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I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use quite a few google services from youtube, to google workspaces (a paid service) - I have never talked to a Google representative. I have talked to AWS service reps multiple times, I have talked to Amazon reps multiple times. Amazon as a company has real people you can talk to. I don't trust google to not shut down my gcp account because my gmail was connected to some project where I accidentally sent a bunch of spam emails to a test account. And if that did I happen, I feel like I would just get an automated message and a bunch of hoops to jump through before I could talk to a real person.

ajross 3y ago
No interest on engaging on the core issues of trust, except to say my standard bit: HN is a site predicated on the whole idea of embracing risk. Except with this one particular vendor who everyone loves to distrust. Maybe... it's not about risk at all?
- inopinatus 3y ago
  There’s a stark difference between risk that is predicated on your own wits and risk that is mediated entirely through a capricious and aloof supplier with a bit of a reputation for the rug-pull.
- DoctorOW 3y ago
  Generally the phrase is "High risk, high reward." This would be considered a relatively low reward.
  - ajross 3y ago
    Nonetheless the chances of a median HN poster's employer being shived by a rogue Angel or dying to a founder feud are vastly (like, vastly vastly) higher than having Google drop one of their dependencies. And I guess I'd expect the discourse to reflect that. But instead it's the boring tech giant (yes, also my employer, though I work nowhere near cloud) who everyone seems to think is the existential threat? Like I said, I don't think this is about risk at all.
    - gopher_space 3y ago
      It's not that the likelihood is high, it's that it happens at all. It's a worry I won't have if I'm doing business with other vendors. I want to predict behavior and Google has always been a little too hermetic and occult for my taste.
- rfrey 3y ago
  This is a deeply weird take IMO. Nobody "embraces risk" because they have a risk fetish. You take on risk because you believe you can be paid for it, and perhaps you are better equipped to mitigate the risk than the people paying you to take it. There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors, so a rational person would not accept the risk that Google pulls the plug on a product, or some contractor gets banned by Google and gets your whole account frozen, etc. There's no upside. It's not even gambling because there's no "win" possible - it's more like shooting an arrow straight up into the air and hoping it doesn't land on your head.
  - ajross 3y ago
    > There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors The linked article is literally about how Google is better than its competitor though! Obviously some people disagree. If you want to write a nuanced take about risk and benefit, I'm there for it[1]. It's the stunningly absolutist take on something as clearly-not-a-big-deal as a cloud service provider, by people who would otherwise be willing to bet their careers on a job with a good vibe, that seems "deeply weird" to me. [1] Actually I'm not. That's stuff's boring. But I respect that people do it.
mef 3y ago
it does seem like any of Google's support options for paid services have the primary goal of reducing support load on Google, not to solve problems for paying customers
lima 3y ago
I have talked to Google representatives when I had an issue with my personal gmail.com account through Google One. It was fine and they fixed it. Likewise, as a GCP customer, I've always had a real account rep and support I could talk to.
- fooster 3y ago
  Yeah we’ve had one too. Actually no two. Wait three. Actually I’ve lost count. In the 6 years I’ve been using GCP we’ve had a new rep practically every quarter. It’s ridiculous.
bastardoperator 3y ago
I concur. Google doesn't seem to believe in a tangible customer service methodology at all. They go out of their way to remove human interaction at seemingly every level. I don't know if it's a legal strategy or what, but it gives me bad vibes too.
crazygringo 3y ago
I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut down without recourse unless you really are being abusive, and Google's not cancelling the services companies are paying for. (The same goes for the paid tier of Google Workspace.) It's a normal paid B2B relationship with all that usually entails. It's unfortunate that people take their experiences and the stories they hear about the free consumer side, and extrapolate them to assume they're also true about the paid business side. It's understandable, but it's just not the case. And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely, or use that as a justification for choosing one or the other.
- gustavus 3y ago
  > And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely. That's what I thought for a long time about google domains. Yet here we are.
  - thezilch 3y ago
    Google Domains made Google the equivalent of $0 and would teach them nothing about operating their core businesses.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      And it's not being shut down, it's being sold off. There's quite a difference.
cedws 3y ago
GCP has people you can talk to, you just need to bring enough money to the table for them to bother. In other words, the fat cats get support, the rest can suck it.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
You trust AWS? Seriously? Amazon? What gets me is that AWS must have insane turnover with the Amazon stack ranking. The stability of that platform long term concerns me. AWS is a utility at this point. Utilities are boring, conservative, and have people that know their systems and stay there for decades.
irrational 3y ago
I work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.
- rossjudson 3y ago
  That speaks volumes about the quality of decision-making at your fortune 100 company, and about their ability to do due diligence.
  - snoman 3y ago
    No it doesn’t.
  - silenced_trope 3y ago
    What do you mean specifically? It seems like all the OP is saying is that the company evaluated alternatives (Azure & AWS) whose cloud products are "first class" citizens of the business whereas with Google the first class product is search, advertising, Android (a couple other things but you get the idea). It doesn't seem too far out of left field that Google would flounder with all it's cloud products being phased out in favor of some other new product they've made or acquired.
- gerash 3y ago
  I was expecting rigorous analysis in terms of cost of services and the complexity/simplicity of offering, reliability figures, etc. but this fortune 100 company went with feelings
  - raincole 3y ago
    This is why starting your comment with "I work for a fortune 100 company" adds zero credibility to what's following. It might adds negative credibility on HN.
  - ww520 3y ago
next_xibalba 3y ago
> The group [Pichai, Page, and Porat] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said. [1] That they’ve actually discussed shutting it down in the recent past lends plausibility to this risk. In 2019, they set 2023 as a deadline for moving into the #2 spot ahead of Azure. Obviously, they’ve not gotten anywhere near that. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
- foobarian 3y ago
  Wow. Imagine top level execs at Ford discussing, but eventually dismissing--the idea of leaving the automobile market entirely. Their hearts really aren't in it as much as with AWS.
  - ahepp 3y ago
    Ford did exit the sedan market But I generally agree with what you’re saying
  - akira2501 3y ago
    Google is an advertising company. They're planning an exit in a non-core market. It shouldn't be a surprise. The weight of "traditional google" has held zero value to me in measuring their cloud product. Google's cloud products are built around the needs of advertisers. A large and slow backend that's meant to churn ungodly amounts of data. Amazon is a retail company their cloud products are build around this need. They have a highly segmented and mostly nimble backend that's mean to build unwieldy amounts of API.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Ford, ironically, is an example of a company that has recently exited a huge business segment - they no longer make sedans. They now exclusively make SUVs and trucks. It is largely thought of as a pretty good move on their part. Google probably should spin off GCP rather than killing it, but it's not a terrible idea to divest from a failing arm of a business. Google (like Intel) just does it too early.
steveBK123 3y ago
Isn't one of the foundational problems of GCP that it's not really core to Google themselves? AWS is basically the same infra Amazon runs their own business on, opened up for the world to use. Azure is the backbone that Microsoft sells you all their cloudified Office/Outlook/etc suite of tools. GCP is neither of those things to Google.
- campers 3y ago
  A good part of GCP is part of Core google infrastructure. Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos. ... Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher [than DynamoDB], and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-cloud-spanner-price-performance-updates https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-... Google Colossus file system underpins all storage across Google services and GCP Cloud Storage. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/a-peek-behind-colossus-googles-file-system https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database, provides metrics for Google's own services and GCP Operation suite. https://research.google/pubs/pub50652/ https://research.google/pubs/pub50652/ Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System - underpins access control across Google's product and GCP IAM. https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/google-is-moving-parts-of-youtube-to-its-cloud-service.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/google-is-moving-parts-of-yo...
sthuck 3y ago
GCP shutting down might be one in a million, but "Google cloud niche product X" is a lot more likely. With GCP I feel like you should stick to the core services to avoid any risks.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  I would put the odds quite a lot closer to 1 in 5 than 1 in a million. Google exec shuts down lackluster business ? It would not even be news outside tech/business circles.
wg0 3y ago
AWS is stable. In that, the DX is predictable. I'm using AWS for over a decade and had huge gaps in between but coming back never was shocked or surprised by things totally reshuffled. On GCP, not the same. The GCP console of around 2012 if memory serves me well, is barely recognizable. That just the UX and I'm sure APIs would have changed as well in the meantime. The hip product management culture of Google is beyond me. Today's cloud console would be something else tomorrow and I'm sure some hip and smart PM is chalking that out on their Chromebook or something. Sorry for the stereotyping. As of speaking to customers, I bet AWS (real people) directly, routinely reach out to even 2 person startups. I have experienced it myself. They really do care. Even I had multiple hour long calls with Azure representative for an account who's monthly spend was a joke. On the other hand, good luck with getting anyone from Google on email let alone phone.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  I've never had a problem getting meetings with GCP reps for both big company spend and tiny startup spend. If anything, they have been too eager to talk when I had nothing to discuss with them.
  - wg0 3y ago
    Good to know that. I might be wrong on that account. But my complain about product stability and maturity remains and that's admittedly is subjective.
cco 3y ago
I'm a bit surprised they haven't spun GCP out of Google and into Alphabet. Even if it's just to assuage fears.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abrookewood 3y ago
Agree 100%. They have done untold damage to their cloud business with their behaviour in the consumer space.

