9 ms·
Gergely Orosz: on the risk of Google shutting down Google Cloud Platform
- jeffgreco 3y agoMeh. Not seeing the parallels between Domains and Cloud. Like comparing a Google Doodle’s ARR with Domains.
- lolinder 3y agoDid you miss that Google Cloud Domains is going down with this sale? It's not about drawing parallels, they're literally shutting down a core part of GCP. > Just to be clear: this is not just the consumer product (with no Google Cloud connection) going away. Google Cloud Domains is deprecated and discontinued as part of this sale / shutdown. > Google told employees internally: but not it’s customers. Yet.
- dekhn 3y agoI'm going to wait for the actual announcement from Google on that.
- lolinder 3y agoGergely is pretty trustworthy when it comes to his internal sources. He's got a lot of connections and uses them very responsibly.
- throwaway1777 3y agoGergely is kind of a clickbait farmer now. He had his moment last year.
- lolinder 3y agoThat hasn't been my sense from following his (free) newsletter for a while, but ymmv.
- dekhn 3y agoSure, he's had good scoops from time to time. I've also seen him claim stuff that never panned out. The reason I'm waiting is that if/when Google confirms Cloud DNS (the nameserver functionality) is going away I can have a more productive discussion with my google cloud rep once things are announced officially.
- ncallaway 3y agoHow is it even possible that this can be an unanswered question? How has there been so little and incomplete communication from Google about this?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aussiedude 3y agoGoogle really annoyed early adopters of Google Apps (now workspace) with the legacy to paid migration, then oh no you don't have to pay here's 300 free user licences nonsense. I can totally see how CIOs and other tech savvy leaders in business really look at anything they use Google related and wonder to themselves if it might be wise to look at alternatives. I agree with lot of comments in that Twitter thread.
- gregwebs 3y agoThe cloud compute market is probably 1000x? bigger than the domain market right now and will continue to widen that gap since it is on a different growth curve. It's certainly possible that Google or AWS will be forced to divest their cloud business into a separate entity or sell it by shareholders or regulators, but it's not going anywhere and it might work a lot better with more focused leadership.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 3y agoPeople like to think all the C-level decisions in giant companies are based on lots of data and pricing, etc. It’s much more based on “which decision will shut that guy on the board up and not destroy the company”
- packetlost 3y agoIs this coming from experience of running a Fortune 10 company, or are you just speculating?
- ncallaway 3y agoSeems like a wild jump from “giant company” to “Fortune 10”
- packetlost 3y agoGoogle is a Fortune 10 company. There's no reason to assume that GPs experience generalizes to Google.
- scarface_74 3y agoGoogle’s founders still own a controlling interest in the company. They don’t have to listen to the board.
- hiddencost 3y agoSure. Rephrase what the parent said to "VP" and you'll get back to Google scale. Larry and Sergey are _gone_. They are wholly uninvolved.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoSergei and Larry long seem to have given up caring what happened to their baby.
- bombcar 3y agoI was referring to companies making decisions on which cloud to go with. If a board member is google hostile and asks questions about it all the time, there is pressure to switch away from GCP just to get the board to stop asking the question. Similar things were seen when companies all announced blockchain strategies so they could report to the board that they’re on top of it.
- bloopernova 3y agohttps://nitter.net/GergelyOrosz/status/1670796482188910592 https://nitter.net/GergelyOrosz/status/1670796482188910592 Nitter link for the lazy twitter hater.
- quadrifoliate 3y agoI am a lazy Twitter hater. Thank you!
- Freedom2 3y agoThank you, this is much appreciated!
- easton 3y agoInteresting in that thread that they mention that Google Cloud’s DNS service uses Google Domains NS records, and they haven’t said whether that is going away or not. I only use Google Cloud for personal stuff, but I know that I would cry if AWS suddenly said “there’s no longer a way to get public DNS names for your services through our tooling” at work.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoCloud DNS is just nameservers. Google Domains is a registrar. Two very different things. There is no reason for Cloud DNS to be affected by Domains going away.
- dekhn 3y agoI really wish they had spun off Cloud as an alphabet company with Kurian at the head (he is CEO of Google Cloud, which isn't a CEO because Sundar is his boss), and transferred all the Cloud employees to the spinoff. (I'm a xoogler, worked in cloud and launched actual products in it, and I strongly prefer AWS. I still don't think Cloud- specifically, GCE and GCS- will go away but I do expect them to continue trimming all the "barely profitable" services)
- lokar 3y agoThere is no way to disentangle TI from gcp
- andybak 3y agoTI?
