14 ms·

Yet another business Google bails on. Add that to the pile. Gee wonder why Google Cloud is getting smashed by AWS and Azure—maybe because nobody trusts Google t

by DLA 3y ago

Yet another business Google bails on. Add that to the pile. Gee wonder why Google Cloud is getting smashed by AWS and Azure—maybe because nobody trusts Google to not flake out on that business or key products within it. They need some management changes!

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Google seems to have bailed on Google Cloud. You should try and find something in the docs these days. When I first started using GAE 10 years ago it really felt like somebody lovingly crafted a nice solution to a complex problem. It's not that anymore.
- cardy31 3y ago
  The company I work for is on GCP and I live in fear of seeing the “Google to shut down GCP by $now + ~2 years” headline.
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    I'm living that now. I will no longer be able to push changes to my Python 2.7 apps as of January. Instead of porting to Python 3, I'm porting away from Google.
    - afavour 3y ago
      I’ll blame Google for a lot but in this instance I think they’re right. Python 2.7 is EOL, they’d be foolish to keep running it indefinitely on the servers they’re responsible for.
    - delecti 3y ago
      Python 2.7 released 14 years ago. About 8.5 years ago (5+ years later), it was announced that Python 2.7 would be supported until 2020. You had over 5 years to prepare for it, and then Google supported it for another 3 years beyond even that generous warning.
      - katbyte 3y ago
        So? Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works and has been mostly untouched for years in eol/maintenance. you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”? It’s far cheaper, potentially millions cheaper, to just change clouds/providers and find a way to continue on 2.7.
        aniforprez 3y ago
        > Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works I've migrated 200k LoC python 2.7 codebases to python 3. It certainly wasn't painless but tools like black, flake8, 2to3 and other stuff helped. It's not impossible and can be executed in 2-4 weeks > you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated” 2.7 is not just deprecated. It's dead. There's no more updates. It's not "millions cheaper" to not migrate. I posit you'd save a LOT of money from the sheer performance improvements and bug fixes from migrating than anything else. In my own case we saved a few hundred dollars a month from not having to spawn new containers and EC2 instances
        jay_kyburz 3y ago
        To be clear, I am upgrading from Python 2.7, but while I do it I'm not building in a way that requires any code from Google and will make sure the app is platform agnostic. It doesn't really matter how many years of notice they gave me, I just haven't had time to do it.
        b112 3y ago
        Having any sort of code on python 2.7, means you don't give a rat's ass about security. It also immediately means your code should be assumed to have back doors, vulnerabilities, because python 2.7 almost certainly does! This is what happens, when no one is maintaining software. Security is more important that anything, certainly than having time or not to update your code. You're 100% in the wrong here, and Google is 100% in the right, and I hate Google more than spammers, more than pretty much any other company there is. They're not wrong here, and it hurts me to support their stance. Fix your stuff. Stop blaming others. I doesn't matter why you're in the situation you're in, you're wrong to be there. No matter what.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      You seem to be confusing AppEngine with Google Cloud. Former is a tiny part of the latter.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  Interesting, I first used GCP maybe 7 years ago and really liked it. Two years ago I came back to it for a year and couldn’t put my finger on it, but it seemed quite a bit worse. I wasn’t sure if it was a case of rose tinted glasses. Like you mentioned, the docs were really shoddy when I needed them. Certain conventions felt half baked compared to AWS, and I don’t even like AWS to begin with. Overall it seemed like the integration of services was much worse than AWS, though. Administration of different services is like visiting separate worlds at times, like the teams might not be on the same page regarding design and technical language. The other possibility is I’m just a little dumb and don’t pick up on the patterns — I’m pretty open to that. It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked and at one point, that was GCP.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked I'm curious what it is about Azure that puts you off.
