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Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud competitor at Google I/O 2012
- mrslx 14y agoGoogle for support and services ... Right, don't waste your time.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoThat was my first thought. What kind of customer service experience are they willing or able to provide?
- jrockway 14y agoGoogle offers Apps customers 24/7 phone and email support.
- sherwin 14y agoThis really makes me wonder what took Google so long. Google practically defined large scale commodity cluster computing with mapreduce (2004). Amazon EC2 was launched in 2006. The closest thing Google has done was app engine, and my understanding is that was not a tremendous success. Does anyone have any explanations why Google didn't move into this space earlier?
- edwinnathaniel 14y agoPerhaps they viewed AWS to be closer to the classic hosting company as opposed to Cloud vendor and their selling point was "scale like us, Google" vs typical RoR+MySQL.
- wmf 14y agoGoogle doesn't use VMs internally and they probably don't have a scalable SAN (EBS competitor) either, so they don't have as much of an advantage as you might think. Google bet big on a "legacy-free" stack (GFS, MapReduce, BigTable, etc.) and that has worked out great for their internal services but external customers just aren't willing to adopt it (see App Engine).
- regularfry 14y agoThey've got Ganeti, but I don't know exactly what they use it for.
- Rastafarian 14y agoThe hosting wars are just starting. There are so many features no one is offering right now. E.g. I want to host my app and data in my own data center, but have an automatic fail over to a cloud provider.
- regularfry 14y agoCan you elaborate on that? What do you see as missing?
- purephase 14y agoWith round-robin DNS you have that now. It is fairly easy to setup. The data may be a bit more challenging, but certainly not impossible.
- ceejayoz 14y agoRound robin DNS wouldn't solve that. Your DNS servers will happily keep serving out the defunct IPs of your failed datacenter.
- joshu 14y agoYeah. I really hate how confident tech people about shit they've never done and/or just read about on blogs. I understand that apparent confidence is a currency but it's not the only one.
- rdl 14y agoI don't think you need to be 100% precise on every hn comment. You can do DNS based failover (short TTL), manually or automatically, and it's the easiest to set up using entirely your own infrastructure. This works great if you can tolerate a variable length outage for customers, or where you're not using it to deal with outage, but rather just migrating load -- say provider A suddenly gets expensive, you can migrate away, but don't need to hard kill provider A, at least until any DNS cache has expired. You can do IP based failover (various techniques -- anycast, which doesn't really work for most apps, making your own announcements of the same netblock, IP address failover below the BGP level/internal to a network, arp stealing on a subnet (not useful across providers but good for HA), etc. You can use a smart proxy in front of your app (an F5 "Global Load Balancer", something you've developed yourself, nginx with minimal state, or an inexpensive service like Cloudflare or their 1000x more expensive Prolexic competition). You can do the best thing for non-web apps, a smart client, which knows to go down a list of servers (randomly?) and find the closest or best one. More intelligence in the client = more better. I've set up all of these except Anycast (which I'd actually love to do sometime, but RIPE jacked my /24) and Prolexic (because I don't want to spend $30-100k/mo). Which is the best really expends, but IMO at least having a plan (even if it takes a week) to switch hosting providers is worthwhile for everyone.
- fpp 14y agoBeen told at a Google meeting recently that there will be a new GDrive SDK introduced during the Google I/O If they are expanding their offerings it might go more towards Box(.net) than vs Amazon By that also the App Engine etc fit into the picture - we'll know next week
- 100k 14y agoI wonder how App Engine fits into this? Maybe it will be an extension of the Backend instances you can use now.
- manuelflara 14y agoI've always though App Engine is kind of a half-assed version of AWS, so maybe this time they're announcing something worthy of Google's brand. With all all the infrastructure knowledge they have I always felt App Engine was way too poor a service.
- myko 14y agoWould you mind elaborating on why GAE isn't very good relative to AWS?
- egillie 14y agoGAE sandboxes you with their proprietary libraries, whereas AWS lets you write for unix/windows platform with minimal sandboxing. If you want to write a LAMP stack, you can just write a regular old LAMP stack with AWS. With GAE, you have to learn their java/python server libraries, then their blobstore/google cloud storage/googleQL, and so on.
- StavrosK 14y agoSure, but GAE has zero setup and administration and infinite scaling. Myself, I prefer something like gondor.io, that looks very much like a dedicated server but also has zero setup/administration. If price is an issue, you can't beat an actual dedicated server, though.
- edwinnathaniel 14y agoWould like to point out that one of the important information from egillie comment is this: "their java/python..." Yes, Google's version of Java. Not JDK/JEE.
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- twog 14y agoCompetition is always healthy, but its going to be pretty tough for Google to launch something that makes our startup move away from AWS or Rackspace. EBS would be the main service to attack of Amazons.
- notatoad 14y agoThey don't need to make me move away from AWS, as long as they're competitive I'll use them in parallel. As we've seen lately, having live fail-over is always a good plan when you're hosting with cloud providers.
- dllthomas 14y ago> [H]aving live fail-over is always a good plan when you're hosting with cloud providers. Also, the rest of the time.
- fizx 14y agoHow about cost? If Google was 20% cheaper, would you switch?
- heretohelp 14y agoIn my case, Google wouldn't be competing with AWS on cost, but rather, Linode. That's a tall-order. $40/mo for a 1gb VPS is attractive.
- glimcat 14y agoI strongly prefer not to deal with Google in a business context. It's great when everything is running smoothly. But if things break down, there's usually not a damn thing you can do about it besides post to your blog and pray.
- notatoad 14y agothis is only true with google's free services. as far as i know, any paid service google offers includes phone and email support.
- davidedicillo 14y agoIt will be free, but it will have targeted ads in your source code :)
- Rastafarian 14y agoHah put ads on 404, 500 and other errors pages :D
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- notatoad 14y ago>Not to be outdone, other sources have confirmed Microsoft is also building an Infrastructure as a Service platform Do they mean azure? That's IaaS, right?
- edwinnathaniel 14y agoAzude does both.
- wmf 14y agoYes, Azure announced IaaS two weeks ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/06/06/announcing-new-windows-azure-services-to-deliver-hybrid-cloud.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/06/06/anno...
- Rastafarian 14y agoAzure started and still is mostly used as PaaS for .NET apps.
- ridruejo 14y agoNot any more, they are now a full IaaS provider, complete with multiple fully-supported Linux flavors
- Rastafarian 14y agoYeah, that's why I wrote "mostly" ... https://twitter.com/devops_borat/status/207600109469437952 https://twitter.com/devops_borat/status/207600109469437952
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- buster 14y agoMakes me wonder.. if an internet shop can build a cloud platform, what does Google come up with? They must have sooo much experience, own tools, people, knowledge in that area, it's hard to imagine how far this can go. Hopefully it will not be just a half-assed experiment again.
- arkitaip 14y agoUnfortunately they also have tons of bureaucracy and a serious lack of understanding and execution of great design, making it difficult for them to compete with startups and other, more flexible ventures.
- vibrunazo 14y agoWhy "unfortunately"? I'm glad big incubents can't roll over all startups. :-)
- omfg 14y agoAmazon is quite a bit more than 'an internet shop'.
- buster 14y agoNowadays. How would you describe Amazon before the rise of AWS? The fact that i didn't say Amazon and you recognized it says a lot, too :P
- jrockway 14y agoThey had a pretty neat fulfillment network before AWS. Amazon is pretty unique in that they make a lot of their internals available as products, but even before that, the infrastructure was still impressive. What other online store do you use? :)
- buster 14y agoYeah, but did they have their own server hardware, data centers, programming languages, CDNs, web frameworks, kernel developers, operating systems, invented new protocols and hosted all kinds of stuff on the internet for billions of users? ;) But of course, i probably use Amazon for 80% of my online shopping needs, they rock!
- zitterbewegung 14y agoDoes anyone else think that they missed the boat? 3-4 years ago there was little competition. Now basically EC2 has most of the market. If they want to be successful they have to be not just cool but noticeably better than EC2 and it doesn't seem like google wins that way.
- gfodor 14y agoNew startups will always be in a position to evaluate where to host their products. I think if Google can offer good service at a competitive price it might make sense for new startups to consider them.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI don't know, EC2 isn't that great to begin with and it's pricing is really not impressive at all. The I/O absolutely awful. There probably is room for biggest companies to compete Amazon, especially Google if they take the business seriously.
- akoumjian 14y agoIt is a huge market, there is plenty of room for even mediocre competition.
- enjo 14y agoAre people going to no longer releasing stuff on cloud platforms? I have some loyalty to AWS mainly because I've already figured out how to make stuff work nicely on it. However, for whatever I release next I'd certainly consider a competitor. Particularly if they can provide better i/o performance than EBS.
- huggyface 14y agoI honestly don't understand comments like this (this is hardly the only one). You know absolutely nothing about their service. You know nothing about what they are offering, what their pricing will be, etc. I have to guess that it's that people are comfortable with EC2 (I am -- great service) and almost want to hope-away anything that degrades the value of the thing that they do know.
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- wavephorm 14y agoShouldn't Google have done this before everyone started migrating off of GAE due to the price hikes, and before AWS pretty much cornered the cloud platform market, and before Dropbox cornered the cloud data storage/sync market, and before Heroku cornered the auto-scaling web services market?