- dekhn 3y agoTechnical Infrastructure- historically, a division inside google which was responsible for the software and hardware infrastructure that runs google. Search, ads, cloud, youtube, etc all ran (run?) on top of TI software and hardware. TI existed before google cloud did and was (is) basically its own cloud with a service API, with borg, google clusters, networking, storage, databases, etc. Historically it was run by Urs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle). At some point, TI and cloud got mixed up together to get more TI people to work on Cloud products. Many cloud products represent either TI services or variations/ports/reimplementations of TI services. TI was absolutely enormous and it was key to google's early and continued scaling of compute and storage. I don't know if it still exists within Google or got renamed, or what.
- ra7 3y agoIs that because GCP runs on Google infra and (most?) GCP services are rebranded versions of internal Google services?
- 3y ago
- astrea 3y agoThis was a hell of a way for me to learn that my Google Domain account will be transitioned to SquareSpace. An email would've been nice (unless I missed it).
- macintux 3y agoGruber spotted this delightful bit of surrealism, in case you’re using Gmail. > Turns out that even though I used an @gmail.com address to register the domain, every single email from Google Domains was being flagged as spam. So Google’s own email service considers all emails from Google’s own domain name service to be spam. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/16/google-domains https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/16/google-domains
- indemnity 3y agoNope, no emails have been sent. There is just a small banner when you into the domains.google admin console. Hoping Cloudflare move faster on .dev and .app so I can migrate before the inevitable fuckups happen with the transition to Squarespace.
- mabbo 3y agoIt's interesting to compare Google's strategy with AWS's. AWS SimpleDB has been a dead product for years now. Afaik, nobody is developing it, nobody is advertising it, and I believe it's not been launched in any new regions in ages. Even internally, when I worked there, it was not a product you should use for anything. Yet it's still supported. Customers are still using it. Somewhere, there is a team in AWS keeping the lights on. Because AWS knows that customer trust is more valuable than whatever it costs to keep that product alive. Google does not understand that.
- bushbaba 3y agoGoogle’s CI/CD and internal monorepo ecosystem building against latest have a high cost to maintain legacy code. You can’t just let something rot with minimal maitenance at google. While fine for a customer tech ecosystem facing security threats, it’s really not ideal for enterprise offerings.
- jeffbee 3y agoThat's a weird take. Is that your first-hand experience? My personal experience was that google3 code can be on autopilot for decades and nobody will break it, because the testing system keeps people from breaking it, and the large-scale changes infrastructure won't break any tests.
- throwaway1777 3y agoI think you missed the point. The cost is how hard it is to make changes because of not breaking all those tests on legacy code.
- tdeck 3y agoThere's only one version of each library allowed for essentially the whole company, including internal libraries. So if someone wants to upgrade it they may need to update the old codebase's call sites and get those changes approved.
- 3y ago
- jedberg 3y agoAs far as I know, AWS has never shut down a service. They've stopped offering some services in new accounts, but if you already had it you still do (like SimpleDB). Microsoft and Oracle are both well known for extremely long term support and creating easy migration paths. I would only ever use GCP as an offsite backup or use some of their AI tools as part of toolchain that either operates on a copy of the data or lands its output on another cloud. In other words I would always make sure to design in a way where I could exit Google in 30 days or less.
- asylteltine 3y agoThey shut down ec2 classic, PV instances too. Not recent, but it’s something. Nothing compared to the thousands of products google killed that tons of people used. I personally use two Google products - gmail and maps. That’s it. I don’t trust them to do ANYTHING else.
- jedberg 3y ago> They shut down ec2 classic, PV instances too That's a fair callout. But also they provided a one year migration timeline, let you keep using it if you already were, and gave you tools to easily migrate what you had left. So I'd say if anything they increased trust by showing how to do it right. And arguably that's a feature, not a product.
- my123 3y agoPV instances still work on EC2 today. They are only available on older regions however. Paravirt AMIs do and will keep working for a very long time to come.
- laurels-marts 3y agoAs long as they can mine your gmail and maps to sell better ads or improve their other services they will survive.
- scarface_74 3y agoUsing BitTorrent on S3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549 EC2 Classic networking support https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-heres-how-to-prepare/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-her...
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoGoogle is completely rudderless. Sundar has completely trashed Google's once impeccable reputation and killed all innovation. I really don't understand why they have't fired him.
- zmmmmm 3y agoIt is quite fascinating what a reputation bonfire they've held over the last 10 years. I keep wondering when their reckoning will come but they really do seem to be oblivious to it even while they struggle to generate meaningful revenue outside of their ad business. It's kind of shocking to me but I was internally debating whether I should spend my time learning how to develop on top of Bard or OpenAI and the whole thought process was around unreliability of Google to support the platform. Just think for a second about that, the 20-year well established software giant vs startup from 2 years ago and all the negative was on Google's side in that equation.
