Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of enterprise.
> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.
How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.
They ship 32-bit versions still to support those people. As a former msft engineer it was a huge pain in the ass to have to build the 32-bit version all the time - but customers used and relied on it.
I have it installed on an old 2006 MacBook, so Microsoft was still providing updates for a 12 year old machine... one that Apple itself abandoned after just 6 years. It's one of my favorite examples of Microsoft's longer support for old hardware.
And for what it's worth, after 12 years and 3 Mac purchases, I've switched & just bought a PC again.
Which one did you buy? Mac's screen, keyboard (old one), trackpad, build and battery life is unmatched as far as I could say. I found mac hardware have much more longer life (even though Apple may not support it for that long)..
I went with a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga. It hasn't arrived yet, so I can't directly compare, but I've tried the keyboard & trackpad in store & they feel about as good as my mid-2012 MacBook Pro. I chose the premium screen upgrade to HDR Dolby Digital 500 nits, 8th-Gen Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, touchscreen/pen & 3yr Next Day On-site Warranty was $1500 cheaper than a MacBook Pro with the same specs. The Thinkpad X1 has a user replaceable SSD, so I'll upgrade it to 2TB for $1000 cheaper than Apple's SSD upgrades, which are soldered on. I also love the Black, which fits in with my 2006 & 2007 Black MacBooks.
I considered the Surface Book 2, which has an excellent keyboard & trackpad, but the SSD can't be replaced by the user & tops out at 1TB. I was worried about the Surface Book hinge being fragile in my backpack while travelling & commuting.
My 2006, 2007 and even my 2000 Pismo G3 Macs all still work well. I used to love Apple reliability & recommended the Apple Store to everyone, I was that guy who queued for a day-one iPhone 4. But my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (bought in 2015) has been a lemon, the data flex cable keeps failing every few months, causing it to corrupt data & eventually lose the boot drive. (SuperDuper! has been a lifesaver.) Apple have replaced the cable 5 times now, each time with a week of downtime, but the replacement cables all have the same known defect & I just can't trust the machine anymore.
Nice. The touchpad on my 2013 MacBook Pro doesn’t click properly anymore, and I just don’t like the current line. I just bought a ThinkPad X1 Extreme (i7-8850H, 32GB, 1TB, 4K). I’ve been running elementary OS on it, and while it lacks many of the niceties of macOS (especially for owners of multiple Apple devices), it has a familiar and refined feel.
I'm not much of a Linux user, but I've been trying elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki via Parallels and like it a lot. Unfortunately elementary OS 5 Juno has been buggy for me (random black screens requiring a reboot), so I'm stuck on Loki for now.
I was tempted to put elementary OS on my 32-bit 2006 MacBook (the one that currently has Windows 10), but there isn't a 32-bit version of elementary OS anymore.
I'm pretty pleased with the X1E: it's not quite MBP-level thin, but it's still a great balance of power and portability. NotebookCheck has a review that's worth checking out.
elementary OS feels fast, familiar, and refined. It's not quite as fleshed out as other distros like Mint (or macOS itself, for that matter), but it's getting better with each release.
The 4K HiDPI screen on the X1E is vibrant. My biggest concern was that the HiDPI scaling on Linux wouldn't be up to snuff, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The scaling for GTK apps was perfect right out of the box. There were some extra steps to get Qt apps to scale properly and inherit the GTK theme, but they look great now. Wine and Steam basically just required checking a box to get the scaling to work.
Thinkpad Yoga (20CD-S02C00) owner here. 4 years and going strong. People on airplanes perpetually confused by my oversized "tablet" that I switched from coding on to highlighting passages in ebooks with a pen. Battery is finally starting to fail though and even though it's an i7 w/ 8GB RAM it is finally starting to feel "slow".
I'd love to hear your thoughts on battery life doing anything useful (not watching movies) with your new one. I'm debating an X1 Carbon, HP Spectre, or XPS 13 to upgrade to in the next few months.
I've had the X1 Yoga a few days. I haven't done a proper battery test, but I think it will do at least a solid 7 hours of browsing & emailing, and it feels like it will be on par with my MacBook Pro 2012. The 7 hours is a pessimistic estimate - sometimes it bounces up to 10 hours, and I did 2 hours of actual work & the battery only drained to 80%. But if I watch a YouTube video, that estimate drops to 7 hours.
I'm more worried about screen issues. I got the premium HDR Dolby Vision screen, and I love the 500 nits & the wide color gamut is stunning & very OLED-like. But the calibration is off, the screen has a red-tint that hurts my eyes and makes the rest of the world look sickly green when I look away from the screen. I fear I'll have to buy an X-Rite and make my own calibration. It isn't like my Dell monitor, which came individually calibrated & with a printout of the calibration.
Also, this X1 Yoga (or Windows?) does lots of dynamic screen dimming, which was messing with Sublime Text in Monokai (dark) theme. It would dim the screen so much that white text would become mid-grey & it was unreadable & low contrast. I was able to turn that setting off, but doing so has reduced battery life to the numbers you see above.
If having a large / replaceable SSD wasn't a priority (and battery was more of a priority), I think I would very seriously consider the Surface Book 2. But hopefully I'll like the X1 Yoga more as I get used to it.
I always thought that was a bullshit excuse. They could have emulated it. Its not like 16-bit apps are on the bleeding edge of performance. Still nobody else is supporting 16-bit applications at all anymore so you have to give them credit.
You can also add Active Directory to that list. Stupid simple to setup, join machines and setup policies. Small businesses with tens of pc's are easily managed from a single domain controller and the licensing isn't that bad when you're revenue easily covers costs.
Oh, and Office 365 is a blessing. I never thought I'd actually like SaaS anything from Microsoft but it works really well Office. It's also much easier than selling a $6000+ purchase req for 15-20 new office licenses. Especially when the boss doesn't see why office 2003 is obsolete in 2011 if it "still works fine for me". ~$240 a month was an easy sell with "free" exchange email and upgrades. Yea small shops are fun to work at.
> I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.
I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.
I guess enterprise trust them because they speak the same language. Also under Nadella's lead Microsoft has shown it can eat it's own dog food and turn it into profit.
Turning from a software house into a full cloud business, the so called "digital transformation".
Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.
I am not often a Windows programmer, but I followed that saga. I think it was the result of poor internal communication and was fairly anomalous for Microsoft.
That's because the new hotness is often outright not possible to fit within the constraints of the old API. It's the same on all platforms, really. The difference is that on Windows, you can choose to not chase the new hotness if you don't actually need it.
E.g. there are still people writing WinForms and even MFC apps, because it works for them, and they don't need anything flashy. And that is a fully supported scenario - not just running the old stuff on new platforms, but even writing new code that uses the old frameworks in the latest-and-greatest Visual Studio.
About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.
I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night.
CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.
Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.
Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.
"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."
I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”. You can argue it took too long, or that having to give that advice for the reason given is stupid, or that the customer didn’t want to get that advice, but in the example the customer managed to get through to customer support and got clear, actionable advice.
I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.
Sure, "close your account" is actionable, but it's funny to think that it's not a clear sign that their customer support is completely broken. I mean, when you inform a company of a problem and their customer support admits that it's a bug on the company's side, but they can't fix it because they don't have any way to inform the developers from the company in question, how is that not being broken? Customer support should be a filter to the developers, but instead they're a fake door. Despite being a 3rd party, the customer support represents the company. From the customer's side, the company apparently can't communicate with itself. That's completely broken in my book.
> I frequently read worse on HN
Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.
The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.
It really isn't difficult to search online for stories of people struggling with Apple app reviewers. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
There are people who have a bad experience and they complain about it on the internet. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just adding the opposite data point.
History is that when one one uses bleeding edge; good support and/or reliability is relatively rare. Whether it must be that way or if it's just a bad industry habit can be debated. But, if one looks at the history of most very-new tech, it quite often is not reliable regardless of cause. Therefore, you should probably not assume the newest incarnation will not have this problem. I don't have any solid study, but watching the industry for many decades has shown me this pattern. Here is a common saying that I didn't invent: "Never buy version 1.0". (Wow, I got a -3 above. That hurts.)
I can’t speak to Azure, but with a business support plan, it’s really easy to connect with a human on AWS. My experience is that they won’t give up until they resolve your issue. They’ve even gone as far as creating a simplified CloudFormation stack to duplicate the issue and then talk to their developers and get back to you.
We're a pretty small fish as Google Cloud clients go, but we have honestly not had this problem at all. We get very fast response to support tickets, and on the rare occasions where we've had to escalate they have gone as far as setting up hangouts with senior engineers.
Google, for all their faults, does seem much more interested in soliciting product feedback.
I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)
Yes, totally. When I transferred to work on GCP, I was pleasantly surprised at how much eng/product cares about users/developers wants, needs, and feedback.
I've gotten a prompt response from Google Cloud every time I've filed a support request. Then again, my company pays for a support contract with an SLA.
I've been a gmail/drive/GSuite/Chrome/Android user for a long time and of course I use Google for internet searches. I am getting kind of tired of their bullshit though.
However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.
It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.
Yeah. That has been my experience. AWS has way better customer interaction and will refund "small accidents" with credits. Google makes it hard to reach a person and won't budge at all on similar issues. On the flip side, the documentation on Google Cloud seems a lot better than AWS.
What are you talking about? Just make sure you are someone important on social media and create a tweet stir such that some Google execs look at your problem. That's how you get support.
Product has their lifecycle. Nothing lives forever even for AWS/Azure.
In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.
Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)
Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
And if you have a really old account you can still use an instance outside of a VPC. I’ve never heard of any service that AWS has just outright abandoned.
I used to teach AWS courses and had the same experience. I haven't heard of any service that has been disabled for an existing account.
Yes, you are strongly discouraged from using some services (simple db) by them hiding it. Yes, new accounts can't use certain services (ec2 classic). Yes, some old features cost more than newer better features (rrs s3).
But I wasn't able to point to any AWS service that had been shut down.
Also, to be fair, I don't know of any Google Cloud Service that has been shut down (as opposed to consumer facing Google services), but haven't been paying as much attention to that service.
We have a really old account, we still create instances in classic to this day. Every now and then we get some really bizarre problems that could be attributed to "account is ancient".
I would add that AWS seems to moth-ball projects, where Google would officially announce an end-of-life. For example, I strongly regretted using AWS OpsWorks after I realized the only priority for AWS seemed to be keeping it running under SLA.
If we're going to talk about "mothball without formally announcing deprecation" Microsoft is pretty awful for that too. There are so many zombie libraries and frameworks and tools in the Microsoft family, and they never have the decency to say "stop using that". Even windows.forms was default in visual studio until like 2013 or so.
Front-end web development of all stripes can burn in a fire, in my opinion; it's got the complication bug, and there's no cure. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, because worse is better, so here we are.
QT looks interesting, if I ever had to care about supporting Linux, but that's not my world.
Windows Forms were also the only sensible option until at least 2014. Only after 2014 Microsoft has fully commited to one solution, before that it was very wild.
> Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing.
Now watch as i consider them the same thing.
Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.
Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.
Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.
I see the same thing, it was also IBM's cloud services pitch that they "understood the enterprise" better than Google or Amazon does.
It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.
I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.
IMO AWS is the true king — the Microsoft numbers are spiked by Office 365 licenses, most of which is renting Office itself. Amazon is the only one not playing games with definitions.
IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.
Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.
Don’t forget the rapid and severe Google maps price increases. These are the gift that will keep on giving for Microsoft and Amazon in the mindshare of developers and business leaders.
Do most enterprise companies care about the price of Google Maps? My company hosts on AWS, Azure and GCP, and I couldn't tell you how much Google Maps costs (or indeed, that there was even a paid tier, though it makes sense for embedded maps and such).
I've created an account to try Azure last weekend, it took me 2 hours to sign-up due to issues in the registration on their end, and then once it finally worked, I copied an example from their documentation. 5 minutes after, I received an email that I was banned for "security reasons", so yeah if they can't even handle a sign-up properly, I wonder how they want to reach the top spot of the cloud market, I'll for sure try to avoid Azure in the future for any company I go.