ajross 3y ago

No interest on engaging on the core issues of trust, except to say my standard bit: HN is a site predicated on the whole idea of embracing risk. Except with this one particular vendor who everyone loves to distrust. Maybe... it's not about risk at all?

inopinatus 3y ago
There’s a stark difference between risk that is predicated on your own wits and risk that is mediated entirely through a capricious and aloof supplier with a bit of a reputation for the rug-pull.
DoctorOW 3y ago
Generally the phrase is "High risk, high reward." This would be considered a relatively low reward.
- ajross 3y ago
  Nonetheless the chances of a median HN poster's employer being shived by a rogue Angel or dying to a founder feud are vastly (like, vastly vastly) higher than having Google drop one of their dependencies. And I guess I'd expect the discourse to reflect that. But instead it's the boring tech giant (yes, also my employer, though I work nowhere near cloud) who everyone seems to think is the existential threat? Like I said, I don't think this is about risk at all.
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    It's not that the likelihood is high, it's that it happens at all. It's a worry I won't have if I'm doing business with other vendors. I want to predict behavior and Google has always been a little too hermetic and occult for my taste.
rfrey 3y ago
This is a deeply weird take IMO. Nobody "embraces risk" because they have a risk fetish. You take on risk because you believe you can be paid for it, and perhaps you are better equipped to mitigate the risk than the people paying you to take it. There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors, so a rational person would not accept the risk that Google pulls the plug on a product, or some contractor gets banned by Google and gets your whole account frozen, etc. There's no upside. It's not even gambling because there's no "win" possible - it's more like shooting an arrow straight up into the air and hoping it doesn't land on your head.
- ajross 3y ago
  > There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors The linked article is literally about how Google is better than its competitor though! Obviously some people disagree. If you want to write a nuanced take about risk and benefit, I'm there for it[1]. It's the stunningly absolutist take on something as clearly-not-a-big-deal as a cloud service provider, by people who would otherwise be willing to bet their careers on a job with a good vibe, that seems "deeply weird" to me. [1] Actually I'm not. That's stuff's boring. But I respect that people do it.

mef 3y ago

it does seem like any of Google's support options for paid services have the primary goal of reducing support load on Google, not to solve problems for paying customers

lima 3y ago

I have talked to Google representatives when I had an issue with my personal gmail.com account through Google One. It was fine and they fixed it. Likewise, as a GCP customer, I've always had a real account rep and support I could talk to.

fooster 3y ago
Yeah we’ve had one too. Actually no two. Wait three. Actually I’ve lost count. In the 6 years I’ve been using GCP we’ve had a new rep practically every quarter. It’s ridiculous.

bastardoperator 3y ago

I concur. Google doesn't seem to believe in a tangible customer service methodology at all. They go out of their way to remove human interaction at seemingly every level. I don't know if it's a legal strategy or what, but it gives me bad vibes too.

crazygringo 3y ago

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut down without recourse unless you really are being abusive, and Google's not cancelling the services companies are paying for. (The same goes for the paid tier of Google Workspace.) It's a normal paid B2B relationship with all that usually entails. It's unfortunate that people take their experiences and the stories they hear about the free consumer side, and extrapolate them to assume they're also true about the paid business side. It's understandable, but it's just not the case. And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely, or use that as a justification for choosing one or the other.

gustavus 3y ago
> And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely. That's what I thought for a long time about google domains. Yet here we are.
- thezilch 3y ago
  Google Domains made Google the equivalent of $0 and would teach them nothing about operating their core businesses.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    And it's not being shut down, it's being sold off. There's quite a difference.

cedws 3y ago

GCP has people you can talk to, you just need to bring enough money to the table for them to bother. In other words, the fat cats get support, the rest can suck it.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

You trust AWS? Seriously? Amazon? What gets me is that AWS must have insane turnover with the Amazon stack ranking. The stability of that platform long term concerns me. AWS is a utility at this point. Utilities are boring, conservative, and have people that know their systems and stay there for decades.

irrational 3y ago

I work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.

