[HN Gopher] Google Plots Course to Overtake Cloud Rivals
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Google Plots Course to Overtake Cloud Rivals
Author : prostoalex
Score : 21 points
Date : 2020-02-25 05:10 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| gamesbrainiac wrote:
| I still don't understand why companies like Microsoft and Google
| hire folks from Oracle to run a cloud business. Oracle is the
| only player that can't do anything on the cloud; even IBM has a
| better game.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is something Google cannot abandon or be complacent about.
| Cloud is their turf and they ceded it to AWS and then Microsoft.
| orf wrote:
| Microsoft is pushing Azure _hard_. Not to disclose specifics but
| there are cases where deals with Microsoft for unrelated things
| are reliant on the company adopting /moving parts of their work
| to Azure, with _huge_ amounts of free credits for the first year
| as a sweetener. It 's not in writing on contracts but it's very
| much a requirement.
|
| I'm not sure how they can hope to become the number 2 cloud
| provider when pitted against that. Say what you want about
| Microsoft but they are in a really good position to take large
| chunks of the enterprise cloud market, and that's where the money
| is.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I know a company that got a very, very, very sweetheart deal
| with GCP on a tens of million dollar contract. They have a huge
| sales team with a monsterous entertainment budget to land
| "traditional" companies.
| ttul wrote:
| Please lavish some of that on me, oh lords of cloud.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| If you have a CIO/CTO title at a "traditional" fortune 500
| there are a busload of cloud sales people waiting to take
| you out to the finest steak houses and gentlemen's clubs as
| often as you please. Along with all expenses paid trips to
| Jackson hole, Aspen or any other upper crust resort city
| for company trainings and seminars.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| Translation, both Microsoft and Google have train cars full
| of money to light on fire in the short term to subsidize long
| term contracts and integrations. It'll be interesting to see
| who is number 2 in three and then five years.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I wish gcp and aws would take some notes (or make some
| acquisitions) to get close to Azure Devops... It has been a
| natural - dare I say _pleasant_ - exercise to move some really
| rancid 15-year old legacy .net sql server /stored procedure
| nightmare applications to the cloud and get them into modern
| devops pipelines. That would not even be a project I would
| contemplate with aws or gcp. It's actually on par cost-wise in
| a lot of cases with running it on-prem which is a rare thing to
| say about the cloud.
|
| Azure is growing pretty damn fast. One thing they don't have
| over AWS however is the scale of cheap resources. If you're
| using public cloud properly, you should be leveraging spot
| instances wherever possible - and in that case, azure doesn't
| really have a solution here. GCP preemptible instances are
| closer. You can spin up a rediculous amount of machines for
| pennies on the dollar at 2am in us-east and I see no such
| solution in Azure.
|
| So all-in-all it seems that a good chunk of Azure's growth is
| proprietary migrations and thus they don't have to focus too
| hard on being cost competitive at the hardware level.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Not the Google Cloud but Firebase is by far the nicest experience
| I ever had with a "hosting" provider. It is a bit expensive but I
| think this proves that there are many low hanging fruits to
| gather out there.
|
| It's essentially an API to access a streamlined database, file
| hosting, access provider and so on. Everything integrated and can
| talk to each other.
|
| Not long ago I got fed up with endless tools and configuration in
| the LAMP/MEAN/MERN or whatever the latest trend is to put data
| somewhere and read it, so I got into native iOS development and I
| am loving it. I'm still learning it but I released the app that
| was my learning sandbox, if you want to check it out(It's an app
| for quitting smoking, it does have some gamification and this is
| where I use the Firebase)[0]
|
| On the client-side, I have only two UI frameworks to deal
| with(UIKit and SwiftUI). On the backend side, I only deal with
| Firebase. You can do everything with those.
|
| Honestly, I don't know why not all providers are essentially like
| Firebase. Surely for some scenarios, a custom solution would be
| needed but it strikes me as Firebase being the place that
| provides the structure and you plug your custom software to it.
|
| That's why I am under the impression that at the end the gold
| rush for the cloud would result in something like Firebase.
|
| [0] https://apps.apple.com/en/app/quit-monster-quit-
| smoking/id14...
| scottfr wrote:
| Firebase is fantastic. There is also a steady drumbeat of
| continual improvements going on in Firebase that keeps making
| it better and better.
|
| Even when Firebase is using other GCP products under the hood
| (e.g. Firebase Storage is Cloud Storage and Firebase Functions
| are Cloud Functions) they often provide a better developer
| experience that makes things flow smoother. For example, having
| a Firebase Function running on a schedule is a just an added
| line in your functions config whereas running a Cloud Function
| on a schedule requires setting up a Cloud Scheduler Job and
| linking everything together with PubSub.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Oh definitely. Also, I like their SDK. It's much easier to
| keep all the app data in Firebase than dealing with native
| solutions. All the stuff about imperfections of the world
| like slow connections and so no is taken care of.
|
| My only issue so far is that cloud functions respond very
| slowly if they are not used for a while. The first time takes
| 2-3 seconds, thereafter it's in the milliseconds.
|
| But other than that, it's such a nice experience.
| monksy wrote:
| How do they plan on doing that if they've downsized the group
| recently?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Engineers are why things take so long to build. Without
| engineers things will build faster.
| rsashwin wrote:
| Made me chuckle
| danudey wrote:
| Someone read the mythical man-month and realized that more
| engineers doesn't make things faster, and can actually make
| things slower.
|
| The next logical step is to hire fire people until you reach
| the optimal number, in some kind of binary search approach.
| smt88 wrote:
| Right. Has Google ever produced a profitable product outside of
| ads and G Suite? YouTube likely isn't profitable, but even if
| it were, they bought it.
|
| This article is far too credulous and feels like it was planted
| by a Google marketing person worried about customers being
| scared off by the downsizing news and by Google's culture of
| whimsical product creation/destruction in general.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Youtube is a growth play - even at that - it's not a slouch,
| 5bn+ in the last quarter.
| jes5199 wrote:
| adding more engineers makes development go more slowly -- does
| that work in reverse??
| [deleted]
| David wrote:
| Can you point to a source here? I work on Google Cloud and I
| don't think I've heard anything like that.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| More employees doesn't automatically mean more
| productivity/launches/success. Downsizing can be an effective
| tool to get back on the right track (if done correctly, of
| course).
| cameronbrown wrote:
| Reorgs like this happen all the time at Google -- they didn't
| downsize Cloud, they found two parts of the business doing the
| same thing and merged them - so some people were redundant
| there.
|
| They could've just let those employees go, but they are giving
| them time to find a new role (and paying them the whole time
| they're not working).
|
| Disclaimer: Am a Google employee.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| Isn't that how layoffs at all large companies go?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| No. It's very much the exception, not the norm.
| kyrra wrote:
| (googler, opinions are my own)
|
| Btw, the "finding a new role" is easily within Google. One
| of the "cloud" teams that was defragged was in my office,
| and some of those people were people I've worked with over
| the years. Local management are trying to make sure they
| have places to land on other teams in the office.
|
| Yes, they can look for new jobs externally, but this is how
| Google deals with cleaning up teams from time-to-time.
| Luckily Google is still hiring, and people moving to new
| teams tends to work out without much fuss.
|
| Outside Google, I've seen the same behavior. A friend that
| worked at waffle.io got a similar 3-6 month transition
| window (find a new job internally or externally). They
| ended up staying at Broadcom, so it's a good way for
| companies to retain talent in a tight labor market.
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