7 ms·

Why Google despite having Borg and know-how so early wasn't 1st to the Cloud? or bigger threat to AWS/Azure?

jthrowsitaway 5y ago
Google's advertising business is really profitable so anything else is secondary. Amazon came at it from a business angle. They had a ton of spare resources that they only needed once in a while and figured out a way to make use of them.
- randomsilence 5y ago
  >They had a ton of spare resources Is this true? There was the story about the resources they need for Christmas shopping that went unused for the rest of the year. But recently somebody mentioned here (I don't remember where) that AWS was a separate business and that Amazon itself initially didn't use any resources from AWS.
  - FranGro78 5y ago
    That’s correct, the multi year project was known internally as MAWS - Move to AWS.
  - dastbe 5y ago
    building a public cloud is more or less a rebuild of any infrastructure you currently have. it would be just unwise for a company to build their private cloud with the same trade offs as public cloud. so while there’s the ideal state of running amazon on a large multi tenant cloud, there was absolutely no safe and reasonable path to making that happen by extending the existing infra. it would’ve also hampered aws by forcing them to focus way too large way too early.
- pid-1 5y ago
  amazon.com also was really profitable when AWS was launched. IDK, at this point I think we can just agree Google is bad at diversifying. The day their ad business dies, they're done.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    It was profitable, but nothing like Google’s margins. It was still just a glorified Walmart with delivery (i.e. not much of a moat).
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    The fear that they were plateauing was a major motivator. Google doesn’t really face that.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That could take a ton of time to die off and they could still pivot. But they're the least diversified, after Facebook, agreed.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Amazon.com wasn’t really profitable. They ran at low margins for years. In 2006, their profit was like 500m against 10B in revenue.
    - jethro_tell 5y ago
      Because they were using all profit to build out EC2, fulfilment centers and fullfilment tech. It wasn't that there wasn't profit because the margins were low, there wasn't profit because they were pouring it all into different verticals and building moats. So yeah they weren't profitable but they weren't just scraping by either. I think that's one of those things that people miss when they compare a not-so-profitable startup to Amazon. The size, scale, and huge number of product markets that Amazon plays in is really pretty astounding for a company that is only 25 years old.
- nevir 5y ago
  > They had a ton of spare resources that they only needed once in a while and figured out a way to make use of them. Not actually the case. AWS was a completely independent stack (from hardware on up) - we couldn't use it internally for quite some time (years); and even then, only in a limited fashion (e.g. only S3 for some time)
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Bingo. There are two facts you need to understand Google's relationship with GCP. Cloud margins are the worst margins of anything at Google, so if there has to be a choice on where to spend money, it can only go to Cloud begrudgingly, or as part of some long game. Second thing you need to know is Google's internal workloads are way, way bigger than you are imagining. So if you see a headline that Google invested $100 billion in datacenters, don't imagine that all, most, or even a lot of that went toward GCP capacity. They spend that money on search, advertising, and letting an AI play ten million years of StarCraft.
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
They didn't realise it was a high margin business until AWS numbers were reported separately. A lot of people used to think that Amazon.com was subsidising AWS. Financials from other VPS providers suggested this to be the case.
- ec109685 5y ago
  GCP has been in the cloud business since 2008, two years after aws launched. They clearly were in a position to predict AWS’s profit margins before AWS publicized them given they were competing for same customers.
  - jakupovic 5y ago
    I remember when GCP launched, we had an all hands meeting for all of AWS, which all fit in a big conference room, less than 100 people. People thought now that Google got in the business that was it. The leadership, Andy Jassy, assured everyone that our jobs were safe and we could get back to work so to say. Seems funny now, but at the time AWS was S3 and EC2 and google was ahead it seemed.
    - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      When was this? 2012?
      - jakupovic 5y ago
        2008 when GCP launched.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    Compute Engine was announced at Google I/O 2012. GA in 2013 Google app engine was definitely NOT competing with AWS. They were not selling to enterprises.
sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
Google is poor at support, web hosting/cloud is as much about support as it is technology
- hackandtrip 5y ago
  In my little experience, although GCP docs leaves a lot to be desired, the support was always very thorough and fast to answer, even for not critical/emergency situations.
  - sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
    They have improved a lot recently
  - pm90 5y ago
    One of the frustrating thing with their docs is that they keep changing them without versioning (last time I checked). So it’s easy to feel like you’re being gaslighted because assumptions you made on the basis of the docs could have changed and then you look stupid. AWS being the dominant player means that if they make any silent changes there will be a SO/GitHub issue/HN thread about it. But with GCP without their pricy professional tier support you can feel a bit unsure and lost all the time about your understanding of it.
- paulluuk 5y ago
  To be honest, AWS cloud support isn't that fantastic either. Responses to tickets usually come in 48 hours, if not more. I don't know about you, but in 48 hours I've usually already built a workaround and moved on to other projects. Not saying that AWS support is worse or even equal to GCP support, but just commenting that cloud support in general feels pretty useless and an afterthought at best. And let's not even get started on the horrible, awful UI in AWS console.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    pay for enterprise support, response is within minutes
emodendroket 5y ago
One theory I’ve heard (I think from Yegge?) is that Google’s internal tooling is so good at dealing with breaking changes that they’re too cavalier about introducing them.
- dastbe 5y ago
  if you have the right company setup, headcount, and culture then you can absolutely build a world where teams can be allowed to force “perfection” over time, even with amazing levels of automation. i think the interesting thing is that while you’d think that is the ideal everyone should strive for, the reality is that’s inapplicable or detrimental to run most businesses that way.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > build a world where teams can be allowed to force “perfection” over time, even with amazing levels of automation. I'm confused, did you mean "without" instead of "with"? Also: > i think the interesting thing is that while you’d think that is the ideal everyone should strive for, the reality is that’s inapplicable or detrimental to run most businesses that way. Why would you say that is?
    - dastbe 5y ago
      i meant with. google has built some really great tools for minimizing toil when pushing major changes across a codebase. even then, there’s a nontrivial overhead that is borne across the company. > Why would you say that is? many/most businesses don’t have the margins/scale/time to focus on it. in a lot of businesses (amazons included) the goal for the business is to try as many things as fast as possible and scale that which works and abandon what fails. the goal of infrastructure there is to get out of the way and enable the layers above to build things as naively and simply as possible with little to no churn.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I think we see a good reason here: normal people don't think "this API is so beautiful," they think "these clowns are making me do a migration yet again."
singron 5y ago
Also, Google's infrastructure is so vertically integrated that it's not obvious how to offer it others. E.g. Borg assigns 1 IP to each machine, which means every pod-equivalent has to listen on a dynamically allocated port, so Google eschewed DNS in favor of a system that more easily assigned dynamic IP:port pairs without relying on TTLs (BNS/Chubby). Google also decoupled storage from compute and had a bunch of custom databases to run in that paradigm (GFS/CFS/BigTable).
- deanCommie 5y ago
  The mistake also reveals the constrained imagination: Google could only conceive of offering what they had internally to others, struggled, and continues to struggle. Amazon didn't try - they just knew that they were good at building high scale distributed systems, and thought they could build services for others. That's what S3 and SQS and EC2 were - built from scratch, not trying to figure out how to externalize the internals.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    GCP was built from scratch as well.
    - singron 5y ago
      It's more complicated, but I think everything is at least a substantial layer on top of an internal offering. E.g. GCE runs VMs in Borg using the same physical infrastructure used for other services, but GCE has its own API and virtualized networking on top that hides Borg and was not (at the time) used for any internal services.
- ra7 5y ago
  I’ve heard Google considers (considered?) their infrastructure prowess as a secret sauce. Could it be that they didn’t want anyone else to benefit from it? They had years of headstart on most infrastructure technology that’s ubiquitous now, but didn’t bother to offer it to others. Perhaps they thought only Google should benefit from it, while Amazon saw a business opportunity with AWS.
deanCommie 5y ago
Hubris. Steve Yegge talks about it on his podcast: https://youtu.be/9v4z46Ea35Q https://youtu.be/9v4z46Ea35Q Amazon actually works backwards like they say - they ask customers what they want, and build it. Google thinks they're smarter than everyone else so they can't comprehend that developers out there in the world want different things than the developers inside Google. You can see this permeate even in this documentary, which is ostensibly about a success - when Google actually did launch something that developers really liked - K8S. They didn't start from developer needs or wants. They started by noticing AWS was eating their lunch, and wanting to compete with them, but realizing they couldn't win by doing it directly.
- ec109685 5y ago
  To be fair, K8s has caught on even outside of GCP. Also, while Amazon does work backwards from customers, part of them working backwards is how to translate customer requirements into a successful business. Amazon is doing this as a for profit company, not spending money on altruistic initiatives. E.g. purely for the benefit of customers, having AWS services be multi-cloud and open source or reducing egress cost would be best.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Because K8s, while commonly deployed on the cloud, is more of a "local cloud operating system" that you use to marshall a bunch of resources into "cloud" (and finalizing TPRs into CRDs really made it shine). To the point that k8s is base operating system for... Chick-Fil-A restaurants, deployed locally, controlling the industrial kitchen hardware.
ec109685 5y ago
Borg was good enough that google engineers didn’t have any desire to use GCP and thus most of the company was not dogfooding its own product. Additionally, the “two pizza teams” style of Amazon’s development was more amenable to the AWS model of development where each piece of Amazon could run effectively in AWS [1]. Google is structured differently, and it’s only recently that both AWS and GCP could even approach running the largest systems from a company like Google. [1] Yes I know that AWS wasn’t built specifically for Amazon engineers, but the fact that it could accommodate them over time has been a boon for their cloud, and it gives enterprises confidence that of AWS’s strategic importance and desire to make it world class. There isn’t a large hidden layer of services that Amazon has access to that the general public doesn’t.
servytor 5y ago
It is because Amazon dog-fooded their own technology stack. This forced them to have a better interface to their infrastructure, which in turn made it easy to open to the public. Google on the other hand, hid behind their own complexity and let engineers feel stupid for not knowing Borg like the back of their hand.
debuggerpk 5y ago
I think Google did .. App Engine came around 2008.

Google's advertising business is really profitable so anything else is secondary. Amazon came at it from a business angle. They had a ton of spare resources that they only needed once in a while and figured out a way to make use of them.

randomsilence 5y ago
>They had a ton of spare resources Is this true? There was the story about the resources they need for Christmas shopping that went unused for the rest of the year. But recently somebody mentioned here (I don't remember where) that AWS was a separate business and that Amazon itself initially didn't use any resources from AWS.
- FranGro78 5y ago
  That’s correct, the multi year project was known internally as MAWS - Move to AWS.
- dastbe 5y ago
  building a public cloud is more or less a rebuild of any infrastructure you currently have. it would be just unwise for a company to build their private cloud with the same trade offs as public cloud. so while there’s the ideal state of running amazon on a large multi tenant cloud, there was absolutely no safe and reasonable path to making that happen by extending the existing infra. it would’ve also hampered aws by forcing them to focus way too large way too early.
pid-1 5y ago
amazon.com also was really profitable when AWS was launched. IDK, at this point I think we can just agree Google is bad at diversifying. The day their ad business dies, they're done.
- kortilla 5y ago
  It was profitable, but nothing like Google’s margins. It was still just a glorified Walmart with delivery (i.e. not much of a moat).
- emodendroket 5y ago
  The fear that they were plateauing was a major motivator. Google doesn’t really face that.
- oblio 5y ago
  That could take a ton of time to die off and they could still pivot. But they're the least diversified, after Facebook, agreed.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Amazon.com wasn’t really profitable. They ran at low margins for years. In 2006, their profit was like 500m against 10B in revenue.
  - jethro_tell 5y ago
    Because they were using all profit to build out EC2, fulfilment centers and fullfilment tech. It wasn't that there wasn't profit because the margins were low, there wasn't profit because they were pouring it all into different verticals and building moats. So yeah they weren't profitable but they weren't just scraping by either. I think that's one of those things that people miss when they compare a not-so-profitable startup to Amazon. The size, scale, and huge number of product markets that Amazon plays in is really pretty astounding for a company that is only 25 years old.
nevir 5y ago
> They had a ton of spare resources that they only needed once in a while and figured out a way to make use of them. Not actually the case. AWS was a completely independent stack (from hardware on up) - we couldn't use it internally for quite some time (years); and even then, only in a limited fashion (e.g. only S3 for some time)
jeffbee 5y ago
Bingo. There are two facts you need to understand Google's relationship with GCP. Cloud margins are the worst margins of anything at Google, so if there has to be a choice on where to spend money, it can only go to Cloud begrudgingly, or as part of some long game. Second thing you need to know is Google's internal workloads are way, way bigger than you are imagining. So if you see a headline that Google invested $100 billion in datacenters, don't imagine that all, most, or even a lot of that went toward GCP capacity. They spend that money on search, advertising, and letting an AI play ten million years of StarCraft.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

