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I 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),

by dekhn 3y ago

I 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 ago
There is no way to disentangle TI from gcp
- andybak 3y ago
  TI?
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Technical 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 ago
  Is that because GCP runs on Google infra and (most?) GCP services are rebranded versions of internal Google services?
  - bluedevilzn 3y ago
    lol only if Google would do things that made sense in anyway.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Honestly, they should have spun off TI into its own company even before cloud! you could call it "ursco"
CharlieDigital 3y ago
It's a shame because Firebase is such a good product for startups. Better than Amplify on AWS. But some of these moves have me a bit nervous having built on top of Firebase.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Is there any official guidance for how a company/product can migrate away from Firebase and onto self-hosted infrastructure - or something akin to “decomposing” a Firebase system so it can be incrementally-migrated to self-hosting? I know open-source reimpls of Firebase exist, but those aren’t official - and they represent mirgration risks. (At least Microsoft put the “Migrate to SQL Server…” wizard in MS Access - why won’t Google do the same?) I’m asking, because I am genuinely interested in using Firebase for prototyping, RAD, and whatnot - but I don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket, especially not a basket that I can’t defenestrate.
  - andrewfong 3y ago
    I think this is Supabase's whole schtick, right? It's an open source, optionally self hosted Firebase alternative.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Right, but Supabase isn't Google.
eitally 3y ago
I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cloud commercialized from other parts of Google/Alphabet over the years, and regardless of all the organizational duplication, fiefdoms and chaos that accompanied having three Cloud CEOs in six years, I think the commercial interest via Google's "innovation story" and One Google pitches created a lot of value. As a third place laggard until TK was hired, Google Cloud didn't really have much of interest to offer beyond the legacy internal data products (BigTable, BQ, Spanner) and GKE/Anthos, so having things like Google Maps, several Verily products, a few things that emerged from Brain/RMI, Google Health, etc made a real difference. That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.

by dekhn 3y ago

lokar 3y ago

There is no way to disentangle TI from gcp

andybak 3y ago
TI?
- dekhn 3y ago
  Technical 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 ago
Is that because GCP runs on Google infra and (most?) GCP services are rebranded versions of internal Google services?
- bluedevilzn 3y ago
  lol only if Google would do things that made sense in anyway.
dekhn 3y ago
Honestly, they should have spun off TI into its own company even before cloud! you could call it "ursco"

CharlieDigital 3y ago

It's a shame because Firebase is such a good product for startups. Better than Amplify on AWS. But some of these moves have me a bit nervous having built on top of Firebase.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Is there any official guidance for how a company/product can migrate away from Firebase and onto self-hosted infrastructure - or something akin to “decomposing” a Firebase system so it can be incrementally-migrated to self-hosting? I know open-source reimpls of Firebase exist, but those aren’t official - and they represent mirgration risks. (At least Microsoft put the “Migrate to SQL Server…” wizard in MS Access - why won’t Google do the same?) I’m asking, because I am genuinely interested in using Firebase for prototyping, RAD, and whatnot - but I don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket, especially not a basket that I can’t defenestrate.
- andrewfong 3y ago
  I think this is Supabase's whole schtick, right? It's an open source, optionally self hosted Firebase alternative.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Right, but Supabase isn't Google.

eitally 3y ago

I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cloud commercialized from other parts of Google/Alphabet over the years, and regardless of all the organizational duplication, fiefdoms and chaos that accompanied having three Cloud CEOs in six years, I think the commercial interest via Google's "innovation story" and One Google pitches created a lot of value. As a third place laggard until TK was hired, Google Cloud didn't really have much of interest to offer beyond the legacy internal data products (BigTable, BQ, Spanner) and GKE/Anthos, so having things like Google Maps, several Verily products, a few things that emerged from Brain/RMI, Google Health, etc made a real difference. That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.