- andrewxdiamond 3y agoGoogle was doomed from the start. Their focus on engineering first and customers second always held them back. The only reason Google has been successful is they get so much funding from Ads that everything else can float. Every single product Google shipped was supported by the never dry ads-fountain.
- andrewstuart 3y agoThis is correct. Bad customer service was in googles DNA from day one.
- pas 3y agomaybe. initially it seemed like they can pull off the impossible and just make it work for everyone. (providing adequate self-service tools, nice undo/redo features, keeping scope very focused, working a lot of behind the scenes magic.) of course then complexity hit, and the paranoia of fake ad impressions ate the whole company.
- 3y ago
- kodah 3y agoI didn't even know they sold Google Domains. How does this kind of transfer work if I'm not a Square Space customer? Do I get a free transfer out of I don't want to use them?
- InvaderFizz 3y agoI imagine it will initially be migrated to SquareSpace hosted services for your interaction that you then use your Google account to oauth into, so a pretty seamless transfer from the end-user perspective. Likely the total transition will take over a year to complete. You will probably get a notification a few months after the transfer of control that the registrar name is changing and you dont need to do anything but make sure your contact info is up to date. At some point, probably 2-3 years down the line, domains.google will cease redirecting to SquareSpace domains.
- faangsticle 3y agoPresumably SquareSpace is going to want money at some point.
- pinewurst 3y agoI can totally imagine a spinoff either to Oracle or IBM. Possibly Cisco as an outlier. BTW I have to deal with Google Cloud as a “partner” and they’re a major pain in the ass - everything we do is mandated as custom, we have to come to them, etc - compared with their competitors who actually feel like partners. We’re always one Google reorg away from throwing away our efforts to be replaced with another goat rodeo.
- kyrra 3y agoA spin-off would not be technically possible without effectively rewriting GCP.
- Bajeezus 3y agoThe Google Distributed Cloud Hosted project is a non-borg port of GCP that could be run by anyone.
- re-thc 3y ago> I can totally imagine a spinoff either to Oracle or IBM. Possibly Cisco as an outlier. Higher chance of it being sold off to a rich SAAS wanting to get in like a Salesforce type. IBM started by buying Softlayer and other clouds so yes no chance.
- paulgb 3y agoMore than the shutdown itself, the lack of any communications from Google has been frustrating. It gives the sense that this is a complete shitshow internally. Nobody seems to have an official answer on the fate of Cloud Domains, which is marketed as a separate product but runs on the same infrastructure (Gergely’s thread says insiders have been told that it is also going away).
- nexus7556 3y agoI’m curious what information you’re missing?
- paulgb 3y agoCan you confirm that Google Cloud Domains is being sunset?
- shepherdjerred 3y agoThey never sent an email, or at least I never received one for any of my 6 domains
- zmmmmm 3y agoActually particularly shocking that they've sold Google Domains to SquareSpace. I couldn't think of a less aligned company. They deal with novice end users who want to make web sites with minimum technical knowledge but give them premium support. Meanwhile Google Cloud's ideal customers (generally) are engineering heavy, people who want to automate everything with APIs and manage seamless automated operations, but are happy with support from a python script. The best I can think is that maybe Google did that analysis and found that all the customers for Google Domains were high maintenance novice users so it made sense to sell it off to a business designed to support them?
- morpheuskafka 3y agoI think the answer to all of this is that Google did not see Google Domains as part of the GCP umbrella. Unlike AWS Route 53, it had its on website separate from GCP. What that website did do was sell and bill Google Workspace. SquareSpace is a reseller of Google Workspace (for people who use SquareSpace for their company homepage), and will not only be taking over the domains, but for those who bought Workspace within Domains, they will become their new reseller.
- re-thc 3y ago> Google did not see Google Domains as part of the GCP umbrella That's terrible. Not every domain is on GCP Cloud domains and falls back to Google domains by default. It's quite obvious even as a user.
- jrpt 3y agoGoogle Cloud Platform has its own domains product called Cloud Domains. https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/overview Google has had a big problem for over a decade with having multiple overlapping products, leading to wasted effort and customer confusion. It also leads to a bunch of extra work when one product is rolled into another or shut down. It's unclear to me why they didn't migrate everyone over to GCP Cloud Domains. I'm also not sure that most customers really care if they're using Google Domains vs another registrar vs GCP Cloud Domains.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 3y agoThe timeline of Google’s domain registration business, according to Wikipedia: * 2005: Google became a domain name registrar. * 2015: Google Domains was publicly launched under a beta test mode. * March 2022: Google announced that Google Domains was officially out of beta. * June 2023: Squarespace concluded an agreement to purchase the Google Domains business. Exiting beta in 2022 after seven years suggests Google planned to get serious about Google Domains. What happened between 2022 and 2023 that made them decide to kill it? I guess when a hobby becomes a business, the bar to keep it going is a lot higher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoIt looks like they decided in January 2022 to sell it. You don't get a higher price by selling a beta product.