They didn't realise it was a high margin business until AWS numbers were reported separately. A lot of people used to think that Amazon.com was subsidising AWS. Financials from other VPS providers suggested this to be the case.

ec109685 5y ago
GCP has been in the cloud business since 2008, two years after aws launched. They clearly were in a position to predict AWS’s profit margins before AWS publicized them given they were competing for same customers.
- jakupovic 5y ago
  I remember when GCP launched, we had an all hands meeting for all of AWS, which all fit in a big conference room, less than 100 people. People thought now that Google got in the business that was it. The leadership, Andy Jassy, assured everyone that our jobs were safe and we could get back to work so to say. Seems funny now, but at the time AWS was S3 and EC2 and google was ahead it seemed.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    When was this? 2012?
    - jakupovic 5y ago
      2008 when GCP launched.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  Compute Engine was announced at Google I/O 2012. GA in 2013 Google app engine was definitely NOT competing with AWS. They were not selling to enterprises.

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago

Google is poor at support, web hosting/cloud is as much about support as it is technology

hackandtrip 5y ago
In my little experience, although GCP docs leaves a lot to be desired, the support was always very thorough and fast to answer, even for not critical/emergency situations.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  They have improved a lot recently
- pm90 5y ago
  One of the frustrating thing with their docs is that they keep changing them without versioning (last time I checked). So it’s easy to feel like you’re being gaslighted because assumptions you made on the basis of the docs could have changed and then you look stupid. AWS being the dominant player means that if they make any silent changes there will be a SO/GitHub issue/HN thread about it. But with GCP without their pricy professional tier support you can feel a bit unsure and lost all the time about your understanding of it.
paulluuk 5y ago
To be honest, AWS cloud support isn't that fantastic either. Responses to tickets usually come in 48 hours, if not more. I don't know about you, but in 48 hours I've usually already built a workaround and moved on to other projects. Not saying that AWS support is worse or even equal to GCP support, but just commenting that cloud support in general feels pretty useless and an afterthought at best. And let's not even get started on the horrible, awful UI in AWS console.
- grogenaut 5y ago
  pay for enterprise support, response is within minutes

emodendroket 5y ago

One theory I’ve heard (I think from Yegge?) is that Google’s internal tooling is so good at dealing with breaking changes that they’re too cavalier about introducing them.

dastbe 5y ago
if you have the right company setup, headcount, and culture then you can absolutely build a world where teams can be allowed to force “perfection” over time, even with amazing levels of automation. i think the interesting thing is that while you’d think that is the ideal everyone should strive for, the reality is that’s inapplicable or detrimental to run most businesses that way.
- oblio 5y ago
  > build a world where teams can be allowed to force “perfection” over time, even with amazing levels of automation. I'm confused, did you mean "without" instead of "with"? Also: > i think the interesting thing is that while you’d think that is the ideal everyone should strive for, the reality is that’s inapplicable or detrimental to run most businesses that way. Why would you say that is?
  - dastbe 5y ago
    i meant with. google has built some really great tools for minimizing toil when pushing major changes across a codebase. even then, there’s a nontrivial overhead that is borne across the company. > Why would you say that is? many/most businesses don’t have the margins/scale/time to focus on it. in a lot of businesses (amazons included) the goal for the business is to try as many things as fast as possible and scale that which works and abandon what fails. the goal of infrastructure there is to get out of the way and enable the layers above to build things as naively and simply as possible with little to no churn.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I think we see a good reason here: normal people don't think "this API is so beautiful," they think "these clowns are making me do a migration yet again."