    - jaxn 3y ago
      I’m on Azure, it’s still Microsoft. I like a lot of Microsoft stuff these days that plays nice with open source dev tools. Azure doesn’t get in the way of that, but my defaults are not their defaults. I’m perfectly happy with AKS. Their Postgres product is great (formerly citus). But at the the end of the day, they still want to sell Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc. That’s a choice I will probably never make, so it just feels like a mismatch.
      - popinman322 3y ago
        Active Directory is actually pretty good I think. Having worked with both Azure and AWS, AzureAD makes AWS IAM permissions feel half baked. Granted my experience was inside Azure so we had the benefit of vertical integration.
        steve_adams_86 3y ago
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  They still offer startups money to switch. Last year they offered my company 8 figures to go from AWS to GCP. Of course I said no because… that’s insane and useless. You have to wonder how many companies they are paying to use their subpar tech.
  - Masema 3y ago
    8 figures of what, doll hairs? Seriously, 10s of millions wasn't worth switching?
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      It would have taken a solid year of work and all of my DevOps resources, for what? The customers won’t know or care. If I wanted to burn $5 million in salary and a year of feature development I’d rather figure out an on-prem solution, because at least someone might want that. The “pay to switch cloud” model doesn’t make sense.
      - b112 3y ago
        If you have time, please hit me up on my email via my profile. I'd just like to ask a couple of questions. Thanks
  - thebytefairy 3y ago
    Hackernews loves to hate google, but I find gcp way more user friendly and simpler to understand and just get things running than on aws.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  Given how much effort they’re putting into vertexai I doubt they’re bailing on cloud. I wager it’s just expensive to run a registry. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they’re really selling (the TLDs), rather than the registrar.
  - petercooper 3y ago
    It appears to be the opposite to me. They appear to be selling the public facing registrar. Their wholesale registry, which appears to hold the TLDs, is Google Registry: https://www.registry.google/ https://www.registry.google/ I suspect Google finds it a lot easier to run a registry with a few enterprise clients than to deal with flesh and blood customers owning domains.
ricardonunez 3y ago
I’m still surprised why Fi has not been dropped even with many customer support issues.
- rootw0rm 3y ago
  I tried out Fi when right when it came out, was pretty happy with it. fell on hard times, homeless here and there, so i paused my account because I was broke. I was able to unpause/repause my account every 6 months for a couple years and keep my phone number without paying a dime. It's a small thing, but I'm still pretty grateful I was able to keep my phone number for free like that.
- schemescape 3y ago
  Any bets on when Google Voice will be shutdown?
  - forgotmysn 3y ago
    wasn't it already nerfed?
    - ricardonunez 3y ago
      I still use it.
- meragrin_ 3y ago
  > I’m still surprised why Fi has not been dropped It is probably something they already had internally that they figured they could monetize easily. They develop Android and RCS. Operating their own MVNO could very well allow them to simplify some things. > many customer support issues. Huh? I've used them for years. Never had issues which were not directly related to T-Mobile's network. There were no issues the few times I interacted with support.