- zarzavat 3y agoIf that turns out to be true that’s extremely short sighted. The whole point of the beta designation is to indicate “this might go away” to customers. They will lose more from burning their customers than they would have gained. Unlike other google products, cloud is something that 1) they have paying customers, 2) it is competitive, 3) Google is not the market leader. So they don’t have any room to be fucking around with customers.
- cachvico 3y agoBeta can also just mean "there might be bugs".
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoI'm not disagreeing, but so far I have never seen evidence that Google cares about any of its customers. And they don't really have to as long as they're the incumbent market leader in a ridiculously profitable industry (advertising). Eventually Google Cloud will die and Azure will buy it for a song. It may take 10 years but it's going to happen.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoWe've all known this was coming for years. Buckle up, kiddos. Those of us who have moved data centers over a weekend know what's coming :(
- pentagrama 3y agoI think Google is good putting ads on front of people and get money by advertisers, but awful by selling stuff directly to consumers. So in general the brand image is very damaged for people who pay for things. The opposite of Apple who people who pays for things is his cash cow and they take care much more on that. And what get Google's brand with only being good with ads? Love from advertisers and skepticism by consumers.
- dboreham 3y agoGoogle just isn't a serious services vendor. They're infected by some MBA virus where they attended a class in biz school that said you focus on your core competency and divest of everything non-core. Of course this is often nonsense because it turns out some of the non-core things were required in order to have the core products. Reminds me of an episode long ago when I worked in hardware design: someone in biz planning completed their MBA and made a spreadsheet ranking all our SKUs by profitability. They recommended shit-canning several products, including the custom cables required to plug in our most profitable product.
- rajeshp1986 3y agoIt is a mixture of MBA virus combined with Staff engineers who abandon older projects and move to newer shiny things to look good on promo packets.
- irrational 3y agoI work for a Fortune 100 company. When we were deciding which cloud platform to settle on years ago, Google Cloud Platform was thrown out first because of this very concern. I would not be shocked to hear tomorrow that they are shutting it down. This is Google. I wouldn't even be surprised that Google Maps of Google Docs are being shut down. Search is the only one that would surprise me.
- joezydeco 3y agoI'm a Workspace customer, hosting my family's domain for mail. Some of us use sheets or docs or drive. Where do I flee to from here? Protonmail? Office365? I'm willing to spend $5-$10/mo per user. Apps would be nice but mail is critical. I'll miss Google's spam filtering but so be it. I know Workspace isn't dead yet but I'm not going to wait until it is. I'm done. My DNS has always been somewhere else which will make this a lot easier.
- redrove 3y agoFastmail can host organizations as well.
- shaklee3 3y agoMight be useful to remove the name of the person since I don't think many people know who this is.
- andrewstuart 3y agoGoogle will spin out YouTube, Maps, Chrome and Gmail into a separate company. It will shut down Google Cloud. All that will remain is Google search/ads. The AI opportunity has already been fumbled and will soon be completely dropped. And Sundar Pichai, who has destroyed everything except googles advertising cash firehose, will stay there and continue to run the empty shell of googles potential. And like now, no-one will care.
- xtracto 3y agoOoh so Google is killing the Route53 competitor? A part of their paid Google Cloud Service? I'll never trust Google cloud with any production infra.
- roboyoshi 3y agoDNS is still possible with Google Cloud DNS, but you cannot purchase domains.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoI moved all of my domains to Cloudflare Domains last night. It was pretty easy, and I believe I fit everything in the free tier. One less thing to be reliant on Google for, I guess.
- pvillano 3y agoIs there a thing for a uniform API across multiple cloud service providers? Is that even a good idea?
- silentguy 3y agoI think Terraform provides multi cloud provisioning. Not an expert on this but I think it's good enough for common services across different clouds.
- blagie 3y agoOne of my life lessons: Never do business with Google. It's served me well. I've seen so many businesses torched to the ground by doing business with Google. That's not an indictment of Google. There are things specific companies are good for and bad for. Google is bad at any sort of B2B, partnerships, or similar.
- debbiedowner 3y agoDoesn't Google cloud have 10s of thousands of employees? Isn't that too big to sell?