singron 5y ago

Also, Google's infrastructure is so vertically integrated that it's not obvious how to offer it others. E.g. Borg assigns 1 IP to each machine, which means every pod-equivalent has to listen on a dynamically allocated port, so Google eschewed DNS in favor of a system that more easily assigned dynamic IP:port pairs without relying on TTLs (BNS/Chubby). Google also decoupled storage from compute and had a bunch of custom databases to run in that paradigm (GFS/CFS/BigTable).

deanCommie 5y ago
The mistake also reveals the constrained imagination: Google could only conceive of offering what they had internally to others, struggled, and continues to struggle. Amazon didn't try - they just knew that they were good at building high scale distributed systems, and thought they could build services for others. That's what S3 and SQS and EC2 were - built from scratch, not trying to figure out how to externalize the internals.
- ec109685 5y ago
  GCP was built from scratch as well.
  - singron 5y ago
    It's more complicated, but I think everything is at least a substantial layer on top of an internal offering. E.g. GCE runs VMs in Borg using the same physical infrastructure used for other services, but GCE has its own API and virtualized networking on top that hides Borg and was not (at the time) used for any internal services.
ra7 5y ago
I’ve heard Google considers (considered?) their infrastructure prowess as a secret sauce. Could it be that they didn’t want anyone else to benefit from it? They had years of headstart on most infrastructure technology that’s ubiquitous now, but didn’t bother to offer it to others. Perhaps they thought only Google should benefit from it, while Amazon saw a business opportunity with AWS.

deanCommie 5y ago

Hubris. Steve Yegge talks about it on his podcast: https://youtu.be/9v4z46Ea35Q https://youtu.be/9v4z46Ea35Q Amazon actually works backwards like they say - they ask customers what they want, and build it. Google thinks they're smarter than everyone else so they can't comprehend that developers out there in the world want different things than the developers inside Google. You can see this permeate even in this documentary, which is ostensibly about a success - when Google actually did launch something that developers really liked - K8S. They didn't start from developer needs or wants. They started by noticing AWS was eating their lunch, and wanting to compete with them, but realizing they couldn't win by doing it directly.

ec109685 5y ago
To be fair, K8s has caught on even outside of GCP. Also, while Amazon does work backwards from customers, part of them working backwards is how to translate customer requirements into a successful business. Amazon is doing this as a for profit company, not spending money on altruistic initiatives. E.g. purely for the benefit of customers, having AWS services be multi-cloud and open source or reducing egress cost would be best.
- p_l 5y ago
  Because K8s, while commonly deployed on the cloud, is more of a "local cloud operating system" that you use to marshall a bunch of resources into "cloud" (and finalizing TPRs into CRDs really made it shine). To the point that k8s is base operating system for... Chick-Fil-A restaurants, deployed locally, controlling the industrial kitchen hardware.

ec109685 5y ago

Borg was good enough that google engineers didn’t have any desire to use GCP and thus most of the company was not dogfooding its own product. Additionally, the “two pizza teams” style of Amazon’s development was more amenable to the AWS model of development where each piece of Amazon could run effectively in AWS [1]. Google is structured differently, and it’s only recently that both AWS and GCP could even approach running the largest systems from a company like Google. [1] Yes I know that AWS wasn’t built specifically for Amazon engineers, but the fact that it could accommodate them over time has been a boon for their cloud, and it gives enterprises confidence that of AWS’s strategic importance and desire to make it world class. There isn’t a large hidden layer of services that Amazon has access to that the general public doesn’t.

servytor 5y ago

It is because Amazon dog-fooded their own technology stack. This forced them to have a better interface to their infrastructure, which in turn made it easy to open to the public. Google on the other hand, hid behind their own complexity and let engineers feel stupid for not knowing Borg like the back of their hand.

debuggerpk 5y ago

I think Google did .. App Engine came around 2008.