The AWS console is far from being great but last time I used Azure’s it was terribly slow and full of little bugs. The UI was kind of flashy and hip and combined with the bugs it made them seem silly, especially contrasted against the AWS console’s utilitarian look. It was painful. I’m not saying I’ll never try it again but I’d need to be convinced.
I totally agree with that, during the small amount of time I had access I found that the UI clearly has some issues. It's clunky, slow and difficult to navigate. AWS isn't exactly a great model of good UI but Azure is clearly even worse, I would personally put GCP in the top spot for the UI and Azure as the last one.
I remember seeing Google folks in Japan coming to sell their products in T shirts and jeans in a business world where everyone wears suits and knows it. I have nothing against the casual style, but knowing the etiquette is primordial in business.
It depends. At my company (70,000+ employees the last time I checked) even the CEO doesn't wear a tie, much less a suit (usually he wears a t-shirt and jeans). A sales guy wearing so much as a tie would not be taken seriously.
Maybe they did not mean it as an insult, they just came in their everyday working clothes I guess. The problem is that looked super unprofessional and left the impression to be a bunch of hipsters. After all, they are the image of the company, and dressing so casually in front on your client is... disturbing.
That was about 3 years ago or maybe 2. They came to showcase their solutions to the Marketing department. I dont think it was Cloud, they were focusing if I remember correctly on the Google Analytics Entreprise plan and its benefits. I cant remember the details of the presentation but I remember vividly the holes in their jeans in front of a well dressed audience.
That and the fact you can speak to engineers at Microsoft will relative ease. Recently had an Azure support ticket open. The whole process was beyond my expectations to the point I'd have difficulty putting anything big anywhere else. Could be personal preference, but the way they manage introducing new services and grandfathering old ones is also very good.
Where are you getting this "price hike" narrative for Google from? Google's presence in the cloud market is instrumental in across the board price drops.
The Google Maps API is a good example. They increased prices by an order of magnitude while simultaneously decreasing the free tier with one month's notice. [0]
Funny how everyone here complains about Google maps changing their licensing, but nobody brings up MS changing changing from per socket to per core licensing a few years ago. That burned several medium businesses I know.
Per socket vs per core happened with a version bump right? If Google maps pricing changes only happened when you used a new api, and you could keep using your existing code with your existing prices, that would be a lot less grudge worthy.
Are you talking about SQL Server? You can keep using old versions, and the performance improvements of modern hardware and new versions end up providing more value overall.
With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.
Also Windows and System Center. It’s very painful for Microsoft shops as many applications really need standalone SQL.
With our scaled up SCCM environment, SQL alone increased licensing cost by a very significant factor, as you need to license SQL Enterprise when you exceed the core limits of the gratis SQL Standard license.
Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform, despite now integrating with Google Cloud Platform's web console for purposes of managing billing and API keys. Yes, this is a branding and communication mess, but nevertheless true.
The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.
Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.
I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.
They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.
(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)
Probably from the AppEngine change of almost a decade ago or the double Maps bumps (the big shrinking of the free tier years ago, then another one in 2018). Usually those are adjustments to make prices match reality.
Google also puts a lot of weight in certain nuances that get overlooked and then quickly forgotten in the Internet's memory.
Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use.
Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.
Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)
With different communication that's harder to misunderstand, it would have been possible for Google to get a much better trust and expectations outcome from exactly the same substantive price changes (at least for GAE and GCP if not Maps).
Yeah. I'm saying that Google Cloud Platform (which does not include Maps) has a good track record with respect to their generally available services, as does G Suite with respect to their core G Suite services. Hell, even G+ isn't going anywhere for G Suite accounts (the turndown is only for consumers).
To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.
Well, yes, I didn't mention that when GAE launched in preview mode, there was nothing exactly like it, so it had an initial pricing model that made intuitive sense (CPU-based), but was flawed: RAM was much more representative of the actual costs behind the service. I only hinted at that when I mentioned reality.
Google Reader is like "the one that got away" because the landscape changed so fundamentally with it, that no other product could take its place.
If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.
I know I'm unlikely ever to trust Google's cloud offerings simply because of their track record of support/service, or rather lack of it. Yes, even for paying customers who paid them payments by paying.
"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
If you pay for their enterprise level support for GCP you can get human responses very easily (and quickly on high priority requests) though they tend to have to escalate and complicated issues to their engineering teams. We also have weekly meetings with their CRE team where we can give general input, make feature requests and get support requests/etc expedited as needed.
Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.
I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer.
We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.
We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services.
If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.
On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer.
In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name.
When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.
> Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.
Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.
It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.
Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.
Ssh'ing into China AWS boxes is like 300 baud modem days born again. I work across from people trying to setup AWS China infrastructure and the curse words fly with alacrity and frequency.
The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have some extra restrictions, but they aren’t some kind of clones of AWS software.
Unless I’m missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the other regions.
You can't go into the AWS console and select a region in China and then provision resources.
AWS-China is literally a different organization with a different service on a different URI and with whom you'll need to establish a different contractual relationship.
No experience with AWS China, but I taught a class to some folks who used one of the restricted AWS regions and the services and features were limited when compared to normal aws regions, according to the students.
There are laws and regulations in China about who can own the physical infrastructure, but that doesn't mean that it isn't AWS. The implication that the only benefit is that the name is retained is simply false.
Due to laws and logistics, AWS Classic -> AWS China aren't at full feature parity, but it's certainly not some watered down or different version of the AWS cloud.
> Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.
Azure has a region in China which is not a baby version of its public cloud offering. It might not have some new SaaS products but for core offerings it's exactly the same feature wise.
When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions.
Amazon “Consultants” are basically useless. The ones I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with only know the netops side and the best they can do is help you do a “lift and shift”. They usually know very little about how to implement all of the other managed services AWS offers.
I was the Dev lead at a previous company with no AWS experience and they brought in “consultants” to help us move to AWS. They gave no guidance on how to actually develop a product using AWS services even though I explained in high level my proposed architecture. I could have easily cut the cost by over 60% if I had known all I know about AWS now or the consultants could have actually helped.
From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure.
As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:
GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.
For every dollar you pay:
- You get more compute power per core, while paying less.
- You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.
- You get the best "data processing at scale".
Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me,
In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.
Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far.
Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.
All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
... and you get what you pay for. Whenever I've had a problem on AWS, I've spoken to a human being, and had a detailed information on what was happening and how they were fixing it.
I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there (now).
When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.
I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.
I have no idea how you are getting someone to talk to from AWS without paying. I have had 10k/mo spend with both and without a support plan you get absolutely nothing, and with they fall over themselves to help, calling you immediately after filing tickets.
Caused by a bad BGP route announcement [1]; this is outside of the control of Google. However, they do seem to have global incidents more often than the competition (for example [2] last July)
AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 explicitly to locations, because they didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What?
command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.
Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes.
I never got to a point I could test if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked.
GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.
Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an issue that is being ping-ponged around different reps for >10 days by now.
Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those.
Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.
Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not)
Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.
The UI is, um, lets say, very unconventional for non-windows folks. It is extremely sluggish compared to AWS or GCP. As in, each page takes several seconds+ to fully load vs AWS/GCP. Maybe this is just for me, or an IE vs Chrome issue or something, I'm not sure. The horizontal panning in the UI is pretty strange for the uninitiated too. Everyone else, the entire internet pretty much scrolls up/down on a web page but in Azure it's up/down + side-to-side + expanding panels with scroll. I'm not even sure where to look for things (scroll down or to the side). As far as the tech is concerned, I'm not sure but the first impression of the UI coming from another cloud provider just seems off. Typically, I use the UI to get the lay of the land before hitting the API or something. But, I suspect I'm not the target market since I've spent my entire career on the linux side of things.
You can't bookmark things, and you can't middle/cmd+click to open in a new tab. AWS isn't much fun to use but Azure gets the basics of being a usable website wrong. Ugh.
I don't have familiarity with Google Cloud though. And in fairness I used Azure for a feature AWS didn't have anything close to (service bus queues), I can see why having really well built things like that get them huge deals. Microsoft know what they're doing in those markets.
I feel Azure has the fastest console. Everything is relatively consistent and loads instantly, even over slow wifi. The actual product line is messy, but it's all very usable, and has recently gotten much nicer looking.
GCP console and products are very consistent and well planned, but the console itself is slow to load because of their heavy UI framework and dumb animations. I much prefer ugly and fast over clean and slow.
Enterprises tend to automate cloud deployments once they've gotten past the initial phases. Comparing UI is valid but also compare the Restful APIs, SDKs and template driven automation tooling across clouds.
It's been a while (~2 years) since I last had to tangle with it, but off the top of my head:
1) Disk and network IO performance was extremely inconsistent, to the point of being unusable at times. 10kbps reads off of the msft-local mirrors of package repositories for example, making security updates a tedious pain in the ass.
2) There were two administrative consoles, "new" and "old." New had a more modern-looking UI but didn't reliably work, old was cruddy looking but did. The set of features present in them was not congruent either ("new" had some some "old" didn't and vice versa). But wait, there's more! see #3
3) Not every operation was possible via the admin consoles. Some things you had to use their powershell cli tools to do, which is great fun when you have no windows machines around to run powershell on. This was for something stupidly obvious like "assign an IP to this instance" or something; mercifully I've forgotten the details but it was something you'd think would be trivial.
4) Whoever designed their payment model was ... to be charitable, extremely set in their ways. Instead of being able to set up a payment method and pay by the hour (or whatever), you had to buy "entitlement packs" at $X per license and apply those to your account, sort of like the boxware model but awkwardly shoehorned into cloud billing. Woe betide you if your "microsoft bucks" ran out in the middle of an extended compute run!
All these were for comparatively simple and straightforward uses of their infra (i.e. pretty much just compute and block storage, no fancy database or machinelearningAIwhizbang-as-a-service stuff). I can't imagine the more complex features were better off if the foundations were so haphazardly implemented.
1) I agree that Azure storage is possibly my biggest complaint about Azure; ESPECIALLY on Web Apps/App Service Plans. I think they are trying to solve this with the new "bring your own storage" model. But we'll see, the latency on the disks when the queue length gets too high is not excusable, imo.
2) This is no longer a thing, though during that transition period it was slightly annoying.
3) This is also no longer a problem.
4) I've never experienced this, the "pay as you go" model has been with me since I started using Azure 6-7 years ago. Maybe they do this for some licensing models? I have only ever paid for compute time, storage usage and egress. I've have used plenty of licensed software too...so I don't know what yours relates to.
Back to #1 though, if the Azure team could figure out why Web App disk speed feels so slow (sometimes), my company would probably double/triple our spend on Azure and drop some of their competitors. This is genuinely my biggest complaint.
I haven't checked the more 'obscure' services, but the Azure CLI is pretty decent nowadays. At least for VMs you shouldn't have to muck around with Powershell anymore.
Speaking as an SRE who less than 1yr ago was tasked with evaluating public clouds as burstable capacity for our traditionally bare metal server infrastructure; this comment is flippant at best and harmful at worst.
Azure is absolutely not comparable to the others, their performance characteristics are nowhere near consistent between equivalent specification instances, their API's are equally inconsistent _and_ they have a terrible usability model on most of their services (not all, admittedly).
In fact when it comes to technical competence, I would (and did) rank Google #1. The drawbacks of Google are:
* It's google and they have a habit of sun-setting products.
* They don't have as many features as AWS.
* They don't have developer mindshare like AWS, meaning FOSS tools will almost always work flawlessly with AWS but rarely have support for GCP (or, if they do it is a little b0rk)
* Google tends not to give human support. (but this is alleviated if you're buying support contracts)
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FWIW we chose google on technical merits alone, although my company is working with all three cloud providers in some fashion. Azure is the one we constantly mock internally for their absolutely maddening warts. Almost as bad as our own internal "cloud". (providing cloud services is not my companies core competence to be fair)
----
Digression;
I would assume that a big chunk of Microsofts cloud money is coming from office365. I know my company recently started paying them in the order of 10's of millions of dollars, I assume others would too as this is "the future" of microsoft exchange/sharepoint etc;
How exactly is saying Azure isn't based on "horrible tech," "harmful?" None of the big cloud providers are based on "horrible tech." Your statement provides anecdotes but no data that proves this as "harmful."
Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Microsoft more than an even keel observer.
I don't really care enough about microsoft to hate it as a company, there's some good and some bad. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's around. And Windows itself has some really good ideas underneath (like IOCP). But it's fair to say I'm not a fan of Windows itself.
My bias is purely on the technical merits of the provider. My company had a pretty large discount on Azure so it was under strong consideration.
My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.
I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.
> My point about it "being harmful at worst" is that it's spreading uncertainty without any actual evidence.
Actually, that's precisely what -you- are doing, not me.
> I, on the other-hand have evidence from a 12,000+ person company that is using all three cloud providers.
I worked at a much larger company than that with over 20K employees that used Azure/O365 and AWS (but no GCS.) Your anecdote means nothing. You're on Hacker News, there are people here that work and have worked for massive media companies, industrial companies and tech companies. Many of which use Azure, AWS and GCS.
Do I wish Azure were better? Absolutely. I have a lot of ideas and complaints where things could be so much better. But I also have just as many numerous complaints about GCS and AWS.
No it is not! Azure is not even in the same ballpark. APIs fail randomly, instances take a random amount of time to come up(sometimes similar to AWS, sometimes double digits) services are poorly integrated, lots of weird constraints and surprising behavior(their load balancers are nonsensical), lack of AZs (and support for them) in many regions, etc.
Can you make your stuff work on Azure? Sure you can. Is that a good experience? No way.
This is probably what people are referring to. The underlying tech may not be horrible, but the user experience is.
While Microsoft has undoubtedly been catching up, and there are always some specific products where one vendor has a leg up, there is no doubt the Azure cloud has been technologically far behind AWS and significantly behind Google.
First of all, I'd want to acknowledge that Google is behind AWS as well. One big technical reason is IAM. Few realize just how important AWS IAM is as a service federation infrastructure. If you look at the details, Google's IAM product is inferior.
Now, on to Azure. Three years ago I was involved with a high stakes effort to port an AWS-grown platform service architecture onto Azure. At the time, they had massive gaps in their understanding of what IaaS meant. Here are some concrete examples:
* They did not really understand what object storage was. Blob storage was not possible to use at scale due to trivially low bandwidth, storage, and API limits
* Software-defined networking was not available between availability zones
* Software-defined networking could not be used to launch mixes of instance types
* Software-defined Internet gateways were not available except in a config that resembled "AWS Classic" networking
* On-demand instances were effectively unavailable beyond one or two instances at a time (at least for the instance types we wanted). You had to reserve instance capacity in advance, by going through a support ticket
* Creating and using custom machine images was undocumented in the API
* Instance metadata APIs were not available
* On-demand instance launches would encounter weird behaviors, where upon hitting certain limits entire groups of instances would be terminated
* Many aspects of APIs for the above were undocumented and unsupported
Combined, these problems made deployment on Azure extremely difficult. I have prefaced this with the caveat that Microsoft has improved since then. Many of the problems above are no longer issues, I'm sure. But what I found was a gaping chasm between what Microsoft claimed and what was really possible on the ground. What I found since then is that Google and Microsoft are making an earnest effort to catch up, and that's good for us consumers, but Microsoft (and to some extent Google) often don't even understand the full feature set of what they are trying to catch up with.
Their UIs and tooling are inconsistent and clunky. They kind of shove some of their tooling on to you as well.
Obviously, my experience is rather shallow here and wouldn't dare go into too deep discussions on that. And the shoving part can easily be avoided with some extra elbow grease.
Agree with the other comment, all of the UIs are pretty difficult. Some things are simple once you know exactly what to click on and in what order, but if you don't it can just be brutal. Amazon seems pretty static, but if my experience with Google's Ad UI is any indicator they are just going to optimize things in the direction where the defaults maximize their own revenue and important parts get buried and eventually deprecated.
Ideally cloud compute remains a commodity resource and all players earn a standard and pretty average return on their capex..
My anecdote is to Warren Buffet - buy commodities and sell a branded product. Don't get caught in a trap where you build your product with unique cloud resources which you can not easily migrate to other platforms when the conditions calls for it (price, performance, or even support.) Right now, there may be endless VC dollars, but there are some markets where the long term winners are going to win because they are paying commodity pricing on all of their compute.
I've used all 3 major providers, and I am going to have to strongly disagree. Out of UI, Azure is far and above superior with AWS and GCS which are both confusing messes. That is literally the worst complaint I can even think of in regards to Azure.
What data do you have to support this? Just saying the UI is superior doesn't really mean anything. What is superior? Why? I'm honestly interested in knowing and not just being "that guy".
In the same manner that you can reply and say it's "sluggish" and "confusing." You can deploy something in Azure using the UI far faster than you can deploy on GCS or AWS using strictly UI. In GCS, especially, it's hard to even tell where you even are or where to go back to where you were just seconds ago. They turned their new API dashboard to match the GCS dashboard too and it's basically impossible to find anything without clicking around or doing it so often you have it memorized. It's not inuitive. On AWS, spin up something on EBS and then spin something up on Azure's webapps using ONLY UI. Tell me which takes less time. The search feature on Azure also makes finding anything incredibly easy.
Further you can use Powershell (from the UI, no less,) if you are all about CLI.
For dashboards, they're all equally terrible IMO and break numerous web patterns (middle click to open in new tab).
But every time I deploy a new AKS services, it takes 30 min for it to be ready. I luckily haven't had to do this recently (~4 months?) and I'm loathe to try again. GKE on the other hand is within 2 minutes.
Are your program .NET ? Because all the people satisfied with Azure I encoutered are .NET users. And Azure seems a good fit for them. But for other people it is awefull.
I'd like to comment a few things made me appreciate and enjoy Google/Cloud services and I am aware they are very subjective to my personal experience as a student and beginner to web dev, but there are many folks like me so I could be speaking for them too.
Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners.
Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.
Google has done an excellent job with their Cloud documentation, including many useful howto sections. When we raise issues with them, they are quick to update the documentation with "gotchas" so there isn't tribal knowledge about this floating around in every company.
Azure's documentation is standard Microsoft technical doc fare, i.e. atrocious. It's horrible trying to get a straight answer out of anything they've written.
