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> 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 provisionin

> 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.
      - discodave 12y ago
        I think derefr replied to your first two paragraphs nicely. "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." I think for a while some didn't believe how serious Google was about the whole selling cloud services thing. Now they do. Regarding Google and Amazon's disparate profitability: 1) Cash is arguably more important than profitability from an investment financing perspective. Amazon and Google are in the same ball park regarding free cash flow (>1B, <10B) and while Google has an enormous cash pile Amazon certainly has the ability to spend several tens of billions investing in their clouds in the next few years, as does Google. 2) Secondly, for the sake of their stock price, Google would be very hesitant to have their high margin search/ads business become dominated by a low-margin commodity cloud business. Their scope to use all of the free cash generated from search/ads for their cloud business is limited. Stock analysts don't like declining profitability whereas Amazon already has basically zero profits and is basically priced at a Price/Sales ratio like a large retailer.
  - jread 12y ago
    He may be comparing Google's total data center capacity (search, cloud, etc.) to AWS. I do monthly scraping to track cloud marketshare for Alexa 10k and Fortune 500. From that analysis, EC2 is at 12-14% marketshare compared to < 1% for GCE and 1-2% for Azure's VM service. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-alexa-fortune-500.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-ale...
    - nickbauman 12y ago
      Where is the other 84% going?
      - jpatokal 12y ago
        Presumably they're hosting directly instead of using third-party cloud services.

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.
    - discodave 12y ago
      I think derefr replied to your first two paragraphs nicely. "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." I think for a while some didn't believe how serious Google was about the whole selling cloud services thing. Now they do. Regarding Google and Amazon's disparate profitability: 1) Cash is arguably more important than profitability from an investment financing perspective. Amazon and Google are in the same ball park regarding free cash flow (>1B, <10B) and while Google has an enormous cash pile Amazon certainly has the ability to spend several tens of billions investing in their clouds in the next few years, as does Google. 2) Secondly, for the sake of their stock price, Google would be very hesitant to have their high margin search/ads business become dominated by a low-margin commodity cloud business. Their scope to use all of the free cash generated from search/ads for their cloud business is limited. Stock analysts don't like declining profitability whereas Amazon already has basically zero profits and is basically priced at a Price/Sales ratio like a large retailer.
- jread 12y ago
  He may be comparing Google's total data center capacity (search, cloud, etc.) to AWS. I do monthly scraping to track cloud marketshare for Alexa 10k and Fortune 500. From that analysis, EC2 is at 12-14% marketshare compared to < 1% for GCE and 1-2% for Azure's VM service. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-alexa-fortune-500.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-ale...
  - nickbauman 12y ago
    Where is the other 84% going?
    - jpatokal 12y ago
      Presumably they're hosting directly instead of using third-party cloud services.