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Just hot air. Not a single plausible example of this "Cloud 2.0", except for one CDN service that Google and AWS could easily compete with. Or buy if there's s

Just hot air. Not a single plausible example of this "Cloud 2.0", except for one CDN service that Google and AWS could easily compete with. Or buy if there's some special sauce involved. The simple fact is that Google tried to do go one level up with cloud services beyond basic building blocks like raw compute power and storage (App Engine etc.), and had their lunch eaten by Amazon. And later on even by Microsoft, who's Azure is a much better fit for those enterprises already using MS tech. So now Google is force to play catch-up, and dropping the price is the only way they can even get people to pay attention. Because let's face it, from the reactions her on HN it was obvious that the price drop announcement was the first time many of us even bothered to seriously check out Google's cloud offerings. Google's case study page (https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/) isn't exactly brimming with big names, and most of the testimonials apply to App Engine, which as far as I'm concerned is a niche product that has already had it's lunch eaten by the likes of Heroku.

camus2 13y ago
app engine is too complicated.let's take Heroku.Heroku is easy,i build my app in whatever language,then push it through git. No sdk to download or anthing else to do,and it basically supports any language I want. Now let's take app engine:I have to download a sdk,write my app the way google wants me to,use this or that ide...and what if I want to use language X that is not supported? i cant. Heroku is pragmatic because it relies on simple concepts like bash scripts and git.that's all,I dont have to download python or java just to push something in the cloud. AppEngine has interesting addons though,but i just dont want to host my code on appengine just to use them. And then there is the lockin stuff.Unless the saas product is extremely complicated and impossible to "self" host, I would not rely on any technology i cant migrate to my own servers or another cloud, especially when it comes to data,I'd never ever use a appengine only database. Google got it 100% wrong.
- atmosx 13y ago
  And pray that in 3 years Google will not decide to drop App Engine.
  - crb 13y ago
    One of the points in the op-ed article we're discussing was the opportunity in this market, which makes it worth investing in. If you're still not convinced, I'd encourage you to read this interview [1] with Google's SVP of Technical Infrastructure, where he spells out a shift in the way Google develops to spend a majority of it's efforts in the cloud world. > “It has become clear that the public cloud is the way of the future,” Hölzle says during an interview at Google headquarters. [..] “One day, this could be bigger than ads. Certainly, in terms of market potential, it is.” If you still don't believe, Google Cloud Platform has a published deprecation policy in its Terms of Service, which is very similar to that of other major providers. In short, you get one full year's advance notice of the deprecation of any supported service. [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-story/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-stor...
    - brohoolio 13y ago
      One year deprecation is not long enough for anything enterprise. I wouldn't put anything in Google that can't be picked up and moved to another provider with minimal effort.
  - paul_f 13y ago
    This is why I would never use Google for anything mission critical. You can't trust them to keep anything going.
- crb 13y ago
  The new Managed VMs feature in Google App Engine lets you deploy anything - including complete runtimes [1] - and you can do this with git. There's even a test pipeline where it won't get deployed unless your unit tests pass. App Engine works at lightning speed (lets see Heroku turn up new instances of your app in O(ms)) because it's opinionated. You can trade performance for opinion - on the left end you have Google managing everything (App Engine), and on the other you have full flexibility (Compute Engine). Managed VMs, and other new features like Replica Pools and Deployment Manager [2], allow you to move toward a middle ground, where you can have Google do the automation of more flexible primitives (full VMs). And you can absolutely migrate your technology to your own servers. AppScale [3] have an open source implementation of App Engine you can run yourself, and there's nothing stopping you use other open source databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc, on Compute Engine, and talking to those from your App Engine app. It sounds like you've not looked at Google Cloud Platform for a while. Take a deeper look, you might be impressed. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 [3] https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki

camus2 13y ago

app engine is too complicated.let's take Heroku.Heroku is easy,i build my app in whatever language,then push it through git. No sdk to download or anthing else to do,and it basically supports any language I want. Now let's take app engine:I have to download a sdk,write my app the way google wants me to,use this or that ide...and what if I want to use language X that is not supported? i cant. Heroku is pragmatic because it relies on simple concepts like bash scripts and git.that's all,I dont have to download python or java just to push something in the cloud. AppEngine has interesting addons though,but i just dont want to host my code on appengine just to use them. And then there is the lockin stuff.Unless the saas product is extremely complicated and impossible to "self" host, I would not rely on any technology i cant migrate to my own servers or another cloud, especially when it comes to data,I'd never ever use a appengine only database. Google got it 100% wrong.

atmosx 13y ago
And pray that in 3 years Google will not decide to drop App Engine.
- crb 13y ago
  One of the points in the op-ed article we're discussing was the opportunity in this market, which makes it worth investing in. If you're still not convinced, I'd encourage you to read this interview [1] with Google's SVP of Technical Infrastructure, where he spells out a shift in the way Google develops to spend a majority of it's efforts in the cloud world. > “It has become clear that the public cloud is the way of the future,” Hölzle says during an interview at Google headquarters. [..] “One day, this could be bigger than ads. Certainly, in terms of market potential, it is.” If you still don't believe, Google Cloud Platform has a published deprecation policy in its Terms of Service, which is very similar to that of other major providers. In short, you get one full year's advance notice of the deprecation of any supported service. [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-story/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-stor...
  - brohoolio 13y ago
    One year deprecation is not long enough for anything enterprise. I wouldn't put anything in Google that can't be picked up and moved to another provider with minimal effort.
- paul_f 13y ago
  This is why I would never use Google for anything mission critical. You can't trust them to keep anything going.
crb 13y ago
The new Managed VMs feature in Google App Engine lets you deploy anything - including complete runtimes [1] - and you can do this with git. There's even a test pipeline where it won't get deployed unless your unit tests pass. App Engine works at lightning speed (lets see Heroku turn up new instances of your app in O(ms)) because it's opinionated. You can trade performance for opinion - on the left end you have Google managing everything (App Engine), and on the other you have full flexibility (Compute Engine). Managed VMs, and other new features like Replica Pools and Deployment Manager [2], allow you to move toward a middle ground, where you can have Google do the automation of more flexible primitives (full VMs). And you can absolutely migrate your technology to your own servers. AppScale [3] have an open source implementation of App Engine you can run yourself, and there's nothing stopping you use other open source databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc, on Compute Engine, and talking to those from your App Engine app. It sounds like you've not looked at Google Cloud Platform for a while. Take a deeper look, you might be impressed. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 [3] https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki