Ask HN: What is your cloud strategy vis-à-vis Google Cloud?
According to this article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud, GCP is under pressure to beat AWS and Microsoft, otherwise it will risk losing funding. Are you doing anything about this to de-risk?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadGCP is seen as too risky at my company, primarily due to a reputation for poor support both in terms of feature parity and in terms of having a vendor throat to choke when things go wrong.
However those of us who read web time wasters like HN n reddit also quietly mutter to ourselves about how clever we are to avoid something already headed to the killed by Google page, even if we don't know when exactly that will be.
Anyone else who suspects that management set this arbitrary and impossible goal as a parallel construction to close down GCP?
(1) I've had terrible customer support experience with Google in the past
(2) I'm scared they will give up on GCP
So my company won't ever be a Google customer.
I personally think it’s quite unlikely that they shutter the entire business and all the product lines - many of them are extremely high margin and are already in a stable position. Given how many of their products they have designated as Google Cloud (last I heard Workspace is being attributed to Cloud revenue now) it seems more likely we would see the killing of new or in-development product lines such as Anthos or Alloy DB whereas the more established and profitable areas such as Workspace, BigQuery, Looker, GKE, BigTable and others would be allowed to continue to exist in some form.
As someone who has used all the major Cloud Providers, I have generally found the Google products to be the best engineered with “the right sized nut” normally being available, rather than an exercise in cryptography to decipher the documentation for a workaround. It would be a colossal waste and shame IMO to throw that away.
As a customer, I think they are struggling (as the article concurs) with their approach to Sales, Marketing and Support. It is frankly years behind their competition and recently (~2 years) have seen an increase in effort but not real shift in the end result. Part of this problem is their insistence on using resellers and partners for any interesting size deal where these partners themselves are really not up to scratch.
For now, we won’t be taking action to de-risk our position beyond ensuring that a migration of some kind is technically feasible given sufficient notice. I think they will start to drop the investment into the platform and focus on extracting revenue from what they’ve got - but I don’t see it going the way of Stadia and siblings from the consumer side. It’s my hope that revenue (and the narrative it allows them to tell the market around diversification) is worth keeping their crown jewel products running.
We also work with a Google Cloud Partner that we maintain out of band communication with who would be able to mediate account restoration.
All in all, I do not think a business account faces this risk at all and it’s largely a narrative developed from their consumer business where humans are hard to reach.
Have you paid any attention to actions taken by Google over the past 10’ish years?
If I’ve learned anything it’s that nothing is sacred.
I’d make sure I have a solid migration path.
Reviewing the infamous https://killedbygoogle.com/ I don’t see much to draw the conclusion that Google kills enterprise products. Which products do you use to draw this inference or are you simply saying you believe the mentality they use for their consumer products would be used for their cloud products?
In either case, I do not think it’s impossible they kill GCP. Just that it is extremely unlikely and without historical precedent w.r.t their cloud business.
That’s not hard, considering they’ve existed for only a few years. In that time they’ve done plenty of things that make me feel like their behavior is questionable (the 10x price hike for maps API comes to mind)
I would also argue that it is not a reasonable comparison in this context to conflate pricing changes with deprecation.
The brand is in a slow death spiral, I'm not sure it can recover.
It’s a distant #3, likely to become #4 if Alibaba can find another 1-2% share somewhere. I would not make any assumptions about Google killing an unprofitable unit or, more likely, selling or back-burnering it to focus on maximizing profit at the expense of future growth.
De-risking is generally useful though. We’re using GCP as a high-quality cloud service (their offerings are usually well-designed and well-operated), but we abstract away or not use proprietary components. Also, it’s their expertise - they run their own mega-cloud anyway, it’d be stupid not to resell it.
So: k8s, managed RDBMS, GCS - yes. Pub/sub: through Apache Camel. And so on.
I’d do the same if we used AWS.
Also we always got great support from GCP (actual engineers solving problems quickly). What they need to learn better is to listen to their users when it comes to new features I believe. For example I always feel that Googlers are not aware what the perception of their company is.
I've recently wondered about this, and I will be stunned if insiders are not aware of how their companies are perceived from the outside: social media makes it almost impossible to not know this, as does actually talking to real people.
more relevant:
"Google Cloud growth slows, losses grow, bosses unworried" Server spend surges across Alphabet’s empire
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/27/alphabet_q2_2022/
"Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat weighed in, too, stating that the company is “investing to support the long-term growth and given the upside that we see … looking at the path to profitability.”
Neither Porat or Pichai offered a timeframe for Google’s cloud producing a profit.
Pichai suggested that Google’s ongoing investment in AI may help, by allowing the creation of differentiated products."
Quickly googling "gcp aws azure market share 2022" it seems that AWS has roughly 3x more market share and Azure 2x more than GCP.
To level-set, I don't think customers need to worry about GCP literally "shutting down" like Stadia being discontinued.
GCP already has many significant customers including Walmart, Sabre travel reservations, etc. Many customers have long-term 10-year multi-billion dollar contracts with Google Cloud.
But the $22 billion in revenue which finally had positive margins just this year[1] may not be compelling enough for Google to focus on as a strategic business.
If so, the worst case scenario if GCP doesn't "earn its keep" at Alphabet is to spin it out as a separate company or sell their cloud business to IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft. Even if Alphabet calls it quits on Google Cloud, all the customers utilizing the service won't have their servers shut down. It won't be a Stadia type of shutdown.
Big companies sell pieces of the company all the time. E.g. IBM sells pc/latop business to Lenovo. Intuit sells Quicken to a private equity firm. Microsoft spun out the Expedia division into a separate company.
The real risk of staying on GCP is whether that platform will stay "cutting edge" on par with AWS because of parent company's continued focus and investment. If Alphabet sells GCP to a stodgy slower company like IBM or Oracle, customers may end up with a stagnant platform. If it gets sold to a more nimble company like Microsoft that has proven track record in making Azure profitable, customers may win by getting more platform innovation that Alphabet would have no longer wanted to fund.
The GCP business -- some form or another -- will continue to run for the next 10+ years; it just may not be owned by Alphabet.
[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4501164-google-cloud-trilli...
Which, I imagine, makes a complete shut down unlikely. Not that that is required for customers to lose confidence in the product...
No way they just shut it down, without some 10 year plan to migrate off
That doesn’t mean we don’t use them, just that we weigh alternatives and lean towards those.
We’re also staying away from any of their new services without a proven track record and history.
I just quit my SWE job to address this very problem. Obviously, our team holds some conviction about the vendor risk and need to derisk. Here’s our shameless plug and our two cents on the space. We’ve built a cloud agnostic search engine as well as means of provisioning in a cloud agnostic way. The premise is that, ultimately, a VM should just be a VM. Cloud vendors could be viewed as utility companies or commodities, with fungible offerings. Currently, there are still vendor specific details you have to be concerned with, so lifting and shifting from one cloud to another is not as straightforward as we’d all hope.
We think every CTO should take a cold hard look at IaaS vendor risk. Hashicorp may be better suited if you have the engineering capacity for infrastructure-as-code. We’re more GUI and low-code centric. Spinnaker is also a great cloud agnostic tool if you’re mostly just dealing in VMs.
There is some time however. Large cloud customers have multi-year contracts where they pre-pay for resources. It would be legally very costly to negate those contracts, as opposed to consumer products such as Stadia. Waving my hand a bit here, but if there was a way of speculating the trend of outstanding contracts, it would be a call to action to derisk sooner.
Part of why I'd ask that is that both AWS and Azure are profitable. GCP is reported unprofitable and far enough behind that they're vulnerable to dropping to #4. They're definitely not out of it but given the lackluster management quality at Google I would worry about heavily relying on any GCP feature which isn't easily ported to a different provider because that's the kind of situation where companies do things like sell a business unit or put it into revenue extraction mode for their existing customers. I wouldn't expect them to give it the Stadia treatment but I would not be surprised if you started seeing the already slow pace of development stagnate further.
With that said, it's highly unlikely Google will abandon it. GCP is not just another product with some niche user base, it does generate a lot of revenue and there are some large companies including Apple that are using it and have substantial workloads on it.