  - ricardonunez 3y ago
    I don't have issues with the network, but if you order a phone from Google, specially with a deal, there's a chance you may run into issues.
TX81Z 3y ago
This makes zero sense, you could previously buy a domain, email hosting, and a web host in a single shopping cart more or less.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Yeah this one is actually stunning. Does anyone know why Google is doing this? Like have they released their explanation?
  - hackernudes 3y ago
    Anti-trust hedging?
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    100% sure the decision was political.
    - wildrhythms 3y ago
      What does this mean?
      - noSyncCloud 3y ago
        Absolutely nothing, but it's provocative. Gets the people going.
        TX81Z 3y ago
        It means business decisions are based on who is most skillful at the corporate game, not what is best for users or the business.
        CydeWeys 3y ago
        What does "skillful at the corporate game" have to do specifically with Google Domains being canceled?
pcurve 3y ago
They've killed off almost 300. They have ~100 left. https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/ What do you think will go next? I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year. 1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years) 2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain 3. Keep 4. Scholar 5. Tilt Brush 6. Google Lens 7. Google Groups 8. Google Drawings
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  > They have ~100 left. Yet.
- dingusdew 3y ago
  Exposure Notifications is probably already dead. It's dead in Washington state, which is also where it was originally developed alongside Google. If it's not being used in the state that it was developed in initially, it's doubtfully being used nationwide. Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass. Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Exposure Notifications was a great try by Google and Apple. If it weren't a thing, most big government would develop more privacy invasive contact tracing app. It seems that it wasn't worked well, but still a great try.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      The German "Corona Warn App" (CWA) is pretty good from a privacy POV. It works along the same lines as the Google/Apple ones I think (trading tokens over Bluetooth, then publishing a list of "infected" tokens when you submit a positive test result, risk severity being based on how many tokens you match, i.e. how long you were in the same space). The difference is that it isn't tied to any American corporation. Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.
hackmehoff33 3y ago
This! Google has a history and present strategy of making reactive moves to please shareholders. I’m shocked the masses trust them with email. When can we go back to decentralized self-hosted?
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  I saw the writing on the wall 5 years ago and switched to ProtonMail with a custom domain bc that lock-in is a real pain.
- rootw0rm 3y ago
  i haven't self-hosted email in the last decade, but last time i did...self hosting email sucked. every aspect of it was a pain in the ass.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Every mass who tried that is a botnet.
- metalforever 3y ago
  I got the account in like 2005. It's not that I trust them, its just that it's hard to move off.
AlbertCory 3y ago
That's where my domain comes from. Unless Squarespace suddenly turns them all over to the public or raises the price by 10x, this isn't quite the same as losing all your data in a cancelled product.
- eeyan 3y ago
  Not 10x, but Sqaurespace domains are already expensive - range from $20 to $70.
irrational 3y ago
I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago we were trying to decide what cloud platform to go with. That is the number one reason Google cloud was the first one crossed off the list. No one trusted it to not be closed down tomorrow.
spacebanana7 3y ago
It also forecloses an entire set of DNS related cloud products that could exist in the future like Cloudflare style DNS proxies, AWS like aliases and DNS load balancing. I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.

