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"Since its inception, Amazon has refined and expanded AWS while competitors including Microsoft and Google have tried to replicate its success with similar proj

by rifung 12y ago

"Since its inception, Amazon has refined and expanded AWS while competitors including Microsoft and Google have tried to replicate its success with similar projects. Those companies have only recently started to deliver basic services on par with Amazon’s." Is this really true? I know that AWS offers many more services than competitors currently, but for the services for which there is a competing product, is the AWS offering really that much better?

fweespeech 12y ago
> is the AWS offering really that much better? Depends on your needs, tbh, traditional hosting is a better fit for mine. I can automate buying and provisioning bare metal servers already. I don't need AWS for that.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Thats not the question. Yes, AWS is way ahead of the other cloud providers in every way.
  - rifung 12y ago
    Care to elaborate? It seems like you know the answer to my question =] For example, how is EC2 much better than GCE, if it is. (I realize you didn't imply that it was; this comparison just seems the most interesting to me)
    - res0nat0r 12y ago
      "Better" is always relative, it all depends on your workload. AWS have ~40 instances types and and ~40 services they offer, so this is way ahead of other cloud providers, so it is a much richer ecosystem.
  - nickbauman 12y ago
    I spoke with a Google channel lead who said Google's cloud is 5x the size of Amazon's. The policy is not to talk about it publicly because Google itself uses its own cloud tremendously and the 5x size was not something customers necessarily utilize.
    - discodave 12y ago
      Most analysts seem to think that AWS is way bigger than Google's public cloud. That channel lead may well be right in terms of total number of servers or MW of datacenter capacity. BUT scale is not the only thing that the cloud brings. AWS is not just S3 and EC2. I think it's pretty clear that Amazon is much further along the road of productizing their cloud. i.e. providing all the products that businesses and most notably enterprises need to move to the cloud. It will take a while for Google (and Microsoft) to catch up in this area.
      - nickbauman 12y ago
        Published information I have dug up shows Google's cloud is larger, but only by 50% and the dates were in the 2012-2013 range. Regardless of whether the channel lead's motivations are to say one thing or another, he did say something that struck me with conviction: "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." My experience with Kubernetes and Managed VMs and as an App Engine dev since 2009 compared to Amazon's latest offerings such as Glacier and RedShift shows Amazon is distinctly targeting the present with these legacy plays. Google is targeting the future. Not much talked about: Google's profitability gives it a distinct advantage in its ability to wage a price war compared to Amazon should have anyone on Amazon's platform concerned.
        derefr 12y ago
        I wouldn't so much phrase it as "Amazon is targeting the present"; they're executing a hybrid strategy of making future-stuff to entice you (Lambda, or DynamoDB way back when) and then also cutting away all the objections you (some enterprise CTO) could have to moving 100% to their cloud stack, by making it also capable of doing everything your current private LAN/VPS/colo stack already does—even if everything your current stack already does is brain-damaged legacy stuff. In other words, Google is building a cloud that you can only really pick up for blue-ocean ventures. AWS gives you a bunch of the same tech, but also a clear transition path: you can first duplicate all your present-day infrastructure in their cloud with little-to-no service interruption, and then start replacing it, component-wise, with the future-tech.
hobofan 12y ago
In my opinion, Google is ahead of AWS in most aspects besides access control. GCE instances vs. EC2: faster boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types). Yes, Amazon offers a bigger variety of products, but the newer ones just scream vendor lock-in without much-added benefit. Why would I use Opsworks if Chef or Ansible work just as well?
- devy 12y ago
  What's the basis of your argument that Google Cloud is better? My personal experience has been exactly the opposite - AWS is light years ahead of Google Cloud. Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? For the longest time, it was only supporting Java and Python SDKs. And the Google's API is still very much lacking in terms of features and stacks. In fact the better support and much comprehensive services presents more choices rather than "vender lock-in". Keep in mind, all the auxiliary services are simply the open source technologies builds on top of AWS EC2 - if you like to spend time and money, you can totally build your own! And this is common, as we've just seen people complain about Google Cloud 4 days ago. https://yourbunnywrote.org/2015/04/19/google-cloud/ https://yourbunnywrote.org/2015/04/19/google-cloud/
  - chisleu 12y ago
    Yep. Google hasn't met any of my needs when I play with it. I always end up back on AWS. Lambda is a stunning system IMHO. I do like Google's new DB. It is like an easy to use spark w/ cassandra backend, all behind the scenes. Very nice.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      Lambda looks awesome... I'm tethered to Azure, so the closest I get is Azure App Service which works, but not as elegantly... Dokku-alt is working pretty well (testing now) as a deployment system... was looking kubernetes and the like, but it's overkill for my needs. Doesn't Amazon's mysql api fronted db work similar to google's?
nivla 12y ago
>"Since its inception, Amazon has refined and expanded AWS while competitors including Microsoft and Google have tried to replicate its success with similar projects. Those companies have only recently started to deliver basic services on par with Amazon’s." They could have summed up the whole thing as First-mover advantage. Amazon created this new market and when MS, Google etc saw a real opportunity in it, they wanted a piece of it and thus moved in by replicating the best features. Meanwhile for Amazon it was all about maintaining its majority share refining and expanding.
mdeeks 12y ago
Compared to Azure, yes. The IaaS offering on Azure has many, many limitations. It is also very difficult to use. There is no general pool of servers. You have to cram VMs into these groupings called "Cloud Services" which are limited to 50 VMs each. No support for TLS termination on their load balancers. SSDs are currently a "preview" feature and only work on a subset of hardware types. In all fairness AWS had a 4-5 year head start on Azure. Also there are a lot of really exciting things coming down the line for Azure. I don't expect this gap to last long. Competition is good!
- btown 12y ago
  SSDs, okay. That's something that's legitimately difficult to scale, particularly if you've invested heavily on spinning disks and made assumptions about their performance/reliability. I get that. But no TLS termination? At a company that has invested $15bn on their cloud products and has in-house expertise on the actual source code of one of the most widely-used networking stacks? That's... surprising, to say the least.
  - nitramafve 12y ago
    What does the lack of SSL termination mean? We are running many services in Azure which we access using TLS1.2 via the loaf balancer so what would SSL termination add to this?
    - nolok 12y ago
      Wikipedia is short and to the point on this one > An SSL termination proxy is a proxy server that is used by an institution to handle incoming SSL connections, decrypting the SSL and passing on the unencrypted request to the institution's other servers (it is assumed that the institution's own network is secure so the user's session data does not need to be encrypted on that part of the link). SSL termination proxies are used to reduce the load on the main servers by offloading the cryptographic processing to another machine, and to support servers that do not support SSL, like Varnish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy

by rifung 12y ago

fweespeech 12y ago

> is the AWS offering really that much better? Depends on your needs, tbh, traditional hosting is a better fit for mine. I can automate buying and provisioning bare metal servers already. I don't need AWS for that.

justincormack 12y ago
Thats not the question. Yes, AWS is way ahead of the other cloud providers in every way.
- rifung 12y ago
  Care to elaborate? It seems like you know the answer to my question =] For example, how is EC2 much better than GCE, if it is. (I realize you didn't imply that it was; this comparison just seems the most interesting to me)
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    "Better" is always relative, it all depends on your workload. AWS have ~40 instances types and and ~40 services they offer, so this is way ahead of other cloud providers, so it is a much richer ecosystem.
- nickbauman 12y ago
  I spoke with a Google channel lead who said Google's cloud is 5x the size of Amazon's. The policy is not to talk about it publicly because Google itself uses its own cloud tremendously and the 5x size was not something customers necessarily utilize.
  - discodave 12y ago
    Most analysts seem to think that AWS is way bigger than Google's public cloud. That channel lead may well be right in terms of total number of servers or MW of datacenter capacity. BUT scale is not the only thing that the cloud brings. AWS is not just S3 and EC2. I think it's pretty clear that Amazon is much further along the road of productizing their cloud. i.e. providing all the products that businesses and most notably enterprises need to move to the cloud. It will take a while for Google (and Microsoft) to catch up in this area.
    - nickbauman 12y ago
      Published information I have dug up shows Google's cloud is larger, but only by 50% and the dates were in the 2012-2013 range. Regardless of whether the channel lead's motivations are to say one thing or another, he did say something that struck me with conviction: "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." My experience with Kubernetes and Managed VMs and as an App Engine dev since 2009 compared to Amazon's latest offerings such as Glacier and RedShift shows Amazon is distinctly targeting the present with these legacy plays. Google is targeting the future. Not much talked about: Google's profitability gives it a distinct advantage in its ability to wage a price war compared to Amazon should have anyone on Amazon's platform concerned.
      - derefr 12y ago
        I wouldn't so much phrase it as "Amazon is targeting the present"; they're executing a hybrid strategy of making future-stuff to entice you (Lambda, or DynamoDB way back when) and then also cutting away all the objections you (some enterprise CTO) could have to moving 100% to their cloud stack, by making it also capable of doing everything your current private LAN/VPS/colo stack already does—even if everything your current stack already does is brain-damaged legacy stuff. In other words, Google is building a cloud that you can only really pick up for blue-ocean ventures. AWS gives you a bunch of the same tech, but also a clear transition path: you can first duplicate all your present-day infrastructure in their cloud with little-to-no service interruption, and then start replacing it, component-wise, with the future-tech.

hobofan 12y ago

In my opinion, Google is ahead of AWS in most aspects besides access control. GCE instances vs. EC2: faster boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types). Yes, Amazon offers a bigger variety of products, but the newer ones just scream vendor lock-in without much-added benefit. Why would I use Opsworks if Chef or Ansible work just as well?

devy 12y ago
What's the basis of your argument that Google Cloud is better? My personal experience has been exactly the opposite - AWS is light years ahead of Google Cloud. Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? For the longest time, it was only supporting Java and Python SDKs. And the Google's API is still very much lacking in terms of features and stacks. In fact the better support and much comprehensive services presents more choices rather than "vender lock-in". Keep in mind, all the auxiliary services are simply the open source technologies builds on top of AWS EC2 - if you like to spend time and money, you can totally build your own! And this is common, as we've just seen people complain about Google Cloud 4 days ago. https://yourbunnywrote.org/2015/04/19/google-cloud/ https://yourbunnywrote.org/2015/04/19/google-cloud/
- chisleu 12y ago
  Yep. Google hasn't met any of my needs when I play with it. I always end up back on AWS. Lambda is a stunning system IMHO. I do like Google's new DB. It is like an easy to use spark w/ cassandra backend, all behind the scenes. Very nice.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Lambda looks awesome... I'm tethered to Azure, so the closest I get is Azure App Service which works, but not as elegantly... Dokku-alt is working pretty well (testing now) as a deployment system... was looking kubernetes and the like, but it's overkill for my needs. Doesn't Amazon's mysql api fronted db work similar to google's?

nivla 12y ago

>"Since its inception, Amazon has refined and expanded AWS while competitors including Microsoft and Google have tried to replicate its success with similar projects. Those companies have only recently started to deliver basic services on par with Amazon’s." They could have summed up the whole thing as First-mover advantage. Amazon created this new market and when MS, Google etc saw a real opportunity in it, they wanted a piece of it and thus moved in by replicating the best features. Meanwhile for Amazon it was all about maintaining its majority share refining and expanding.

mdeeks 12y ago

Compared to Azure, yes. The IaaS offering on Azure has many, many limitations. It is also very difficult to use. There is no general pool of servers. You have to cram VMs into these groupings called "Cloud Services" which are limited to 50 VMs each. No support for TLS termination on their load balancers. SSDs are currently a "preview" feature and only work on a subset of hardware types. In all fairness AWS had a 4-5 year head start on Azure. Also there are a lot of really exciting things coming down the line for Azure. I don't expect this gap to last long. Competition is good!

btown 12y ago
SSDs, okay. That's something that's legitimately difficult to scale, particularly if you've invested heavily on spinning disks and made assumptions about their performance/reliability. I get that. But no TLS termination? At a company that has invested $15bn on their cloud products and has in-house expertise on the actual source code of one of the most widely-used networking stacks? That's... surprising, to say the least.
- nitramafve 12y ago
  What does the lack of SSL termination mean? We are running many services in Azure which we access using TLS1.2 via the loaf balancer so what would SSL termination add to this?
  - nolok 12y ago
    Wikipedia is short and to the point on this one > An SSL termination proxy is a proxy server that is used by an institution to handle incoming SSL connections, decrypting the SSL and passing on the unencrypted request to the institution's other servers (it is assumed that the institution's own network is secure so the user's session data does not need to be encrypted on that part of the link). SSL termination proxies are used to reduce the load on the main servers by offloading the cryptographic processing to another machine, and to support servers that do not support SSL, like Varnish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy