software doesn't have time to continuously fiddle with shit that supposedly work correctly at the time.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    > shit that supposedly work correctly at the time. I do love me a well-formed customer query. Yeah, it's supposed to work. I get paid more it if does. But in exceptional circumstances, it won't. And in more exceptional circumstances your alerts will fail too. As an admin what do you do with the 90% of your time that isn't actively fixing something if not planning for how to fix the next thing? We did this years before cloud meant anything other than prepare for floods.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      > As an admin what do you do with the 90% of your time that isn't actively fixing something if not planning for how to fix the next thing? Not every cloud customer has a dedicated admin team, some even don't have any dedicated developer teams. They simply wanted a website done, contracted someone and they uploaded some HTML to a cloud instance. Sure, if you're a large company, it makes sense to have redundancy. If you're running a small company with some esoteric webshop to serve AFK customers, it makes less sense.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Think about components you rely on for your service. How long would it take you to stand up or migrate to an alternative. Architect at a F500 here. It would take us easily 2 years to roll out a solution, get migrated to it, and have it implemented, tested, and signed off. Probably another year (or more) to work out all of the kinks or handle the stuff that wasn't in the initial build (e.g. phase 2 expansions, etc.). There is a reason we do 5 year TCOs, and it's not just cuz of the depreciation schedules. Also the reason we lean to things with 5-, or 10-year maintenance cycles. 1-year notice is not enough, full-stop. Not talking about rolling our own solution here either, this is COTS being deployed in a 99.999% environment in multiple countries.

kyrra 6y ago

Does any cloud provider provide a blanket "all released features will be supported for X years" to all users without a contract (as part of the terms)? I have never looked into other cloud providers, so I honestly don't know. Also, I'm guessing larger companies could push for certain longer deprecation policies as part of their contracts on certain features. I have no insights here, just assuming from what other people on this thread are saying. (Googler, opinions are my own)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whoisjuan 6y ago
Well that’s hardly the problem honestly. AWS is surprisingly good at not dropping services or creating long-term deprecation plans. They don’t have to enter into a contract to guarantee the longevity of their services. It’s definitely what makes AWS so trustworthy. Amazon in general is pretty good at supporting both business and consumer services in the long run, even when some of those services are clearly money losing units. That’s because the company is basically designed like a synergistic portfolio where even money-losing businesses have a purpose in the big picture. And that’s where Google fails. It’s very well known how ruthless Google can be at killing business that don’t produce tangible results. The Alphabet re-org clearly showcases that they are playing a game of optimizing the allocation of their assets. That mentality bleeds down. Unfortunately, you can’t run a Cloud Business like that. To Google’s merit, it seems that they are not running their cloud unit with that mentality (I don’t think I have heard about GCP services that shut down). But it’s clear there’s a generalized feeling in the industry that Google can at any point become impatient with GCP, leaving many stranded. For Google to be a distant third in the Cloud game must be pretty hard. This is something that plays to their strengths and yet they are hardly closing the gap. The big difference is that the companies that are winning (Amazon and Microsoft) are willing to lose in some areas to win in others. They excel at that. Google on the other hand seems to have a hard time with that shit...
- Corrado 6y ago
  > AWS is surprisingly good at not dropping services or creating long-term deprecation plans. Case in point; AWS SimpleDB. SimpleDB hasn't been available on the AWS console for years (since 2015?) but is still accessible through the SDKs and API calls. They don't promote it or even update it (AFAIK) but it's still there and you can still use it. Amazing!
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Yeah, while it's not (AFAIK) a written commitment anywhere, what I've heard is that Amazon hasn't spun down any AWS service that still has any use, just reduced visibility and stopped new work and provided a migration path for those who choose to get off. As long as they don't visibly break it, that provides a reputation that is hard to beat without something much more than one year notice as a binding commitment.
shandor 6y ago
I have no idea if any of the others have such promises, but wouldn't you agree that Google kind of stands out from the Three Big cloud providers when looking at the historical rate of service deprecation? It's not an accident that Google is rather (in)famous regarding that, and MS & Amazon are not.
- jsnell 6y ago
  No. Amazon and Microsoft are equally happy to kill their failed consumer products as Google. And none of them have a high rate of killing their business-focused cloud products. But for whatever reason, when Bezos brags about how making failed products is a core part of the company culture because it shows you’re tajing risks, HN shrugs. When MS kills off billion dollar consumer bets after only a couple of years, HN just goes “lol, why would anyone have used Mixer”. It is a clear double standard that seems to have happened since memes are self-reinforcing.
CaptainZapp 6y ago
Probably not. But Google has an absolutely dreadful image to drop products and features at the drop of a hat. Take Microsoft as a counter example, which went through absolute crazy length to provide backward compatibility for their products. Google just doesn't have that credibility on long term commitments to bank your entire enterprise on its products.
- tharne 6y ago
  This is very true. People forget that enterprises, especially large ones, will take it on the chin in a lot of other areas in exchange for long-term stability. I think this is one of the reasons MS Teams has been so successful, even when there are better apps out there that provide all the same functionality and more.

ed_elliott_asc 6y ago

An example of this is how long it took Amazon to remove oracle, it was only recently - if a non-tech focused enterprise move to gcp and they get a year to move everything to azure/aws that is a killer.

Rule35 6y ago

Disclaimer: So do I. Occupational hazard on HN. A year is crazy short if your job is to architect an ideal solution, but insanely long if your job is to simply migrate your employer onto a roughly equivalent solution. If a cloud customer isn't continuously testing a migration they're naive. General best practice is to have a current best setup using all the first-party services on cloud-provider #1 using all their hosted services, and a fallback on cp#2 that self-hosts the services from cp#1 and uses their built-in services where better. It's what you should already be doing for benchmarking and testing but for a fallback if needed. And once you've got the fallback planned you're free to move the active service around, almost at a whim. Even for a fortune 50 with petabytes of data - if your data isn't already hosted everywhere you're just begging to be wiped out with a simple account problem.

capableweb 6y ago
Imagine working for a cloud company and then also saying "If a cloud customer isn't continuously testing a migration they're naive.", not knowing that every user of your software doesn't have time to continuously fiddle with shit that supposedly work correctly at the time.
- Rule35 6y ago
  > shit that supposedly work correctly at the time. I do love me a well-formed customer query. Yeah, it's supposed to work. I get paid more it if does. But in exceptional circumstances, it won't. And in more exceptional circumstances your alerts will fail too. As an admin what do you do with the 90% of your time that isn't actively fixing something if not planning for how to fix the next thing? We did this years before cloud meant anything other than prepare for floods.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    > As an admin what do you do with the 90% of your time that isn't actively fixing something if not planning for how to fix the next thing? Not every cloud customer has a dedicated admin team, some even don't have any dedicated developer teams. They simply wanted a website done, contracted someone and they uploaded some HTML to a cloud instance. Sure, if you're a large company, it makes sense to have redundancy. If you're running a small company with some esoteric webshop to serve AFK customers, it makes less sense.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

> Think about components you rely on for your service. How long would it take you to stand up or migrate to an alternative. Architect at a F500 here. It would take us easily 2 years to roll out a solution, get migrated to it, and have it implemented, tested, and signed off. Probably another year (or more) to work out all of the kinks or handle the stuff that wasn't in the initial build (e.g. phase 2 expansions, etc.). There is a reason we do 5 year TCOs, and it's not just cuz of the depreciation schedules. Also the reason we lean to things with 5-, or 10-year maintenance cycles. 1-year notice is not enough, full-stop. Not talking about rolling our own solution here either, this is COTS being deployed in a 99.999% environment in multiple countries.