by DLA 3y ago

jay_kyburz 3y ago

Google seems to have bailed on Google Cloud. You should try and find something in the docs these days. When I first started using GAE 10 years ago it really felt like somebody lovingly crafted a nice solution to a complex problem. It's not that anymore.

cardy31 3y ago
The company I work for is on GCP and I live in fear of seeing the “Google to shut down GCP by $now + ~2 years” headline.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I'm living that now. I will no longer be able to push changes to my Python 2.7 apps as of January. Instead of porting to Python 3, I'm porting away from Google.
  - afavour 3y ago
    I’ll blame Google for a lot but in this instance I think they’re right. Python 2.7 is EOL, they’d be foolish to keep running it indefinitely on the servers they’re responsible for.
  - delecti 3y ago
    Python 2.7 released 14 years ago. About 8.5 years ago (5+ years later), it was announced that Python 2.7 would be supported until 2020. You had over 5 years to prepare for it, and then Google supported it for another 3 years beyond even that generous warning.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      So? Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works and has been mostly untouched for years in eol/maintenance. you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”? It’s far cheaper, potentially millions cheaper, to just change clouds/providers and find a way to continue on 2.7.
      - aniforprez 3y ago
        > Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works I've migrated 200k LoC python 2.7 codebases to python 3. It certainly wasn't painless but tools like black, flake8, 2to3 and other stuff helped. It's not impossible and can be executed in 2-4 weeks > you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated” 2.7 is not just deprecated. It's dead. There's no more updates. It's not "millions cheaper" to not migrate. I posit you'd save a LOT of money from the sheer performance improvements and bug fixes from migrating than anything else. In my own case we saved a few hundred dollars a month from not having to spawn new containers and EC2 instances
        jay_kyburz 3y ago
        To be clear, I am upgrading from Python 2.7, but while I do it I'm not building in a way that requires any code from Google and will make sure the app is platform agnostic. It doesn't really matter how many years of notice they gave me, I just haven't had time to do it.
        b112 3y ago
        Having any sort of code on python 2.7, means you don't give a rat's ass about security. It also immediately means your code should be assumed to have back doors, vulnerabilities, because python 2.7 almost certainly does! This is what happens, when no one is maintaining software. Security is more important that anything, certainly than having time or not to update your code. You're 100% in the wrong here, and Google is 100% in the right, and I hate Google more than spammers, more than pretty much any other company there is. They're not wrong here, and it hurts me to support their stance. Fix your stuff. Stop blaming others. I doesn't matter why you're in the situation you're in, you're wrong to be there. No matter what.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    You seem to be confusing AppEngine with Google Cloud. Former is a tiny part of the latter.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
Interesting, I first used GCP maybe 7 years ago and really liked it. Two years ago I came back to it for a year and couldn’t put my finger on it, but it seemed quite a bit worse. I wasn’t sure if it was a case of rose tinted glasses. Like you mentioned, the docs were really shoddy when I needed them. Certain conventions felt half baked compared to AWS, and I don’t even like AWS to begin with. Overall it seemed like the integration of services was much worse than AWS, though. Administration of different services is like visiting separate worlds at times, like the teams might not be on the same page regarding design and technical language. The other possibility is I’m just a little dumb and don’t pick up on the patterns — I’m pretty open to that. It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked and at one point, that was GCP.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked I'm curious what it is about Azure that puts you off.
  - jaxn 3y ago
    I’m on Azure, it’s still Microsoft. I like a lot of Microsoft stuff these days that plays nice with open source dev tools. Azure doesn’t get in the way of that, but my defaults are not their defaults. I’m perfectly happy with AKS. Their Postgres product is great (formerly citus). But at the the end of the day, they still want to sell Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc. That’s a choice I will probably never make, so it just feels like a mismatch.
    - popinman322 3y ago
      Active Directory is actually pretty good I think. Having worked with both Azure and AWS, AzureAD makes AWS IAM permissions feel half baked. Granted my experience was inside Azure so we had the benefit of vertical integration.
      - steve_adams_86 3y ago
monero-xmr 3y ago
They still offer startups money to switch. Last year they offered my company 8 figures to go from AWS to GCP. Of course I said no because… that’s insane and useless. You have to wonder how many companies they are paying to use their subpar tech.
- Masema 3y ago
  8 figures of what, doll hairs? Seriously, 10s of millions wasn't worth switching?
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    It would have taken a solid year of work and all of my DevOps resources, for what? The customers won’t know or care. If I wanted to burn $5 million in salary and a year of feature development I’d rather figure out an on-prem solution, because at least someone might want that. The “pay to switch cloud” model doesn’t make sense.
    - b112 3y ago
      If you have time, please hit me up on my email via my profile. I'd just like to ask a couple of questions. Thanks
- thebytefairy 3y ago
  Hackernews loves to hate google, but I find gcp way more user friendly and simpler to understand and just get things running than on aws.
scrollaway 3y ago
Given how much effort they’re putting into vertexai I doubt they’re bailing on cloud. I wager it’s just expensive to run a registry. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they’re really selling (the TLDs), rather than the registrar.
- petercooper 3y ago
  It appears to be the opposite to me. They appear to be selling the public facing registrar. Their wholesale registry, which appears to hold the TLDs, is Google Registry: https://www.registry.google/ https://www.registry.google/ I suspect Google finds it a lot easier to run a registry with a few enterprise clients than to deal with flesh and blood customers owning domains.

ricardonunez 3y ago

I’m still surprised why Fi has not been dropped even with many customer support issues.

