The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
Its kind of ridiculous that this is the moment in time they decided to pull the plug. It feels like they leaked this to ensure they could get out of cloud by 2024.
GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters.
It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.
And you’re kind of demonstrating why enterprises don’t take GCP seriously.
How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you say and you might as well be speaking Greek.
The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose it.
You wouldnt mention jaeger or istio either to decision makers.
You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow).
You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of course this is all
moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont shut down by 2023.
Making operations google’s problem is precisely what drives BigQuery, FaaS and Dataflow adoption. Its operationally safer when you dont need a hadoop team to maintain your data infrastructure.
See Nytimes, Twitter and Spotify for examples.
Now if you’re talking about future-safety there was an argument...until a few hours ago.
Again, you’re talking about what’s “operationally safer” not what’s “reputationally safer”. If AWS goes down, no one is going to question your decision - and you’re in the same boat as a lot of other people. If GCP goes down and everyone else is up, people are going to ask a million question.
Every company you named isn’t the same thing as just arguing to the powers that be - AWS is what Netflix uses. AWS has many more “referencable clients” that matter.
We're fully adopted and couldn't be bigger fans. After about 2014 I feel like AWS just got into a "how many services can we launch" game but most (if not all) of them have poor reliability and poor docs. Google has fewer options, but what they ship works as advertised.
I agree the cloud (pun intended) of doubt is unsettling when you're considering a switch, but I'd consider risking it anyway. They do have a tendency to kill projects, but killing a capital investment of this size is a bigger pill to swallow than not supporting xyz software anymore. So even if they do exit, I imagine it would wind down slowly.
>When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
I would be soooo pissed if this happened. So much for marrying GCP. AWS and Azure are so much worse though. The price of good software is clearly very high.
The engineers from Amazon, Google and Microsoft should get together and make sure they're all using different metrics for success, so they can all be first at the same time. Or work out a schedule for who will be first which year.
The Information is a fantastic source, and I subscribed to support the excellent original reporting that comes out of it. Most of the news will get disseminated by other blogs and news journals in the next day or so, but The Information is pretty good if you want tech news first.
A big nugget from behind the paywall: "This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said."
The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current business plan: "The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market."
I signed up to the information for the same reason. Plus they actually have their paywall well designed. I get most of my news from them via email and I can read it right in my phone's gmail, versus everything else that has me sign up somewhere and then re-login every time. I wouldn't mind paying if the experience was at least seamless post payment.
Curious about what others think of the price. $399/year is pretty steep. Compared to, say Ben Thompson who I do subscribe to for $120/year. For younger (<=30) folks, there's a $199/year discounted price.
It's super steep. I think that their target market is businesses and people who can afford it. But I jumped on it when they offered the young professionals plan. Really just to support them over the exclusive access side of things.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this headline on Twitter. It's just kisses fingers.
So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that.
The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2].
Microsoft and Amazon don't even need to do anything. Knowing that there might only be 3 years of service remaining, I definitely won't use Google Cloud and I'll tell everyone I know not to use it too.
Microsoft Azure: The cloud service that wont abruptly close out of nowhere with no transition plan leaving you stranded, and a service that actually comes with that thing you call when you need help and support.
Mostly all you need to know about Microsoft's support lifecycle is that my Windows Mobile phone just got a security patch on Patch Tuesday, and apparently Microsoft also extended its support an extra month into January just because.
Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.
Like the Microsoft Azure "German Cloud", assured to be GDPR compliant. We spent quite some time and money to migrate from AWS to that solution in 2017.
Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019.
We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
If you still don't believe me, please provide your public key or email address so I can publish a response.
Maybe it doesn't stand out: Microsoft Germany delivered the promise that US authorities are technically unable to access stored data. The "new" data centers were without that promise, making the USP obsolete.
> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today.
> Existing customers are not affected by this and can continue to use the Germany cloud without restriction.
You don't see any Windows Phones being sold, but they still years later being supported with security updates.
No one can possibly fault a business for stopping continuing development of an unpopular offering. It's when it becomes unsupported and leaves people stranded that the the real problems happen.
Microsoft have plenty of platforms and products that were abandoned overnight. It’s hard for me to even think of Windows Phone, for example, without thinking of what happened to WP7 buyers when they abruptly pivoted their mobile OS/runtime strategy with the incompatible WP8. The most they got was a WP7.8 update that skinned the immediately-dead platform to look like the new one.
It’s a matter of visibility and what kind of customers own the products being shut down. From a PR perspective there’s a big difference between killing an enterprise product with few large customers, and killing a consumer product with many small ones. Even if the few complaints are louder, the many complaints around the latter would still totally drown it out. I’m sure they have analytics to know how many people still use Windows Phones and weighing the possibility of an outcry e.g. if all their unsupported phones got 0wned and they collectively took to Twitter about it.
Windows Phone was like the opposite of Microsoft's strategy over the last several decades. They decided to move fast and break things like we're all told to do and they were roundly punished in the marketplace for it.
They just lost my business. I was planning to use them over AWS for a new project. Now that I know they might cancel it like the other Google experiments, I'm not going to risk that investment. I'll stick with AWS.
They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible
The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
There are options other than "put your entire infrastructure on Amazon" and "hire someone fulltime to manage your physical infrastructure".
Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.
So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).
And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly.
Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for less than my hourly bill rate at this point.
I don't know what your company is but knowing it's sensibly renting rack space rather than jumping on the cloud bandwagon because it's the path of least resistance would give me confidence if I were a potential customer.
"The Cloud" is just managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS. There are literally thousands of such providers in the world, and until everything about providing managed hosting and SaaS/PaaS becomes impossible to compete on, there always will be.
The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones!
I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.
There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.
My job is managing infrastructure, services and products for large corporations in the cloud. It is managed hosting, and SaaS/PaaS, and yes, there are plenty of providers who have alternatives that we regularly use, in addition to being able to build our own with mostly open source tools. It's part of my job to find alternatives so we don't get into a jam when the one solution we use becomes unusable.
The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.
If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not.
Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
That's a statement that cries out for analysis, although I'm not doubting you could be right still - it's not the kind of thing one just states without backing it up.
Reader was written using a bunch of proprietary Google tools, deployed on proprietary Google infrastructure and used a proprietary Google system for authentication.
It's hard to even imagine how it could have been split apart from the mothership at all.
So I just counted my RSS feeds via Live Bookmarks (dang you Firefox for killing them shakes cane) and I have 60+(! I expected like 30 tops) RSS feeds that I check regularly.
Most sites have RSS feeds, even the heavy hitters like YouTube.
How is it ridiculous? The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met. It's a bit hard to grow without investing, so it smells to me like a precursor to sustained engineering.
Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.
> The article said GCP would receive reduced invesment if that target isn't met.
And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?
Google has built a strong reputation as a company that shuts down any product or service that isn't #1 in the target market. it is not unreasonable to believe that might extend to their third- or fourth-place GCP product.
If he sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023 or we will decrease our investments in the retail parts of the company" I might be worried that the retail parts of the company were going to enter into a death spiral given Amazon's problems with quality control already.
If I also thought it was unlikely that they would hit their target I would be really worried (assuming of course I had any reason to actually worry about how Amazon's business was doing)
If we were talking about a company that had a history of shutting down successful divisions because they were not successful enough I would think "hey 2023 is when the shutting down process is likely to start"
>Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS
That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well.
We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy.
Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.
Of all the comments about damage in this thread I think this is the most damaging. In other words if I were AWS and Microsoft sales I would be calling all the big clients on Google Cloud and scaring them about their future prospects and wooing them with some sweet deal.
Even if Google does an about face in tomorrows news cycle the time for MS and AWS to strike is now.
Different articles and sources give different numbers, so don't take this as gospel, but:
IBM's *-as-a-service ARR is larger than Google Cloud's.
Oracle claims theirs is too, but my understanding is that they roll a lot of their licensing costs into the same reporting, so it's hard to tell for sure.
From what I have seen Alibaba cloud is #3. Don't forget that China is a huge market, and it is very hard for Western companies to be successful there. Alibaba has China government backing and that relationship is allowing them a lot of access in China
For example, AWS China and Azure Operated by 21Vianet (official name of Azure China) are operated independently by Chinese companies, and have incomplete integrations with the rest of their services, because of how hard Chinese govt compliance is. And GCP only has a location in Hong Kong, which means Chinese users can mostly access it but it's unreliable https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649
It really depends on how you split the numbers. It's kind of like saying SQL and Excel are the most popular programming languages... yeah, but they've captured a far different market than most people would consider to be the "programming" field.
A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.
If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don't want to support anymore.
The thing that scares me the most, is some automated system deciding that I did something wrong without telling me and banning not only my Google Cloud account but also all of my personal google accounts.
Or, alternately, some automated system linking personal and work identities, a misunderstanding occurring on a personal side project of any of our developers (say, a misconfigured email send that's flagged as spammy, or someone's personal blog that's hacked and has malware uploaded)... and our entire startup going offline as a result.
It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
GCP has the same support model as AWS. You don't get to enter cases with either free plan, your support is posting on forums and hoping for answers. If you want to pay then you have different levels of access to varying response times.
The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here.
We're on Google because we're not betting the farm on them or anyone else. Google has the best Kubernetes hosting, but using Kubernetes allows us to move if anything drastic changes.
This whole idea of basing your entire company’s infrastructure on a non responsive provider is so foreign to me. We have the regular old Business Support Plan with AWS and we can always reach a live person by opening a ticket and starting a live chat. It’s only $100/month minimum or 10% of your monthly spend with discounts. We go through an APN so I doubt we are paying that much even though we are a small company.
Having gone through a 6 week long process just to get a working replacement for my Pixel 3, I vowed not to use Google Cloud for fear of a similar opaque customer support experience. I can't fathom the amount of organizational change that would be required to make Google a customer focused organization nor how they could possibly communicate that change to all the people they've burned.
Google sure is nowhere near as capable or even willing as Microsoft or Amazon; heck even IBM through Red Hat could prove a much better steward for its enterprise customers.
But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure.
So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows.
Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever.
This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market.
When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.
Im also wondering what “best” or “winning” means in this context. Theres no way they’ll surpass AWS in revenue in 3 years so whats the dimension of quality here?
You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products (nonexistent) with support for paid services.
Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.
Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.
I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud.
It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.
If your company has a widespread perception to have some of the worst support in the industry you have a problem, even if that perception isn't entirely accurate in all cases.
Any inaccurate perceptions users have are Google's fault anyway. They name every product "Google {{service_name}}" and do nothing to differentiate which services have real support and which ones only let you yell into the void.
The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.
Part of Google's problem is that Amazon will give you a refund on a shirt you ordered and then have customer support walk you through setting up AWS services to run your website.
Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.
Sorry, I left out a key part of my argument. Google scales by automating everything they can, keeping people out of the way. Making customers happy isn't something you can automate, it requires the human touch.
We get good support. But recently I think I have heard about big/huge potential customers of us tell us that they are scared of moving because Google suddenly starts ghosting them.
Their support is garbage. Their only answer to getting better support is to get a TAM. Which is completely ridiculous. Plus their SLA isn't worth the paper it is written on. They deny any SLA compensation unless your application is FT over 3 or more AZs.
They deny any SLA compensation unless your application is FT over 3 or more AZs.
For what it's worth, the 3 AZs requirement is their internal policy as well, and they intentionally run exercises where they randomly shut down important looking data centers to verify that failover is working correctly.
If you haven't set up your application to continue working if the plug is pulled on the data center, there is a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to intentional action.
To be fair, there is also a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to other people's actions. My two favorite examples are, "Gypsies stole the cables to the data center so that they could sell the metal in it" and "Hunters used the shiny supports for the cables for target practice." These happened in Eastern Europe and Oregon respectively.
On the flip side, their tools make it really easy to have your software run extremely robustly. Even if Gypsies or hunters attempt to ruin your day.
Oh yeah? I remember a story about GCP shutting down an entire large enterprise customers GCP account and turning off all their services over some minor billing thing.
No notice. No warning. No email or call. Just bam - your infrastructure is offline.
Now maybe they've gotten better. But this was only a year ago. You have to at least acknowledge that they are quite frequently not at all on par with organizations known for customer service in this time such as Microsoft.
I'm not an Apple dev, but you just reminded me of Apple's excellent support. I got a problem on my development account and immediately received a phone call from a human helping me solving the issue.
Their payed support is terrible and getting worse. We've had no end of issues with being told incorrect advice, being advised on how to administer our systems (when its very clear the problem is with the infrastructure). We've had disks corrupted, which is theory impossible. The list goes on and on an on.
As an Xoogler and someone who used GCP professionally I had numerous issues with their support, especially when helping customers launch brand new projects.
It’s interesting seeing the rapid turn-around of opinions on HN. Before everyone said GCP offered the best experience and disregarded Azure. Now people bag on GCP and praise AWS and Azure for their customer/service support.
Reminds me of Ray Noorda[1]. Nothing good ever happens when companies focus entirely on their competitors. If Google really wants to beat Amazon & Microsoft in "Cloud", they should focus entirely on the customer and the value they can provide that customer.
From the Everything Store,
“We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else.”
I interviewed him a few times and I don't think that was strictly true. Perhaps near the end where Windows NT and OS/2 were taking chunks out of Netware
Did you miss that the complete headline is actually 'Google execs reportedly debated getting out of cloud computing, but instead set a goal of being a top-two player by 2023'?
I can't imagine a more damaging leak for Google Cloud. A company that's already notorious for abandoning projects now has a public date for when they'll abandon cloud. How could anyone in their right mind start building on GCP? They may as well shut it down today.
"That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information."
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
For one thing, there is a lot of resentment about their lower quality bar. I am not a googler and never have been, but GCP has hired a lot of people I wouldn't hire even on a dare.
The Stadia pro tier fee is just $9.99/mo. The GPU and CPU you could consume playing a AAA game on that (yes, even on the purported "medium" settings) for just a few hours a day surely far exceeds what it could be sold for wholesale.
Don't forget that they value new ways of spying on users at a non-zero dollar amount, and probably intended to slap ads all over the interface (maybe—maybe—not the games themselves) to make up the difference, or at least were holding that possibility in reserve in case it was needed or they just wanted to kick returns up a notch later (I'd be shocked if it didn't come up in any "decks" used to sell the project internally).
Fair, and that was certainly the YouTube model— years of free video hosting to saturate the market, now preroll and interstitials everywhere with "YouTube Premium" just a click away.
They don't have to match what it would be sold for wholesale though, just need to match the marginal cost. A graphics card that can run a AAA game is less than $500, so I don't think they are losing much on $9.99 a month. That's over $100 a year, and if each users plays 3 hours a day you can have 8 users using the same hardware at different times.
Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are other costs as well, but it seems realistic that they are making money off of it.
That's assuming people play games in well-defined shifts. I find it more likely to have 8 users play between 8pm and 11pm and zero users for the rest of the day.
Games are latency sensitive and thus region sensitive. Multiplexing opportunities here are poor. Stadia is a terrible idea business-wise as Google has defined it.
> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)
What. The. Fuck.
First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will they charge us for having memories of their IP?
We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The rent-seekers are taking ownership away.
> (Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)
That is a factually incorrect statement. You lose access to any games you claimed for free as a benefit of your Stadia Pro membership if you cancel your membership; you regain access to those games if you renew, but you will not gain access to games that were offered for free during any interval where you were not a subscriber.
You retain access to any game you paid for, _even_ if you paid a discounted rate as a result of being a Stadia Pro member, even if your subscription is canceled.
Thanks for the info. I've been considering a new console purchase and had basically ruled out Stadia immediately due to the subscription requirement. This changes things a bit but I still don't like the fact that I can't play something without a connection to the big Google. I suppose this is just what it feels like to be part of a generation falling out of the marketing window.
By this strategy, which disregard customer confidence completely, considering that Stadia isn't exactly well received, I seriously doubt I will put my money on it getting anywhere.
Agreed, this is a disaster. A lot of leaks simply don't matter all that much-- Apple might get annoyed at iPhone leaks, but they probably don't affect sales one bit-- but this is dead serious.
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
Something along the lines of "Google execs considered cutting GCP, later decided to set 2023 as a deadline for improved financial performance."
A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.
I'm curious what sorts of things you had running and how complex moving off was. I'd expect any cut to have some announcement period, which I'd expect to be longer than a few months, so you may not have needed to migrate so soon.
Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG. They’ll have to keep it running to prevent people leaving because of the leak so they’ll do something drastic like pledge 10 years of support or something.
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
It always seems to me Google won the Search Engine battle, ads became their revenue source, and that is it. Android came out of necessity and stupidity of Microsoft at the time.
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
Google could very well be a one hit wonder. Coming from someone who works at a company with one successful product and many failed ones: Maybe they are too wealthy to want a second success. Life is cozy.
If the metric for success is revenue then, no, they are not by any sensible measure super successful. Their revenue combined it’s a small fraction of search/ads.
By that standard, practically all other companies are failures, since practically all other companies pale in comparison to Google search. So I would say your claim is absurd.
There's no evidence that YouTube is profitable[1]. In fact, there's no evidence any of this is profitable.
Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search.
Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem.
That leaves Drive, which might have some good margins, but they give it away for free to many users...
Every day that Youtube exists without competitors it further solidifies itself as the only video platform like itself that will exist.
Gmail makes money from business users and I would go as so far to say that if it doesn't make more money that Drive now it will make more money in 10 years from people who have lived their entire lives inside of a gmail account using it for business.
It said in the article G Suite might account for the bulk of Google Clouds revenue, since its combined in their financial reports with the infrastructure stuff and G Suite is extremely popular.
> Maybe this helps GCP as the leak now makes this reputational for GOOG.
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
CTOs and CEOs who matter do not give shit about these sort of leaks. Google cloud is unlikely going anywhere because it is the same thing on which Google runs. Unless Google itself is shutting down the marginal cost of providing GCP to the rest of the world is less (still in billions though).
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
The fact that it was mentioned in a meeting doesn't mean it was on the table. I'd more concerned with management if they weren't talking about exit points for a risky venture. A perfectly necessary point of consideration and I don't doubt that the same topic came up at Amazon and Microsoft.
For Google, if this is still a 'risky venture' then they are simply in the wrong business, they have the scale and should be able to offer their infrastructure at a cost that is quite profitable. There is plenty wrong with Amazon but they have never ever given off signals that they might withdraw their infrastructure offerings from the market. Microsoft also hasn't but then again, they do have a history of launching stuff and withdrawing it again (Xbox the notable exception, that took forever to take off and they stuck with it). Google has taken products off the market not because they weren't profitable but because they weren't profitable enough. That's the nightmare of early infrastructure adopters who will - by that time - be bound hand and feet.
If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit.
That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided.
Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.
Nobody sent these signals. It was a minor discussion a long time ago. The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.
You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
The article does not make it out to be a minor discussion and it was only 18 months ago, hardly 'a long time'. To me it is quite shocking that as short as 18 months ago Google would still consider pulling out of the market but then again, that is exactly the same play they did with other products so it probably should not surprise me.
> The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.
At Google's level I would not expect less than billions in investment, the growth of the platform is for now still substantially lagging behind the competition as far as I know, the bulk of the companies I look at are solidly in the AWS camp or in some cases running on Azure, Google is still the exception but getting more common over time. I look at about 50 companies / year so that's a relatively small sample but they are typically well funded start-ups or later stage established companies.
> You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
I suspect this is down to how it's phrased by someone who may not be familiar with strategic planning.
It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.
So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:
1. Invest More + High Growth
2. Invest More + Low Growth
3. Maintain Investment + High Growth
4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth
5. Divest
You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.
So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.
Dude, You're comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare GCP in 2017/2018 which is when the article refers to this conversation to AWS which predates it by 10 years. You don't think that AWS execs and Amazon execs had conversation about profitability in 2006?
Google has offered cloud computing with the release of app engine almost a decade ago. They kept it running this whole time and have only added to the platform.
The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.
Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.
Again, having the option numbers crunched is not the same as discussing it or seriously considering it. "Quit" and "Do Nothing" should always be included in scenario planning. Especially the latter, because by ordinary momentum it's usually what happens.
I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".
Why so much significance to such a minor line in a meeting years ago? What about the part where it was dismissed? Or does that part not matter?
I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap.
It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.
Interestingly we don’t even know if Azure is making a lot of money because Microsoft obscures it even harder than Google in their financial reports.
Microsoft has one hell of an enterprise sales and marketing machine though, probably the best in the world, so I’d assume they are doing quite well, even if they are mostly reinvesting it.
Nothing makes me want to subscribe to a company's offerings more than timelines, or threats it might be eliminated. That is one of the many reasons why GCP has not taken off; outside of Amazon and Microsoft just having much better salesmen/women.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
"The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. "
> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
That only means that the team's head is on the chopping block. That's all.
> 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
This assertion is utterly absurd as you're describing the world's third largest cloud provider, and thus one of the dominant players, of being "underperforming" and justifying pulling the plug on a 8 billion-dolar a year business.
> Google is far from the world’s “third largest provider”
You're being a bit disingenuous. Your own source states quite clearly that Google is in the 3rd spot and arguably, if you cherry-pick results, you can place it in 4th.
By cherry-picked results I'm referring to posting 2018 results and ignoring how GCP's revenue doubled in the last 18 months, nearly matching Azure's revenue.
> So let’s look at the raw marketshare. It’s 10% of AWS.
Yes, AWS is 1st. What's your point? Azure is 2nd and GCP is currently 3rd and catching up with Azure. What does AWS has to do with whether GCP is 3rd or 4th?
I believe the 8 billion a year number includes its G-Suite products. My understanding is that GCP itself makes only around 1-2 billion a year (excluding G-Suite). That doesn't seem enough to cover the CapEx, OpEx and engineering costs they are sinking into keeping GCP running.
Only Amazon breaks out its AWS numbers completely today, but the other cloud providers bundle their cloud computing numbers together with other "cloud" numbers, so it makes it very confusing to keep track of what numbers people are talking about.
That makes sense in the abstract but of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of projects Google is currently working on, how many outside of Ads make a sizable amount of profit?
A mildly successful cloud provider would probably make FAR more money long term than the median Google product. Pulling the plug on GCP to build a couple dozen projects that will mostly get killed themselves seems like a huge waste, even without considering all of the negative externalities of burning even more customers by cancelling a major service.
If you look at the way profits are distributed in a category, this goal makes perfect logical sense. What percentage of ad-tech profits do you think Google gets from being #1?
Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to be #1 in every business you touch.
I'm fairly certain Google Cloud is not profitable. Even if it is profitable, Google will divest from business that don't hit a certain scale (billion $ businesses). Basically their goal is to never have employees staffed on projects which yield a low $ / employee ratio. They will invest for a while, but pull the plug after some arbitrary time if it doesn't hit the scale.
Exactly, which is the exact opposite of what AWS is doing. They have how many services that very few people use now? But at least they respect their customers and view the cost of running those services as goodwill for their customers.
It's the opposite of what AWS is doing, but not what Amazon as a whole is doing. There was a recent article that said they're considering cost-cutting in the Alexa business unit [1].
They like to use small teams. I wouldn't be surprised if their least-used AWS product is still profitable (aside from brand-new stuff or obvious non-profits like Deep Racer). The idea is to get people into AWS and help keep them there. You don't do that by making life harder or unpredictable for your customers.
And that's not a bad way to move at least in the short term. The problem is that longterm, people will avoid your products pre-emptively for fear of them being vaporware. Especially with something as serious as cloud implementation in an organization. I would hate to be the guys who now have to rearch all their applications to go from GCP to AWS.
Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)
Since at least as of this writing, nobody else has mentioned this, and it's always someone's day [1] to hear something the first time, this is a variant of something that goes very far back in our industry called the Osbourne Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.
Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.
So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.
(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
anyone who will get money if Google Cloud doesn't, or anyone who doesn't like whoever is running Google Cloud or thinks that anyone associated with Google Cloud that pulls it off will be a competitor for the next raise in level etc. etc.
This is like corporate infighting for comedies set in the 50s really.
In any enterprise competitor doesn't mean a similar product, it means any unit who can get headcount, budget etc. Google said in Q3 that they were spending a ton to grow cloud - which makes all the other kingdom building VPs concerned - they are the competition. Youtube, Gsuite, Ads, whatever else google hasn't abandoned that they charge for.
I don't doubt that Amazon.com runs on its own dedicated "installation" of AWS, but are you saying that it doesn't run on AWS at all? That doesn't jive with the infamous "API mandate" email that Bezos wrote that essentially kicked off AWS. Have I been misunderstanding that email all along?
If you think the API mandate necessitated or created AWS then yes, you misunderstand that memo. The API memo simply mandated a service-oriented architecture. That can run on any compute and indeed predates AWS by several years.
The origins of AWS are entirely unrelated, Amazon simply realized it was good at operating infrastructure. This led to the conception of offering infrastructure as a service. The initial AWS service offerings were built based on Amazon's experience and expertise but were not the literal internal services of Amazon.
Amazon (or Google, or Microsoft) is an anomaly, the things Amazon needs to operate Amazon.com are very very different from what most companies need. The internal services and architecture are purpose built although today they do heavily leverage AWS under the hood. Amazon.com is just a customer of AWS, there's no special installation.
Almost nobody needs Amazon.com's infrastructure (except Amazon) or could even afford to staff it. What people do need are generalized, managed services they can combine for their own use cases.
I'm confused because on the one hand you say that their needs are very different and then on the other hand you say that they are using AWS. Another commenter also pointed out that they are using AWS.
I think the only needs that are likely different are scale, so bigger instances, and the fact that they have a massive legacy infrastructure that can't be easily migrated off of. So that's pretty much what I would expect; Amazon.com does use AWS for new stuff but is still operating a lot of legacy as well.
Amazon uses AWS for some new stuff. New AWS services high up in the stack like AI services run mostly on AWS. Most infra-AWS services run on foundational AWS services like EC2 and S3. Foundational AWS services (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc.) don't run on AWS for obvious chicken-and-egg reasons. For all of the things that are done by latecomer AWS services you can count on there being an unrelated internal tool, since clearly Amazon was doing those things before they launched those services.
This article lists some of the AWS services that now power Amazon.com since they moved away from Oracle. So, while it may not have been true in the past, it does now appear that AWS powers a significant portion of Amazon.com.
Amazon using AWS today is entirely different from the origins of AWS or GCP or Azure being productizations of internal infrastructure.
AWS services have always been their own thing, they happen to be useful so today Amazon utilizes them just like anyone else. That doesn't mean the services started internally.
I think you're being a bit too literal here. Did AWS merely fork the infrastructure that Amazon.com runs on and start selling it, no. But are you telling me that it wasn't built on the lessons learned of amazon.com and that it doesn't share some aspects of how amazon.com worked a the time (with improvements to the bad parts)? I don't know the answer and maybe it was a clean-room implementation but that seems unlikely to me.
> Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast majority of its internal servers to Azure, including its SAP implementation, payment systems, and test systems. This has helped Microsoft learn what it takes to run the technology on an enterprise scale.
That's normal progression. Hardly anyone at Microsoft used Azure in the beginning either, it takes a few years for teams to move infra and deprecate old stuff.
Same for Amazon, it took them very long also, including dedicated internal projects with focus on moving. But majority of Amazon and Microsoft workloads now run on their respective cloud offerings.
Google is probably still be at least 3-5 years before that would happen be aligned. GCP is quite immature and young, which this leak highlights also. I assume this would mean that also internal teams at Google won't be moving workloads to GCP.
Good point. Google using GCP internally would be strong validation of the product and I think add more comfort for enterprising adopting it.
E.g. what coup would be for Google Search to run on GCP. Imagine the CIO conversation of, “well, if it is good enough for google search, it must be good for me”.
This deadline should never have been set in the first place. They should have attached a massive bonus if they exceeded the target by that date instead. Of course, the CEO could have in their head the deadline, but that's be announced internally at earliest 6 months ahead of time.
Only way Google perhaps can take a lead in Cloud is if they invent a new paradigm - quantum cloud or something (just to illustrate the point). That is, change the game and not change themselves for the current game.
Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.
Just spitballing: what if they rented compute based on sandboxed access to the huge trove of behavioral and activity data they have on their users (which amounts to everyone who uses the web)?
It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
The United States has no data protection laws to speak of (over this kind of data). Renting/selling access to run queries over this sort of data is entirely legal. All it
would take is another half dozen years of our society continuing to move in the direction it has already on privacy.
It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...
Yeah, why not play the long game by focusing on providing a great experience for developers? Enable today's hobbyists to start the companies of tomorrow on your platform, and let go of chasing the #1 spot with enterprise customers of today. Cloud computing as a market isn't going anywhere, and demand is only going to grow for the foreseeable future.
Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot more sense than AWS.
I'm astounded that they would seriously consider closing GCP after committing so much time, money, and effort into building it.
Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.
Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
However tempting (and it is very tempting), how much they’ve already spent should never figure in this kind of decision (aka the sunk cost fallacy). What matters is the return they will get from future commitments.
More precisely, always have a backup plan. Nothing wrong with running on GCP if you're using it in a platform-abstract way (either by using it as a simple hosting provider, or by going through a layer like the "serverless" framework).
I never thought they would shut down Google+ either. It may have been a “failure” in the sense of not beating Facebook, but it had enough traction among hacker circles especially that I assumed it was here to stay just as the cross-Google identity system if not a standalone Facebook-alike.
In my opinion, it's just a consequence of the culture of stack ranking. The only thing that promotes you is if you deliver something. Not supporting something well. Not having an established, loyal customer base. Or, even if you provide good support/bug fixing. It's make something go public. Doesn't matter in what state. It's why I wasn't in the least shocked about Stadia's problems.
Amazon has stack ranking and hasn't fallen into this particular trap. It all depends on what you prioritize and what you reward. At Amazon, I got the sense that it was actually harder to get a promo if you were on a secret new product team. I'd heard younger engineers talk about doing stints in less fashionable departments as the ladders seemed easier to climb.
Google just seems to care about the launch. Not how happy customers are. Not how much money is pulled in. Not how well it fits in with the overall strategic vision of the company. Just launch points.
GCP can seriously be #1 because their kubernetes platform and cloud platform is much better than other cloud providers I have used. I started off with their Google Cloud Engine (?) and Big Table they provided and even though it was not really pure Java, I loved it.
And then they pulled the plug on my accounts because some of my android apps had "likeness or similarity to other apps" which I have absolutely no idea what it meant. Then they pulled the plugs on my colleague's account because of equally vague reason.
This feels like a threat. Are they going to graveyard Google cloud? Probably not. But they've discontinued so many random, good services that I'm cautious to 'learn' a new Google tool. I wouldn't want to invest in a product only to be forced to transition to AWS in 3 years. Might as well just skip to AWS.
I have a hard time believing articles from sources with no track record making bold claims. Seriously, "theinformation.com" and hardly anyone is skeptical?
> If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely.
If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google's flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.
Google Cloud was always a "become number one or die" thing. Same with Google Plus.
Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform. That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will never be profitable at Googles current level of investment.
You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to carry on running as before.
The crazy part about this is that in the meeting of setting targets one option that came up was folding the cloud unit entirely. And this was already after billions invested.
I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.
Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
All cloud computing put together is less than 10% of total enterprise computings.
Again are they profitable? If the article is to be believed, there own management doesn’t think so and as I posted below, they are distant third at less than 5%.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadThe Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.
When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.
On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.
Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.
GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters.
It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.
How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you say and you might as well be speaking Greek.
The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose it.
You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow).
You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of course this is all moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont shut down by 2023.
See Nytimes, Twitter and Spotify for examples.
Now if you’re talking about future-safety there was an argument...until a few hours ago.
Every company you named isn’t the same thing as just arguing to the powers that be - AWS is what Netflix uses. AWS has many more “referencable clients” that matter.
I agree the cloud (pun intended) of doubt is unsettling when you're considering a switch, but I'd consider risking it anyway. They do have a tendency to kill projects, but killing a capital investment of this size is a bigger pill to swallow than not supporting xyz software anymore. So even if they do exit, I imagine it would wind down slowly.
And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.
A big nugget from behind the paywall: "This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said."
The article also claims Google Cloud isn't profitable under their current business plan: "The group’s leaders told staffers that if Google couldn’t reach a certain size with its computing and storage business—two of the most commonly used cloud services—the cloud unit might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said, Google would need to be in a top two position in the market."
http://thein.fo/youngpros
So now that everyone knows they are waffling on whether to stay in the business (and have a deadline), Microsoft and Amazon just need to increase the competitive intensity for the next few years to drive Google out and instead of cloud computing being an oligopoly it'll be a duopoly.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible, because the long-term future of this market is AWS and Azure being an extremely high margin duopoly with massive barriers to entry. You might see aggressive competition before 2023, but 10 years out it's not going to be that.
The NYT wrote a piece a few days ago about certain startups considering antitrust complaints against AWS, and more of them should consider that [1]. The FTC is investigating AWS [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-cloud-business-ft...
The marketing writes itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QI4KmlcQr4
Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.
Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019.
We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)
No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.
https://hackernoon.com/microsoft-announces-the-end-of-the-ge...
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/14944
If you still don't believe me, please provide your public key or email address so I can publish a response.
Maybe it doesn't stand out: Microsoft Germany delivered the promise that US authorities are technically unable to access stored data. The "new" data centers were without that promise, making the USP obsolete.
> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today.
> Existing customers are not affected by this and can continue to use the Germany cloud without restriction.
You don't see any Windows Phones being sold, but they still years later being supported with security updates.
No one can possibly fault a business for stopping continuing development of an unpopular offering. It's when it becomes unsupported and leaves people stranded that the the real problems happen.
It’s a matter of visibility and what kind of customers own the products being shut down. From a PR perspective there’s a big difference between killing an enterprise product with few large customers, and killing a consumer product with many small ones. Even if the few complaints are louder, the many complaints around the latter would still totally drown it out. I’m sure they have analytics to know how many people still use Windows Phones and weighing the possibility of an outcry e.g. if all their unsupported phones got 0wned and they collectively took to Twitter about it.
They have a great platform, but I think they've just lost the war by the top brass waffling on this. That's a shame. There could have been a lot of money in third place, and as long as you're in the game there is a non zero probability of moving up the ladder.
The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
Unless you have some truly massive amount of hardware (in which case it's _definitely_ cheaper to hire someone than pay Amazon), you can generally just set it up and forget about it save for periodic maintenance and emergencies.
So what you really need to pay for is the time of someone who can do these things for you and funnily enough, such a service exists. I believe it's common in the not-startup world: a managed services provider (MSP).
And in the end this really depends on what the business is actually doing. AWS is _really_ price inefficient but in particular for bandwidth. If you're doing anything bandwidth-heavy like video, images or backup, you want to keep the hell away from any kind of cloud.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...
The only "duopoly" will be in terms of the hyper-scale size of such providers, but very, very, very few customers actually need such hyper-scale. Not to mention, you literally get to pick and choose how much of their tech you use, limiting any potential risk of lock-in. Not to mention, the hyper-scale providers are probably the most expensive ones!
I think this is all very over-blown. AWS's services are fantastic for scaling up services quickly, and their customer focus is great, but if they were all gone tomorrow we'd still be doing the same things as before, just slower and with less reliable infrastructure.
There are literally hundreds of services offered by AWS and Azure outside of what you are thinking of "rented servers". These things cannot be replaced by "managed hosting". Not that they would be slower and less reliable, these services don't even exist outside the cloud providers.
The most "cutting edge" things I remember announced at re:Invent 2019 were machine learning and AI stuff, but it was all stuff integrating with existing 3rd-party services and products. They know you want to be able to work with somebody else's tool, and they want to make it easier for you to spend money using that tool on their systems. The bulk of AWS's income is still EC2 (and data transfer); the rest is window dressing to keep you from looking elsewhere.
If Jeff Bezos sent an email to the company saying "We want retail revenue to increase by X% by 2023" would you assume that they'd shutter the whole thing if they didn't meet that goal? Of course not.
Why is a goal and strategy for Google treated differently?
Things like Google Reader had healthy user bases when Google came for them in the night.
They could even sell most of the products they murder to someone else for millions.
It would have cost Google more money to sell Reader than anyone would have bought it for.
It's hard to even imagine how it could have been split apart from the mothership at all.
No. The technology died. Isn't this clear evidence that the product was dead in the water?
I wonder if anyone in Google management ever looks back and regrets that decision?
It's still always being brought up, even 6.5 years later.
I couldn't actually read the news in it anymore.
Most sites have RSS feeds, even the heavy hitters like YouTube.
These are not really comparable worlds.
Google migrated from a weird, Apple like "come buy stuff from us, but first solve this riddle" sales process with reps with huge territories to a more traditional enterprise model. Based on Linkedin updates, the Oracle class of 2015 has basically moved in on the sales side. Those guys usually make premium bank, so they need to bang out deals or GTFO.
And the comments upthread said that GCP would be terminated instantly if that target isn't met. You genuinely don't see the disconnect in that interpretation?
If I also thought it was unlikely that they would hit their target I would be really worried (assuming of course I had any reason to actually worry about how Amazon's business was doing)
If we were talking about a company that had a history of shutting down successful divisions because they were not successful enough I would think "hey 2023 is when the shutting down process is likely to start"
You can't predict the future.
Just build your workloads to be cloud agnostic. If prices ever change, then you can move your workload wherever it makes sense at that time.
Locking yourself into a colo architecture is just as risky as locking yourself into AWS.
That's the game theoretical predicament: Colo's can take advantage of all this and increase their prices as well.
We just don't know how this whole thing will shake out. Given that uncertainty, I think you're proposing the only reasonable way forward for a little guy.
Be agnostic. Meliorate your market position by differentiating in some key area of your business where you can actually secure a competitive advantage.
They may have numbers due to Chinese usage, but no Western company is going to use Chinese hosting, ever.
IBM's *-as-a-service ARR is larger than Google Cloud's.
Oracle claims theirs is too, but my understanding is that they roll a lot of their licensing costs into the same reporting, so it's hard to tell for sure.
This gives Alibaba a huge advantage domestically.
Funny that China has a new law allowing them access to any data stored there, so it may stick to operating only in China...
A service that only exists in China to serve the Chinese audience may be bigger than worldwide services that serve worldwide audiences, but it's kind of irrelevant if you're not a Chinese company doing business exclusively in China.
It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.
The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here.
https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/
All of your vendors are just as responsive.
But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure.
So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows.
Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever.
This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market.
When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.
Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.
Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.
I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud.
It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.
The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.
Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.
Edit to add: if the customers have a choice. Telecoms do just fine because there's not really an option that will make you happy.
Amazon is able to scale 'making customers happy' fairly well.
It is all about the company's priorities and the direction that the leaders steer the company. Perverse incentives reap perverse rewards.
Amazon won't cancel my AWS service because they don't like the shirt I ordered.
Having personally lost a Google account, the risk of using them for something business critical seems epic.
Garbage.
For what it's worth, the 3 AZs requirement is their internal policy as well, and they intentionally run exercises where they randomly shut down important looking data centers to verify that failover is working correctly.
If you haven't set up your application to continue working if the plug is pulled on the data center, there is a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to intentional action.
To be fair, there is also a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to other people's actions. My two favorite examples are, "Gypsies stole the cables to the data center so that they could sell the metal in it" and "Hunters used the shiny supports for the cables for target practice." These happened in Eastern Europe and Oregon respectively.
On the flip side, their tools make it really easy to have your software run extremely robustly. Even if Gypsies or hunters attempt to ruin your day.
No notice. No warning. No email or call. Just bam - your infrastructure is offline.
[1] https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...
Now maybe they've gotten better. But this was only a year ago. You have to at least acknowledge that they are quite frequently not at all on par with organizations known for customer service in this time such as Microsoft.
People are quick to grab their pitchforks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda
Noorda's problem was he was completely, utterly, obsessed with his competition.
Too absurd for reality.
Or is it more the fact they considered it at all?
Can't imagine a leak like that happening. This leak could very well have been planted by MS or Oracle to help them sell their own cloud to clients.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...
I don't work at google so I have no idea of knowing what it's like.
Turns out that setting absurdly high hiring bars doesn't mean much if you don't make products people like, and kill off the ones that people do.
You can't plant a leak, if it's planted by a 3rd party it's either a lie it's or a leak.
Now I don't think they are using consumer hardware, and there are other costs as well, but it seems realistic that they are making money off of it.
Google can utilize dark GPU hardware for numerous tasks. For example, YouTube video transcoding, ML, and Cloud batch processing.
Games, like websites, seem to expand to fit the available space. Today's smartphones would beat a ten year old mega-powered gaming PC.
(Incidentally, and you lose the game if you cancel your Stadia subscription.)
What. The. Fuck.
First, they took our physical games and media away. Then they made us subscribe. Now they take away everything when we stop paying for our subscriptions? I can't even conceive of what the next step will be -- will they charge us for having memories of their IP?
We need to reduce copyright terms and kill this cancer of IP hoarding. The rent-seekers are taking ownership away.
They take away the games you claimed as a Pro subscriber - similar to how PS+ works. If you claim a game on PS+ and quit PS+, you lose those games.
If you buy the game you can keep it and still play it even after you're done subscribing.
That is a factually incorrect statement. You lose access to any games you claimed for free as a benefit of your Stadia Pro membership if you cancel your membership; you regain access to those games if you renew, but you will not gain access to games that were offered for free during any interval where you were not a subscriber.
You retain access to any game you paid for, _even_ if you paid a discounted rate as a result of being a Stadia Pro member, even if your subscription is canceled.