rossjudson 3y ago
That speaks volumes about the quality of decision-making at your fortune 100 company, and about their ability to do due diligence.
- snoman 3y ago
  No it doesn’t.
- silenced_trope 3y ago
  What do you mean specifically? It seems like all the OP is saying is that the company evaluated alternatives (Azure & AWS) whose cloud products are "first class" citizens of the business whereas with Google the first class product is search, advertising, Android (a couple other things but you get the idea). It doesn't seem too far out of left field that Google would flounder with all it's cloud products being phased out in favor of some other new product they've made or acquired.
gerash 3y ago
I was expecting rigorous analysis in terms of cost of services and the complexity/simplicity of offering, reliability figures, etc. but this fortune 100 company went with feelings
- raincole 3y ago
  This is why starting your comment with "I work for a fortune 100 company" adds zero credibility to what's following. It might adds negative credibility on HN.
- ww520 3y ago

next_xibalba 3y ago

> The group [Pichai, Page, and Porat] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said. [1] That they’ve actually discussed shutting it down in the recent past lends plausibility to this risk. In 2019, they set 2023 as a deadline for moving into the #2 spot ahead of Azure. Obviously, they’ve not gotten anywhere near that. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

foobarian 3y ago
Wow. Imagine top level execs at Ford discussing, but eventually dismissing--the idea of leaving the automobile market entirely. Their hearts really aren't in it as much as with AWS.
- ahepp 3y ago
  Ford did exit the sedan market But I generally agree with what you’re saying
- akira2501 3y ago
  Google is an advertising company. They're planning an exit in a non-core market. It shouldn't be a surprise. The weight of "traditional google" has held zero value to me in measuring their cloud product. Google's cloud products are built around the needs of advertisers. A large and slow backend that's meant to churn ungodly amounts of data. Amazon is a retail company their cloud products are build around this need. They have a highly segmented and mostly nimble backend that's mean to build unwieldy amounts of API.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Ford, ironically, is an example of a company that has recently exited a huge business segment - they no longer make sedans. They now exclusively make SUVs and trucks. It is largely thought of as a pretty good move on their part. Google probably should spin off GCP rather than killing it, but it's not a terrible idea to divest from a failing arm of a business. Google (like Intel) just does it too early.

steveBK123 3y ago

Isn't one of the foundational problems of GCP that it's not really core to Google themselves? AWS is basically the same infra Amazon runs their own business on, opened up for the world to use. Azure is the backbone that Microsoft sells you all their cloudified Office/Outlook/etc suite of tools. GCP is neither of those things to Google.

campers 3y ago
A good part of GCP is part of Core google infrastructure. Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos. ... Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher [than DynamoDB], and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-cloud-spanner-price-performance-updates https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-... Google Colossus file system underpins all storage across Google services and GCP Cloud Storage. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/a-peek-behind-colossus-googles-file-system https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database, provides metrics for Google's own services and GCP Operation suite. https://research.google/pubs/pub50652/ https://research.google/pubs/pub50652/ Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System - underpins access control across Google's product and GCP IAM. https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/google-is-moving-parts-of-youtube-to-its-cloud-service.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/google-is-moving-parts-of-yo...

sthuck 3y ago

GCP shutting down might be one in a million, but "Google cloud niche product X" is a lot more likely. With GCP I feel like you should stick to the core services to avoid any risks.

jeremyjh 3y ago
I would put the odds quite a lot closer to 1 in 5 than 1 in a million. Google exec shuts down lackluster business ? It would not even be news outside tech/business circles.

wg0 3y ago

AWS is stable. In that, the DX is predictable. I'm using AWS for over a decade and had huge gaps in between but coming back never was shocked or surprised by things totally reshuffled. On GCP, not the same. The GCP console of around 2012 if memory serves me well, is barely recognizable. That just the UX and I'm sure APIs would have changed as well in the meantime. The hip product management culture of Google is beyond me. Today's cloud console would be something else tomorrow and I'm sure some hip and smart PM is chalking that out on their Chromebook or something. Sorry for the stereotyping. As of speaking to customers, I bet AWS (real people) directly, routinely reach out to even 2 person startups. I have experienced it myself. They really do care. Even I had multiple hour long calls with Azure representative for an account who's monthly spend was a joke. On the other hand, good luck with getting anyone from Google on email let alone phone.

andrewmutz 3y ago
I've never had a problem getting meetings with GCP reps for both big company spend and tiny startup spend. If anything, they have been too eager to talk when I had nothing to discuss with them.
- wg0 3y ago
  Good to know that. I might be wrong on that account. But my complain about product stability and maturity remains and that's admittedly is subjective.

cco 3y ago

I'm a bit surprised they haven't spun GCP out of Google and into Alphabet. Even if it's just to assuage fears.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

abrookewood 3y ago

Agree 100%. They have done untold damage to their cloud business with their behaviour in the consumer space.