rootw0rm 3y ago
I tried out Fi when right when it came out, was pretty happy with it. fell on hard times, homeless here and there, so i paused my account because I was broke. I was able to unpause/repause my account every 6 months for a couple years and keep my phone number without paying a dime. It's a small thing, but I'm still pretty grateful I was able to keep my phone number for free like that.
schemescape 3y ago
Any bets on when Google Voice will be shutdown?
- forgotmysn 3y ago
  wasn't it already nerfed?
  - ricardonunez 3y ago
    I still use it.
meragrin_ 3y ago
> I’m still surprised why Fi has not been dropped It is probably something they already had internally that they figured they could monetize easily. They develop Android and RCS. Operating their own MVNO could very well allow them to simplify some things. > many customer support issues. Huh? I've used them for years. Never had issues which were not directly related to T-Mobile's network. There were no issues the few times I interacted with support.
- ricardonunez 3y ago
  I don't have issues with the network, but if you order a phone from Google, specially with a deal, there's a chance you may run into issues.

TX81Z 3y ago

This makes zero sense, you could previously buy a domain, email hosting, and a web host in a single shopping cart more or less.

CSMastermind 3y ago
Yeah this one is actually stunning. Does anyone know why Google is doing this? Like have they released their explanation?
- hackernudes 3y ago
  Anti-trust hedging?
- TX81Z 3y ago
  100% sure the decision was political.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    What does this mean?
    - noSyncCloud 3y ago
      Absolutely nothing, but it's provocative. Gets the people going.
      - TX81Z 3y ago
        It means business decisions are based on who is most skillful at the corporate game, not what is best for users or the business.
        CydeWeys 3y ago
        What does "skillful at the corporate game" have to do specifically with Google Domains being canceled?

pcurve 3y ago

They've killed off almost 300. They have ~100 left. https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/ What do you think will go next? I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year. 1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years) 2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain 3. Keep 4. Scholar 5. Tilt Brush 6. Google Lens 7. Google Groups 8. Google Drawings

DeathArrow 3y ago
> They have ~100 left. Yet.
dingusdew 3y ago
Exposure Notifications is probably already dead. It's dead in Washington state, which is also where it was originally developed alongside Google. If it's not being used in the state that it was developed in initially, it's doubtfully being used nationwide. Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass. Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Exposure Notifications was a great try by Google and Apple. If it weren't a thing, most big government would develop more privacy invasive contact tracing app. It seems that it wasn't worked well, but still a great try.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    The German "Corona Warn App" (CWA) is pretty good from a privacy POV. It works along the same lines as the Google/Apple ones I think (trading tokens over Bluetooth, then publishing a list of "infected" tokens when you submit a positive test result, risk severity being based on how many tokens you match, i.e. how long you were in the same space). The difference is that it isn't tied to any American corporation. Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.

hackmehoff33 3y ago

This! Google has a history and present strategy of making reactive moves to please shareholders. I’m shocked the masses trust them with email. When can we go back to decentralized self-hosted?

birdyrooster 3y ago
I saw the writing on the wall 5 years ago and switched to ProtonMail with a custom domain bc that lock-in is a real pain.
rootw0rm 3y ago
i haven't self-hosted email in the last decade, but last time i did...self hosting email sucked. every aspect of it was a pain in the ass.
hgsgm 3y ago
Every mass who tried that is a botnet.
metalforever 3y ago
I got the account in like 2005. It's not that I trust them, its just that it's hard to move off.

AlbertCory 3y ago

That's where my domain comes from. Unless Squarespace suddenly turns them all over to the public or raises the price by 10x, this isn't quite the same as losing all your data in a cancelled product.

eeyan 3y ago
Not 10x, but Sqaurespace domains are already expensive - range from $20 to $70.

irrational 3y ago

I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago we were trying to decide what cloud platform to go with. That is the number one reason Google cloud was the first one crossed off the list. No one trusted it to not be closed down tomorrow.

spacebanana7 3y ago

It also forecloses an entire set of DNS related cloud products that could exist in the future like Cloudflare style DNS proxies, AWS like aliases and DNS load balancing. I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.