Oh, so if I cancel my Stadia subscription I can still play the games?
As far as I can tell from [1] the situation is:
* Per-game purchase price.
* There's a free 1080p streaming tier.
* There's a $10/mo 4k streaming tier, which also includes discounts on games and some free games.
* However, you won't be able to convert your Stadia-purchased games into local games or Steam codes.
* And of course you won't be able to close your Stadia/Google account and still keep your games.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-06-06-google-stadia-...
I hope Google's C-suite is treating this article as the PR equivalent of a Sev-1 servers-on-fire emergency, because it is. If they don't come out swinging today and announcing that they're all-in on GCP for the long haul, it's toast. It may be toast even if they do.
A few months ago, someone I know who is close to the issue mentioned something along these exact lines to me. I shortly moved all of my GCP projects to a self-hosted server. Glad I did it.
Think how good your rates might be for the last six months of 2022!
This is what has always terrified me about GCP. The business mode wasn’t there so I haven’t done anything serious since they killed/overhauled app engine years ago (aws seems to always make stuff better and I think Microsoft has bet the whole company on azure).
Comparatively speaking they are incompetent both Technically and Manageability, compared to Amazon and Azure, or to better phase it compared to Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella.
It remains to be seen now Google CEO Sundar Pichai, now also Alphabet CEO will change. ( I could never understand how Google Cloud also had a CEO )
https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/04/google-has-sold-55-millio...
Anecdotally it's pretty popular with folks I know in Columbus, OH - admittedly they tend to be on the tech savvy side.
Android, Gmail, and Maps make money from ads, not from charging users directly. That makes them the same business as search.
Hardware businesses like Home and Chromecast usually aren't profitable, and Google (like Amazon) is likely using them to keep people in their ecosystem.
That leaves Drive, which might have some good margins, but they give it away for free to many users...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...
Gmail makes money from business users and I would go as so far to say that if it doesn't make more money that Drive now it will make more money in 10 years from people who have lived their entire lives inside of a gmail account using it for business.
Nope. Engineers know this product is dead. There's no way they'll risk their time and money on something Google doesn't believe in. We've been bitten time and time again, and adopting GCP is about the riskiest move you can make: hitching your entire project to a dying technology platform.
Since no one will be willing to make this gamble, GCP's growth rate will flatline. Exactly the condition Google said would cause them to shutter it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Their platform just died today.
It's sad, because Spanner is actually really cool tech.
I bet Google engineers and PMs on GCP are reading this right now and already thinking about their future within the company.
In the future, we'll probably be able to look back at today as a major shift in strategy for Google.
Totally gonna believe them
What would one prefer ? Google top brass not setting deadline to beat competition? Google not trying to be market leader ?
Google obviously has a firm grip on what they’re willing to call unacceptable losses for an investment, but they need to realise that there is reputation damage every time they axe one of these projects that they don’t seem to be accounting for at all in their decision-making.
Google is a trillion-dollar company and GCP has the potential to be bigger than their ads platform. It's not going anywhere.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely
That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
> That's good enough reason for anyone to get off GCP.
I fail to see how this is even a reason to get off GCP, yet a good one.
If you're in competition with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and you intend to go after the same customer profiles then you would do well to ensure that your messaging is what those customers expect and that every outward signal you give is that you're in it for the long haul, with a much longer horizon than the companies that are going to be your customers can oversee so that the trust becomes implicit.
That way if some internal document gets released it doesn't look as though you are still undecided.
Anyway, no need to take my word for this, let's just see how it plays out in the longer term.
You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
> The billions in investment and growth of the platform are the exact opposite signal.
At Google's level I would not expect less than billions in investment, the growth of the platform is for now still substantially lagging behind the competition as far as I know, the bulk of the companies I look at are solidly in the AWS camp or in some cases running on Azure, Google is still the exception but getting more common over time. I look at about 50 companies / year so that's a relatively small sample but they are typically well funded start-ups or later stage established companies.
> You seem to be reading this as if the CEO just announced that they're not sure about GCP anymore.
No, that's not how I'm reading it.
It's common for businesses to work out several scenarios and estimate their outcomes. Then you look at the investment outcomes of those scenarios.
So quite plausibly there might have been these scenarios:
1. Invest More + High Growth
2. Invest More + Low Growth
3. Maintain Investment + High Growth
4. Maintain Investment + Low Growth
5. Divest
You pretty much always want to canvass the option to quit a business. You need it to keep your other estimates honest. Anything else is not only giving into sunk cost fallacy, it's flat out denying its existence.
So rejecting "Divest" doesn't mean it was ever a serious contender. It may be there mostly in the interests of completeness.
But Google doing it seems totally believable.
See the problem?
GCP started 11 years ago, 2008, with App Engine.
No, AWS and Amazon leaders did not even remotely discuss that possibility 2 years ago...
The entire discussion in the memo seems to be more about how much they want to compete at the level of AWS rather than being in cloud computing at all.
Based on the developments and investment so far, it’s clear GCP wants to be a serious contender.
I expect Amazon plans have included scenarios such as "quit machine learning" and "don't invest in on-premise units".
I don't know how else to explain this. AWS and Azure are massive profit centers and GCP is slowly catching up. Cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IoT, and more have trillions in potential market cap.
It's completely nonsensical to consider that a company this big with this much investment already will exit that opportunity.
Most big corporations will exit any market, no matter how big if that market does not turn a profit.
Microsoft has one hell of an enterprise sales and marketing machine though, probably the best in the world, so I’d assume they are doing quite well, even if they are mostly reinvesting it.
The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
Now that we know they're not invested in a Google cloud beyond 2023, what reason does anyone in their right might have to use their services?
I was previously considering GCP. And now I'm not.
Great job, Google. You're so short-sighted you'll remain in adtech forever. Not even your founders could keep interest.
This leak was a billion dollar mistake. And I'm grateful for it. It's saved me a whole lot of headache.
I have no clue how anyone could arrive at that interpretation. What exactly let you to that conclusion?
1) The article.
> The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
That only means that the team's head is on the chopping block. That's all.
> 2) How Google treats all of its other "underperforming" products.
This assertion is utterly absurd as you're describing the world's third largest cloud provider, and thus one of the dominant players, of being "underperforming" and justifying pulling the plug on a 8 billion-dolar a year business.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/public-cloud-market-sha...
As far as the manager “being on the chopping block” the article talks about “losing funding”.
$8 billion in revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?
This is the same company that left an entire city’s streets in disarray after abandoning Google Fiber.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
You're being a bit disingenuous. Your own source states quite clearly that Google is in the 3rd spot and arguably, if you cherry-pick results, you can place it in 4th.
By cherry-picked results I'm referring to posting 2018 results and ignoring how GCP's revenue doubled in the last 18 months, nearly matching Azure's revenue.
Also revenue != profit. If it was profitable enough would management be complaining?
Yes, AWS is 1st. What's your point? Azure is 2nd and GCP is currently 3rd and catching up with Azure. What does AWS has to do with whether GCP is 3rd or 4th?
Only Amazon breaks out its AWS numbers completely today, but the other cloud providers bundle their cloud computing numbers together with other "cloud" numbers, so it makes it very confusing to keep track of what numbers people are talking about.
A mildly successful cloud provider would probably make FAR more money long term than the median Google product. Pulling the plug on GCP to build a couple dozen projects that will mostly get killed themselves seems like a huge waste, even without considering all of the negative externalities of burning even more customers by cancelling a major service.
Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to be #1 in every business you touch.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-learns-a-new-...
Breaking even doesn’t cut it since capital could be put toward something better. Unless it has some other strategic value (eg, bragging rights, growth potential, security, etc)
The traditional Osbourne Effect that earned the original namesake is to announce your v2 product a long time before it's available, thus trashing your v1 sales and eliminating the resources needed to make the v2 in the first place. But this is fairly similar; by announcing at what point Google is planning on throwing in the towel, everyone is going to think twice about going to GCP, because now everyone knows that everyone else is going to think twice about going to GCP. Consequently, the odds of this article actually creating the future in which Google pulls the plug on GCP are quite good.
Also, note how this is all about perception, and people's beliefs about what other people believe. Arguments like "But GCP is really good!" or "But GCP will surely continue to be very supported by Google right up until then!" would be missing the point. The point is that you need to change not only what everyone believes, but what everyone believes everyone else believes. Easier in some ways, harder in others, but none of those sorts of basic arguments will move the needle one bit. You need different arguments.
So, basically, in our industry, with this sort of folk wisdom widely known, Google damn near announced their plan to shut down GCP after 2023. They didn't. Quite. But damn near. Yes, it's a sort of second or third order conclusion from the literal text of the article, but it's a very easy one that lot of people can make, which ironically is the very thing that makes it true in the first place.
(Also, since PR is pervasively dishonest, putting out a PR release that says "No, srsly, we love GCP and would never dream of shutting it down" will not move the needle anywhere near as much as they'd like. Also in the "what people believe other people believe" department, Google has a reputation now of just shutting things down. GCP would be quite a bit bigger than anything else they've shut down, but, even so, they've shut down some pretty big "all hands on deck" initiatives before, like G+, so we're all going to believe that everyone else is going to find the idea that they might just pull the plug quite plausible. If they had a reputation for supporting things and gracefully shutting them down with care and concern, they'd be in significantly less trouble now.)
[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
If you create a culture of intense internal competition, where identities are tied to subunits (e.g. a product team) over the company, you incentivise leaks. Google's elitist, "product founder" driven culture, unmonitored by a detached leadership, almost guaranteed this sort of sniping and in-fighting.
This is like corporate infighting for comedies set in the 50s really.
Only one company needs Google's internal infrastructure. That company is called Google.
The lessons learned in building those systems can be applied to more generalized solutions which can be sold as standalone products.
The origins of AWS are entirely unrelated, Amazon simply realized it was good at operating infrastructure. This led to the conception of offering infrastructure as a service. The initial AWS service offerings were built based on Amazon's experience and expertise but were not the literal internal services of Amazon.
See https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-... for more historical details.
Amazon (or Google, or Microsoft) is an anomaly, the things Amazon needs to operate Amazon.com are very very different from what most companies need. The internal services and architecture are purpose built although today they do heavily leverage AWS under the hood. Amazon.com is just a customer of AWS, there's no special installation.
Almost nobody needs Amazon.com's infrastructure (except Amazon) or could even afford to staff it. What people do need are generalized, managed services they can combine for their own use cases.
I think the only needs that are likely different are scale, so bigger instances, and the fact that they have a massive legacy infrastructure that can't be easily migrated off of. So that's pretty much what I would expect; Amazon.com does use AWS for new stuff but is still operating a lot of legacy as well.
This article lists some of the AWS services that now power Amazon.com since they moved away from Oracle. So, while it may not have been true in the past, it does now appear that AWS powers a significant portion of Amazon.com.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
AWS services have always been their own thing, they happen to be useful so today Amazon utilizes them just like anyone else. That doesn't mean the services started internally.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
https://www.pcmag.com/article/364611/microsofts-cloud-how-th...
> Guthrie said Microsoft has long had a tradition to "eat our own dog food," which means it runs its own systems on top of the same software it offers to customers. Microsoft IT was an early customer for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, and has moved the vast majority of its internal servers to Azure, including its SAP implementation, payment systems, and test systems. This has helped Microsoft learn what it takes to run the technology on an enterprise scale.
I’m not willing to die on this hill. I could be wrong about the origins of Azure. AWS and GCP are not productized versions of internal services.
Same for Amazon, it took them very long also, including dedicated internal projects with focus on moving. But majority of Amazon and Microsoft workloads now run on their respective cloud offerings.
Google is probably still be at least 3-5 years before that would happen be aligned. GCP is quite immature and young, which this leak highlights also. I assume this would mean that also internal teams at Google won't be moving workloads to GCP.
E.g. what coup would be for Google Search to run on GCP. Imagine the CIO conversation of, “well, if it is good enough for google search, it must be good for me”.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
They're at war with a subset of the staff over unionizing. And they have a "culture of openness" around internal information.
Google just can't compete with hustlers like Amazon, Alibaba and to some extent Microsoft (ex-Oracle leader not withstanding). Cloud business is commodity operational business.
It would be the ultimate differentiator. The only potential competitor would be Facebook, who doesn’t offer cloud services.
There are some differential privacy techniques which might help, but so far they're rather hard to use and there is no tooling for such things.
It may just be de jure legal though; I bet it would be shown to be de facto illegal once people started mining data from federal judges and legislators...
Google already has a leg up on this, their cloud offerings and APIs make a lot more sense than AWS.
Every time there's a GCP story on HN commenters say "I won't use it because Google can just pull the plug." I thought this opinion was silly as GCP is the #3 cloud provider in the world, not a free service like Reader.
Guess I was wrong, nothing is safe. Google wants #1 or nothing at all.
Google just seems to care about the launch. Not how happy customers are. Not how much money is pulled in. Not how well it fits in with the overall strategic vision of the company. Just launch points.
And then they pulled the plug on my accounts because some of my android apps had "likeness or similarity to other apps" which I have absolutely no idea what it meant. Then they pulled the plugs on my colleague's account because of equally vague reason.
It was time for me to give up GCP forever.
Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.
If I was a paranoid person, I might think this article is a sinister plan from Amazon or Microsoft. A quote like this can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: managers are already wary about GCP because of Google's flaky reputation, hearing a quote like this could easily make it worse, and the lack of new business makes Google all the more likely to shut it down.
Google has assigned so many engineers to building and running the platform. That means the platform has a high ongoing cost to provide. Unless the platform grows rapidly and grabs a significant chunk of the market, it will never be profitable at Googles current level of investment.
You can't scale a project down from 5000 engineers to just 50 and expect it to carry on running as before.
I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.
Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
If they kill GCP, what CTO in their right mind would ever choose Google for a mission critical service?
Again are they profitable? If the article is to be believed, there own management doesn’t think so and as I posted below, they are distant third at less than 5%.