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Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a

Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.

varelse 4y ago
Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Wrong Amit. You are thinking about the google search Amit. That’s a different google exec.
  - varelse 4y ago
    [dead]
mike_d 4y ago
Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon-reveals-its-most-profitable-business/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        > is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.
        yazaddaruvala 4y ago
        It is not secret. There is an internal spreadsheet that documents all the prices. Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
        nerdbert 4y ago
        How could that work? Don't managers have budgets? Do they get drugged and blindfolded while their departments' AWS costs are deducted every month?
    - jahewson 4y ago
      > While Amazon did not disclose the operating income generated from their ad business, it is almost certainly bigger than the income generated by AWS Not exactly making a strong case.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - abledon 4y ago
      heres a sankey diagram of q3 FY 2022 for Amazon...https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES. (from https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1 https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1) Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    Someone can still win a race to the bottom. Look at Walmart a generation ago in retail.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Scale up staff? That’s not the cloud business at all. It’s scale up infrastructure and services independently of staff, 100%. Source: I was there
  - mike_d 4y ago
    Nope. Major accounts require tons of dedicated technical resources and hand holding. You might not have been directly involved, but the people side of Cloud is scaling out of control right now - even during "hiring freeze" and layoffs.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Those are all marginally profitable staff billed through post sales. Consulting business sides of tech companies shouldn’t be considered part of the core footprint as they’re profit centers based on staff scale. The core product itself is designed to scale independently of people, because the marginal person doesn’t increase profits while the marginal unit of infrastructure. Sources, I was directly involved. Edit: my experience is with aws not gcp. Gcp is a bit of a non entity in enterprise cloud.
    - bushbaba 4y ago
      It’s a bit of both. Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”. Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise. Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year. However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    AWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling. The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
    - Nzen 4y ago
      Miscapitalized url, should be [0]. However, the page is mostly metadata pointing at a 2 hour youtube video [1]. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk
      - deanCommie 4y ago
        Thanks for fixing! Mobile autocorrect fail. It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
- derefr 4y ago
  What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That just does not describe google. If you look at their published systems papers, particularly the borg traces and the B4 SDN, their hardware runs essentially flat out 24x7. They don’t need to backfill diurnal or annual capacity
  - scarface74 4y ago
    This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure. What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity? Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS. They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
      - scarface74 4y ago
        I guess I should disclose that I work at AWS. But it’s publicly well documented how the infrastructure of AWS came to be. Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over. If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
    - 4y ago
- klodolph 4y ago
  IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it). Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    Google doesn't have the ability to speak with a customer at ALL. If there is a problem, basically the only recourse you have is to flail about on HN, Reddit or Twitter and hope that you are noticed by a random Google employee who feels sympathy for your plight and decides to try and help you. The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only. This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support. I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
    - johngalt_ 4y ago
      Once I had an issue with a Google App Store (I paid for some app expensive subscription but did not get access) payment and got a pretty quick and efficient customer support. They were very polite, checked the issue, explained what happened, and offered some solution. Perharps they provide better support in my country due to customer protection laws or I just got lucky.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      Google Ads has full fledged customer service. I’m tempted to mention everyone’s favorite saying here, but won’t :)

Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.

varelse 4y ago

Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.

bushbaba 4y ago
Wrong Amit. You are thinking about the google search Amit. That’s a different google exec.
- varelse 4y ago
  [dead]

mike_d 4y ago

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

RhodesianHunter 4y ago
You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.
- mike_d 4y ago
  Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon-reveals-its-most-profitable-business/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.
      - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
        It is not secret. There is an internal spreadsheet that documents all the prices. Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
      - nerdbert 4y ago
        How could that work? Don't managers have budgets? Do they get drugged and blindfolded while their departments' AWS costs are deducted every month?
  - jahewson 4y ago
    > While Amazon did not disclose the operating income generated from their ad business, it is almost certainly bigger than the income generated by AWS Not exactly making a strong case.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - abledon 4y ago
    heres a sankey diagram of q3 FY 2022 for Amazon...https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES https://imgur.com/a/OupE8ES. (from https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1 https://www.appeconomyinsights.com/p/amazon-day-1) Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  Someone can still win a race to the bottom. Look at Walmart a generation ago in retail.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Scale up staff? That’s not the cloud business at all. It’s scale up infrastructure and services independently of staff, 100%. Source: I was there
- mike_d 4y ago
  Nope. Major accounts require tons of dedicated technical resources and hand holding. You might not have been directly involved, but the people side of Cloud is scaling out of control right now - even during "hiring freeze" and layoffs.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Those are all marginally profitable staff billed through post sales. Consulting business sides of tech companies shouldn’t be considered part of the core footprint as they’re profit centers based on staff scale. The core product itself is designed to scale independently of people, because the marginal person doesn’t increase profits while the marginal unit of infrastructure. Sources, I was directly involved. Edit: my experience is with aws not gcp. Gcp is a bit of a non entity in enterprise cloud.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    It’s a bit of both. Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”. Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise. Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year. However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
ethbr0 4y ago
Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  AWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling. The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
  - Nzen 4y ago
    Miscapitalized url, should be [0]. However, the page is mostly metadata pointing at a 2 hour youtube video [1]. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk
    - deanCommie 4y ago
      Thanks for fixing! Mobile autocorrect fail. It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
derefr 4y ago
What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That just does not describe google. If you look at their published systems papers, particularly the borg traces and the B4 SDN, their hardware runs essentially flat out 24x7. They don’t need to backfill diurnal or annual capacity
- scarface74 4y ago
  This is a completely false take. AWS was built from the ground up as separate infrastructure. What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity? Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS. They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I guess I should disclose that I work at AWS. But it’s publicly well documented how the infrastructure of AWS came to be. Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over. If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
  - 4y ago
klodolph 4y ago
IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it). Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Google doesn't have the ability to speak with a customer at ALL. If there is a problem, basically the only recourse you have is to flail about on HN, Reddit or Twitter and hope that you are noticed by a random Google employee who feels sympathy for your plight and decides to try and help you. The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only. This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support. I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
  - johngalt_ 4y ago
    Once I had an issue with a Google App Store (I paid for some app expensive subscription but did not get access) payment and got a pretty quick and efficient customer support. They were very polite, checked the issue, explained what happened, and offered some solution. Perharps they provide better support in my country due to customer protection laws or I just got lucky.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Google Ads has full fledged customer service. I’m tempted to mention everyone’s favorite saying here, but won’t :)