- justinsb 14y agoAnd they probably should have launched GMail before Hotmail, Search before Altavista, and Adwords before Overture ;-)
- tlogan 14y agoHey even Nokia was not first in phone market, they raise to the top, and look were they are now. I think the parent post has a valid point. It is harder to enter market now than it was 4 years ago. Not impossible but much much harder.
- AlexMuir 14y agoI disagree. I think it's an easier market to get into - it's a proven market that is about to be commoditised (which is a lot of what Google is about). No-one needs persuading that they need cloud servers now. If Google can produce a a)better, b)cheaper or even c)different service then they've got customers.
- viscanti 14y agoThe most valuable customers are either on EC2 or their own private hardware. The number of companies who can trivially port their software to Google's new offering are a small fraction of the total market (when accounting for total $ spent). There's an even bigger problem as well. Google hurt their reputation as a hosting provider when they significantly raised their rates without advanced notice. Companies want to know what their costs will be, and want to know that someone will answer their questions if they have support issues. Google has a negative reputation in both areas.
- Xcelerate 14y agoThis is good news. We'll have cheaper prices all around! And with that article on Google having their own hardware manufactured, it may end up better than we think.
- da_n 14y agoAm I the only one who read this headline thinking Google is going to launch a cloud rival to Microsoft called Amazon?
- dsirijus 14y agoIsn't this all about who can get cheaper electricity?
- Hikari 14y agofor more about the subject here is an interesting read from a google insider talking about their lack of understanding platforms and service oriented architecture. http://steverant.pen.io/ http://steverant.pen.io/
- harryh 14y agoIf this includes some sort of public access to borg it could be extremely interesting. No more borg is one of the top 3 things I miss from my days at Google.
- wmf 14y agoThose of us who didn't work at Google have no idea what you're talking about.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoAnd those of us who did, well... there are some words you say, and some words you don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
- jrockway 14y agoIt's some Linux boxes, essentially.
- dsl 14y agoBorg gives you access to Google's compute resources.
- flyt 14y agohttp://www.quora.com/What-is-Borg-at-Google http://www.quora.com/What-is-Borg-at-Google "It's the system that manages machines. If you want to run a program that uses x CPU and y memory on 100 machines, you don't specify which machines to run it on. Instead, you request 100 machines using a Borg library."
- grandalf 14y agoAs someone who has dealt with customer service from the companies Google is competing with in this arena, Google is either going to have to come in at about 25% of the price or seriously up its game in the customer service department.
- waleedka 14y agoAgreed. I've been using App Engine for a while and bad customer service is my main issue with it. I can tolerate poor support for free products, but not for business products that I pay a lot for.
- jbarham 14y agoIf Google can deliver a semi-decent IaaS offering that works well with App Engine IMO they will have a uniquely powerful platform. App Engine is often criticized for being expensive compared to AWS, but putting together a production ready setup (i.e., automatic failover in the case of data center failure) on AWS isn't cheap since you need at least two of everything: multiple EC2 instances sitting behind a load balancer (ELB) and redundant databases (i.e., RDS Multi-AZ). I know because I'm setting up exactly this configuration right now for my DNS hosting service (http://slickdns.com http://slickdns.com). But if Google's IaaS offering could fix all the fiddly bits that App Engine currently doesn't do (e.g., custom SSL, native binaries) it would surpass AWS in terms of functionality. Selling bandwidth and white-label servers is easy. Building a production ready arbitrarily scalable web platform is much harder.
- cpunks 14y agoI have an extremely, extremely, extremely healthy level of skepticism. We do substantial business with AWS. When they went down and came back up, some of our data was damaged. I called my Amazon rep, who put me in contact with Amazon engineers, who helped us recover. Amazon can do that -- they're a service organization, and they're used to working with customers and making them happy. Google's customer service, in contrast, has a raison d'etre of avoiding customers. As a customer, the feeling you get is mild disdain. This is necessary -- one support call for Google.com can wipe out the profits from thousands of people. This translate into how they handle the enterprise market. I use Google Apps for my organization. I needed to enable Google+ for a social presence. This required applying into a black hole which, for a long time, did nothing. Support e-mails went to someone who clearly was in the business of neither having nor giving out information. Here's an experiment for you: Pretend you want to try Google App Engine, but your cell is not on one of the providers Google supports (I've been there). You just a credit card, and a willingness to spend a bit of cash. Try to buy some service. See how far you get. I use Google internal to my organization for things like Google Apps; if it has issues, employees will deal, and it saves a big chunk of work and cash. For anything customer-facing, I really do want a partner whom I can talk to if there are issues, not a black box designed to reject support requests.