My impression from a decade in Windows Server and .NET development is exactly the opposite. You may have to do a lot of reading, but the available technical docs have 100x the raw utility of those from Apple and others.
And as discussed to death in the linked thread, what Microsoft should've done instead? Excluded Office from the cloud revenue, simply because Amazon didn't make as much money from their own office productivity suite (but still included it in their cloud revenue numbers)?
MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.
And to be fair Microsoft only includes Office365 revenue which consists of storage, active directory support and not standalone office that you can download.
What does Amazon offer for a cloud office suite though? I have never heard of one despite living in Seattle, where we see all kinds of failed Amazon expansions.
I would be seriously challenged to find more than a handful of businesses in Seattle that use any of these offerings. I don't think I have ever heard of these offerings, compared to G Suite there seems to be no marketing of these offerings.
For reference, we've seen a variety of failed attempts by Amazon to expand, like Amazon Register.
I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number that you see in all the graphs.
Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.
This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to “juice” the numbers.
Here’s one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don’t complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can “book” 600k in cloud revenue.
Google having an edge in ML and kubernetes will help them but they really need superior documentation to counter crowd wisdom on AWS.
Solutions/answers to most basic roadblocks you might encounter when working with AWS offerings are a quick google search away but that's the case for gcp offerings. They also need to ramp up their evangelism (for the lack of better word) to get some mind share.
Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features, and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way".
AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional, scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant stream of updates. They apply the iterative process of startups to the cloud, and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster.
We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100% of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.
Anecdotally I've met an absolutely crazy amount of recent Google Cloud hires in the past few months so I'm curious if the pace of updates will improve in like a year as they throw money at it.
Snap doesn't spend it all on what you are all discussing here, though. Even though it's wrapped up in Google Cloud marketing, Snap's main use seems to be of App Engine, a product that is clearly in the lead among comparable products, as opposed to things like GCS and GCE which are clearly behind S3 and AWS, respectively.
Snap also has a huge contract with AWS, for what it's worth. Other large customers like Apple also split their ticket between Amazon and Google.
I would argue on many points GCE is clearly significantly superior to EC2.
The Google billing model is far better, they bill on straight CPU and Memory, which you can combine in any desired ratio. Amazon has well over 100 different instance types.
Google gives you an automatic sustained usage discount.
Amazon requires you to commit to reserved instances up front for 1 year minimum, and those have to be specific instance types, so as your workloads change you can't reallocate capacity.
GCE has workload live-migration. If the underlying hardware that your VM is hosted on begins to fail, they will migrate you to new hardware in REAL TIME without any downtime other than a sub-second pause in processing.
Amazon will notify you that your hardware is failing and give you a deadline usually a week or so out to reboot your VM, if you don't they just terminate it.
I could continue for several more points if interested.
Given how customer unfriendly google seems it is not surprising. If you are running a service and google shuts it down or just closes your account with no explanation it might be hard for you.
How much do you think Active Directory is driving Azure's success? I picture Azure's big sales pitch as being able to call up GE or Exxon or whatever and say "hey throw all your ancient lotus notes and other various hosted stuff onto our servers and we can sync all your AD to AAD and you're done". I can see that as being a huge thing. And once an enterprise is in, they're start using it for new things as well.
I've never done any kind of enterprisey user access management before so I don't know if it's actually that easy or even if it's any different from migrating to AWS/GCP. Or if AD sucks and enterprises hate it. Would love to hear from people who have more experience there.
One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up datacenters) has helped them become #2 in the cloud space
That lists 38 hipaa-compliant services. Azure's is close to 80ish hipaa-compliant services. AWS' list is fairly large too. I haven't used GCE in a long time, so maybe GCE just has that many fewer products/services.
One big selling point of GCP vs other cloud providers in regards to HIPAA is that pretty much all of GCP is covered, and probably will in the future:
"GCP’s security practices allow us to have a HIPAA BAA covering GCP’s entire infrastructure, not a set aside portion of our cloud. As a result, you are not restricted to a specific region which has scalability, operational and architectural benefits. You can also benefit from multi-regional service redundancy as well as the ability to use Preemptible VMs to reduce costs.
The security and compliance measures that allow us to support HIPAA compliance are deeply ingrained in our infrastructure, security design, and products. As such, we can offer HIPAA regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, including sustained use discounts. Other public clouds charge more money for their HIPAA cloud, we do not."
Its been about a year since I last checked out everything you need to be HIPAA compliant to run AWS services, but IIRC it required running dedicated instances for nearly everything. That can make running on AWS way more expensive.
AWS has a large number of things that aren't HIPAA-compliant as well including Elasticsearch. They've made significant progress over the past two years to make most services HIPAA-compliant
The last company I worked for used Azure. I had never used Azure before and the thought of using a Microsoft product was a bit off-putting during my interview, to be honest (yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s). After using it for a few days, I had a change of heart. The documentation is pretty good and their tech support guys were extremely helpful. They would even call me back several days after the fact to make sure their suggestions were working and that I was having a good experience on the platform. In my experience, their UI made sense, their documentation was decent, and their tech support was great. I think Microsoft has earned their spot in the market with Azure.
> yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s
I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the 2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes.
It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their products in this period).
I don't think its fair to judge cloud platforms competency with just the market share since there are players like Microsoft/Oracle who have lot of enterprise foothold. I have used all other major cloud providers and as a power user, have found GCP to be rock solid.
Paid support is the only option with all major cloud platforms if you want faster response. I think all of them need to get better at it.
Cloud providers can literally break your business with a price hike so be very careful when you build your stack. Don't tangle yourself by consuming vendor locked features. Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel.
Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel.
Changing infrastructure over a small increase in price (which rarely happens) is a one of those dreams that techies have but hardly ever happens because the risk of regressions is too high.
The minute you don’t use managed services and you host everything yourself on EC2 instances you have the worse of all worlds - you’re paying more than baremetal, you’re paying the same amount for supporting your infrastructure, and you’re not developing any faster than you could on prem.
I don't think price is the main motivation to use cloud. Ease of use, vast resources to provision without any significant delay and pay for what you use are the main factors.
If your infra is not mission critical and if you have deep pockets you can afford to be tied to a vendor. Otherwise - having skilled expertise and designing your architecture in vendor agnostic way is pretty much essential.
Of all the business risks you have, AWS or Azure going out of business is the least of them. Do you think that the executives at Netflix stay up at night worrying about AWS going out of business?
Its not about them going out of business - its the other way around. Its not just the pricing bump that can have an impact. All cloud providers have some sort of quota. Say if some quota cannot be increased by one provider and your business cannot thrive without it. What would you do?.
We had one such case but in the end it worked out positively. We realized GCP had 100 service account limitation when we exhausted it. We have had our quotas bumped for many different things sometimes instantaneous or max in a day or two. We needed more than 100 service accounts but it seems GCP wasn't even designed to handle that request. After two weeks we got it approved but still we can't go to service account page on the console to see the accounts since its not designed to list that many. We have to use gcloud to view and to handle them. What if GCP said no?. There are players who aren't anyway big enough like netflix but still are powers users but without deep pockets.
AWS has all sort of “soft limits” that you can email support about and they will increase it within 30 minutes. Out of the three major cloud providers, GCP is the worse when it comes to customer service and understanding the needs of an enterprise.
Amazon will gladly let you spend all of the money you want to spend.
In your specific case, not being able to view but a maximum
amount on the website is normal that’s what the CLI/APIs are for.
Probably not, but I’ve seen two companies that were in AWS.
The first company where I was the Dev lead and at the time didn’t know the first thing about AWS and neither did the infrastructure guys and we brought in consultants. Yes it was much more expensive. We didn’t reduce the number of people, didn’t increase automation from the netops side and we developed just like we did on prem. So yeah they should have stuck with the colo and from what I’ve heard, they kept my system on AWS but stopped there.
On the other hand, I’ve worked for a company that started off on AWS from day one. They outsourced most of the netops to a Managed Service Provider, they have one person in house that manages some of the EC2 instances and does some other projects, and they used as many of the managed service offerings on AWS as they could. They were more concerned about focusing on their core business than worrying about the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”.
Yes. Cloud is way too expensive if pricing is the main criteria.
I have seen many big companies move out of cloud and onto bare metal after realizing how much they could save. But all of them had the expertise to handle the migration and continue the ops with ease.
Azure's UX is terrible. They have this weird sliding, Metro UI that takes a lot of learning to figure out. Every startup that I have talked to has hated using Azure. Even the pricing is so hard to figure out. There is some weird intermediate conversion when looking up the price for managed databases.
Microsoft is known to throw brilliant discounts into bundling cloud along with its other Office stuff. Not sure if they are using this as leverage.
In India, I know for a fact that the banks that are moving to the cloud are doing it on Azure, because Microsoft is not afraid of heavy compliances. It's hard to speak to a human in Google Cloud.
I agree on the UI part, it is quite horrendous. But any major enterprise organisation should be / probably is using some sort of automation tool such as Terraform or something similar. You just don't go and click around in the UI to set up your stuff manually, that's not how big projects in enterprise work (all cloud stuff is automated without depending on UI) so bad UI is a con but it's less important that other more technical features.
ha ha - fair enough. Pretty much justifies Hashicorp's valuation ;)
But here's some stuff that's really missing. In Google's dashboard (and their API), you can add ssh keys after creation of an instance. Its a fairly basic functionality made possible by the "accounts daemon" (which is opensource https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-package...)
There's a large number of companies that have a "Microsoft Strategy", meaning that if Microsoft have a solution that sort of fits the problem, that's what they pick.
Google simply can't sell to these customers, because... They aren't Microsoft.
The weird part is that a large number of these companies will outsource their operations, their own staff will never use Azure services directly. It would make zero difference if their applications run on Amazons, Googles or Microsofts cloud offering, but they have a "Microsoft Strategy", so it has to run on Azure.
It's astonishing to me that you silicon valley types still don't get, how much of a lead MS have on the compliance front (among others) that makes their cloud platform the only logical choice.
In Europe, GCP is almost immediately disregarded, as they have, on multiple occasions, proved they cannot be trusted with your data, and legally required audits will destroy your company if you chose google as your provider(see the DeepMind issue for the latest example)
while Amazon doesn't have quite the same problem, contrast that to MS who has the largest compliance list, as well as outstanding contracts with most large companies, and the choice is bloody obvious.
Essentially, if you are not a SF startup or American centric company, there really is no other option, and the vast majority of the human population, surprise surprise, do not live/work in America.
I'm also in Europe, using GCP, know many others who do, and have actually never heard criticism of GCP with regard to data security.
Yes, there are lots of people criticising Google. But for a business using GCP, my impression is that they have been pretty good crossing their t's and dotting their ö's during, for example, the recent introduction of GDPR. They have contracts and model clauses for different scenarios and products. And while I can't judge how good these are, I would assume they will be tested in court pretty quickly.
Long before that, they have reacted well to criticism. For about a decade or so, Analytics has had the option to only collect anonymized IP data, a requirement from a couple of court decisions categorizing IP addresses as PII.
I don't disagree that Google's size alone is reason for scepticism, and to keep an eye on them. But please don't go around claiming to speak for some imaginary European consensus when no such thing exists.
Microsoft is much better positioned than Google to build a large cloud business off their enterprise customers. IT execs need a "cloud strategy." MS can move their existing apps right into Azure. Presto, you have a good story for the board. Their success in this sphere doesn't surprise me. Google's cloud business growth is nothing to sneeze at, and I don't know whether it matters that they are in third place or not.
While I’m a huge G cloud fan , there is too many things that frustrate me with GCloud.
Whether it’s Firebase that doesn’t have a way to limit user bandwidth or Google Staff taking you for a dummy because the guy is a « Google Engineer » or the performance of European Datacenter... there is a just countless stuff that makes GCloud overall an « okay » experience but nowhere similar to what AWS or’Azure offers
I work in this space. If you count VMWare on-prem deployments, Azure and GCP are 3rd and 4th, respectively.
Amazon's dominance is massive, Azure exists because Microsoft gives it away for free with big Windows and Office purchases, and GCP putters along last due to perceived bad customer service (which is kind of true)
I find Google's products harder to use than competitors.
A year ago I did a shootout between visual recognition APIs by the like of IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google, Clarifai, etc.
Every API other than Google took less than 20 minutes to get logged in and running API calls.
To log into Google cloud services I had to install complex proprietary code just to be able to log in. Then when I installed the Python GCS API it destroyed my anaconda installation even though I wasn't working in the base environment.
I was able to get it to work but it took 10x longer than competing APIs.
It seems to be the same way for other GCS services. I think people at Google think they are so smart that developer ergonomics doesn't matter.
Google struggles with the top down Enterprise sales required to make something like this happen at a non-Tech Fortune 500 firm. It’s not about low cost hardware and fancy AI, it’s about helping move a process along.
Microsoft were able to leverage their Office 365 cloud products that most companies are already using to gain momentum. Google have shifted their focus toward AI in their recent years and I believe once it is ready, Google will come out with a breakthrough AI application on its cloud platform that will make a lot of businesses flock to them. Right now they just really don't have a way to differentiate themselves among other providers yet. It's still early in the game but that time will come.
GCP is mainly sold to engineers it being the best one on a price per feature, AWS is sold on market force they where the first big one. Azure is sold on being a vmware setup replacement.
i have been using AWS for many years across multiple companies now. Over the years i got the feeling that the quality has degraded. New services are half-baked (ES, EKS), some newer API's are overly complicated (VPC peering is overloaded for cross-account AND internal instead of 2 abstractions on top of it - why do i need to get confused about all these extra API args which are not needed for internal VPC peering and have to spend hours to finally understand it). Overall AWS feels that they got more sales focused.
i just started to get nightmares with Azure recently, luckily i was able to get rid of almost everything of it (only keyvault remains, since azure does for now have the best offering for HSM). The UI is absolute terrible from front-end caching bugs to strange permissions. MS seems to have to invent their own vocabulary for everything instead of using terminology that most of the rest of the internet uses (which makes finding things very hard), same goes for their API's, its almost impossible to use their API's without these super huge and often buggy libs (try to use REST API auth without a lib...). I am personally also having a hard time to read their documentation.
I did not had the chance to try GC yet but i want to. I know that google services sometimes can be a bit complex to start with, but there is good documentation and reference docs - its usually very easy to just use REST api if you dont wanna use some heavy libs. We recently moved to k8s (i am loving it - continues deploying apps with autoscaling and 0 downtime was never that easy), so as we move more into k8s i hopefully get the chance to try out GC
Interesting. Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena, they had a chance to integrate with Red Hat's customer base and lost it to IBM. I suspect IBM will handily pull into third unless they manage the acquisition like most of their other acquisitions.
> Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena.
Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals.
The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capitalize on any expanded and growing market if you're just a niche player catering companies under 10MM ARR. That doesn't mean you can't build a great company that caters for SMBs, but you just won't be a significant player in the market (Think Digital Ocean).
You can try to capture all that theoretical mass of small and medium businesses which in theory looks larger and more profitable when seen as a block, but you will burn yourself harder and get less return over those deals. It's simple math. It's better to go after an account that will spend 20MM on your services (for instance Netflix), than trying to close 200 accounts that will spend 100K on your services.
The logic here is that by earning the trust and loyalty of the enterprise clients you can slowly capture the other segments of the market. Not the other way around.
If Google's plan for their cloud is to focus on SMBs, they will get crushed even harder and potentially disrupted by niche companies which ironically will build their own offerings on top of more feature-rich public clouds like AWS or Azure.
You're incorrectly conflating "enterprise" with "large" here. For example, Snap and Apple are very large companies in terms of Cloud spend, but they're very much not an "enterprise"/Fortune 500 company that moves at the speed of an arthritic sloth and needs to be sold on the benefits of moving to the cloud.
I'm basing this on the actual technical terminology for classifying business segments. Snap and Apple are definitely considered Enterprises if we go by the Garter definitions that represent business segments as cohorts of different IT needs.
SMB (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses)
0-100 Employees with ARR of $5-$10 million
SME (Small and Medium Enterprises)
100-1000 Employees with ARR of $10 million to $1 billion.
Large Enterprise
Over 1000 employees with ARR of over a $1 billion.
Of course, there are always going to be outliers or companies that can't be classified exactly in one category because they may have unusual large IT spendings and Infrastructure needs. That's probably the case for Snap and Apple, but that doesn't mean they are not enterprises by definition.
As an IaaS, the bulk of your revenue is not coming from Snap anyways. It's coming from companies with those arthritic speeds you mention and that are just starting to realize why it makes sense to move their huge workloads to the cloud.
For our application it would make it a lot easier to directly communicate with phones and other devices on mobile networks among other things. It's a UDP-based native protocol. Google has UDP load balancers, but they obscure source IP and other info.
There is no deep integration. Some plugins yes. It is driven by that motivation. I use VS Code daily and never read the word Azure there.
My opinion on your question: Not much. The interesting question is: How much the good will (VS Code, .NET Core, Linux support,...) of the last year's pay out
If Godaddy can provide decent support, why can't Google?! The only think I use on Google Cloud is Firebase, love Firebase. But even then, I never know who/where to ask if I have questions.
I've had my ups and downs with Firebase. The dev experience is generally good, but reliability hasn't been so great.
Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers.
I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be uploaded.
2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed. Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted.
We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android SDKs.
Our support page mentions where you can ask questions https://firebase.google.com/support/ Slack is good and the firebase-talk Google Group is a great resource, as there are Googlers monitoring. Glad you're enjoying Firebase.
Why do you think that Apple will enter the cloud? Apple hasn't been a real contender in servers for a decade, and it seems like their strength lies more in the design than in raw technical capabilities.
Great question. Apple has a long history on building on the shoulders of giants....and then building their own giant.
Further, they also have a long history of playing suppliers against each other in order to get the best terms.
Finally, Apple occasionally works hard to move away from companies it fights with - Adobe and Qualcomm are two notable ones there, as are the social media firms like Facebook.
As for evidence, I’d offer up this report on future data center spending that they are planning. You don’t have as many data centers and add to it in this magnitude without having a solid strategy.
