Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing services down.
Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform.
Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though.
Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.
Amazon getting into on demand hosting early is in it's DNA. If you look at them as a business that grew up on earning profits on very small margins. And that early on demand hosting was pretty low margin, that in their case also let them offset some risk of building data centers earlier than they would have otherwise.
Bezos graduated summa cum laude electrical engineering and computer science and then had a fair part in building out Amazon's own infrastructure. He probably knew that stuff quite well even if it was only a support to the core business.
Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account?
I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.
In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.
I'm an enterprise GCP customer, Google Support have a few superbly irritating habits:
1. They link to generic documentation that doesn't solve my problem
2. They insist that things that are clearly bugs aren't bugs until they're provided with some trivial reproduction case that satisfies them
3. They refuse to advise on issues with beta products despite half of GCP's products being in a beta
4. They are sometimes just flat-out wrong (but confidently so) about the cause of an issue
I'm an Enterprise AWS customer(well, I work for one), our account is special enough that we've got extra AWS tech people on site regularly in addition to normal support, and I've seen 1, 2, and 4 with AWS, both regular support and our on-top handholding.
On top of that AWS documentation is often both needlessly opaque, elliptical, incomplete, and outdated or otherwise incorrect.
On the other hand, if the issue isn't too obscure, AWS’s huge marketshare means that you can usually find decent answers on SO.
I am currently in a support role at a company(not GCP) with some pretty big enterprise customers and let me just say that supporting software is fucking hard.
You essentially have to be a systems engineer/sysadmin for every one of your customers with only as much context as your customer is willing to share.
You are 100% right, but it's worth noting that this is why there's a whole model of b2b interaction that involves embedded engineers partnering with a company to solve their specific problems (IBM, SAP, etc.).
The reason Google support has a hard time of it is Google doesn't offer that model to all its customers, just the ones that can pay a lot of money. But support still has the job of helping everyone else (with all the challenges you've described that such entails).
I think most of the annoyance with Google is their culturally not seeming to understand that model even exists.
Their zeitgeist appears to be "Other companies needed to provide that because their technology was wrong / incomplete. We'll just build things right instead."
Which is batshit insane, in the same way that expecting a veterinary pharmacist could prescribe for humans... with better technology.
To be fair I too probably wouldn't accept something as a bug until provided by a trivial reproduction case. I have seen too many developers call things bugs before looking at their own code.
It was a documentation/error response bug in their API, so it was hard to reproduce trivially. I gave them some source that reproduced it (https://github.com/samcgardner/neg-lb-initialiser), which really seems like it ought to be sufficient - it reliably reproduces wrong behaviour.
I do have experience as a GCP customer. I may not be a big customer of GCP, but I do spend around 3k/year in G Suite and 38k/year. It is uttermost impossible to have a phone conversation with somebody from GCP. You just can’t get a hold of somebody there.
Contrast that with AWS, where I had 4 engineers (back when our bill was 12k/year) helping us with recommending certain arquitectures and actively being useful anytime we reach out.
Our AWS expenses tripled because of growth and us choosing them for new components while our GCP expenses have remained flat.
Amounts like 30k/year may not sound big to many folks, but when you go to a truly good SaaS organization and spend that kind of cash, you get excellent support (online or offline). Google has absolutely amazing services that for the most part do not require human support, but for the times that you actually do, it is simply non-existant.
We're a new GCP customer with a growing amount of spend as we investigate multi-cloud (coming from AWS multi-account, words can't effectively express how much of a joy GCP is to work with).
It may be because we're an attractive customer with a very large amount of AWS spend, but the folks at GCP have made our adoption pretty amazing. We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services, in addition to onsite training/consultation with experts (all paid for by Google).
I've had to use support a couple of times and found it pretty on par with support I've gotten out of AWS.
Like any provider of services, I've found that relationships are key. Cultivating a good relationships with your reps/contacts goes a long way in their willingness to go the extra mile for you.
But, interactions with our reps have grown fewer (we're told their customer success/technical account management teams are understaffed), and it may be a sign that we're getting out of the honeymoon phase. We'll see.
> We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services
As have we. But that should ring a few alarm bells in regards to scalability and whether that can continue.
Google should just cut IBM's support org (the older, experienced folks) off the carcass, retrain them, and use them as a cadre for building their own org.
> I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.
AWS frequently will communicate detailed, specific technical workarounds and instructions via email on the free support plan. I’ve reached out to GCP support and the best I’ve ever received was a link to a generic support document.
AWS does give 1-1 support to smaller clients, and you can also pay extra to get actual phone help. The OP may or may not have had direct experience with this but his criticisms ring true with mine.
My point was that their reliance on reputation was misguided, especially in the case of a large conglomerate with many business units targeting consumers and businesses separately.
> Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure?
The point is that that doesn't matter. Even if it's not always logical, the reputation of your company as a whole sometimes matters, even in the case of corporate accounts ("nobody got fired for buying IBM" after all). Moreso in the case of startups where you have one tech guy who might have gotten burned before.
Amazon has a stellar reputation since nearly everyone has gotten a refund from Amazon for some cheap DOA $2 cable but meanwhile Google stonewalled them on some random glitch in Gmail. Even if it's not logical, those things stick around in people's heads.
Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated.
One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).
> Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service.
No, I don't think there really is.
With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.
I've had really high quality support from GCP and a nice human touch when I accidentally ran up a $10,000 TPU bill on my own personal project. I emailed them, saying I don't actually have that kind of money, and they not only wiped the whole bill, they refunded all the money which had been charged to my debit card and already removed from my bank account.
Very communicative, real people responding...couldn't have asked for more. Also I personally feel the UI on GCP is far more human-centered/focused than either AWS or Azure.
To me, GCP is the most "human" cloud service offering so far. I get the criticism when it's applied to GMail or Google Maps but I really don't understand that as applied to GCP.
I believe the "reputation" is simply the fact that you cannot call someone at Google for support unless you're an enterprise customer (GSUITE).
That's the new trend though for almost all companies. Customer telephone support is costly, difficult to manage, difficult to staff, and problematic customers consume an overwhelming amount of resources - orders of magnitude more than their value as a customer.
...on the enterprise side, I've had great experiences with their GSUITE support teams.
The online support forums are garbage though - I'll give you that.
We pay for GSUIte for our org, approximately $300/month across a number of domains. I find the included chat support to be excellent and often marvel at how wait times are always under 1 minute. Perhaps other GSuite users dont know that chat support exists?
From what I've heard their customer service for paid customers seems to be fine. No first hand experience though because I've also heard that if anything goes wrong they tend to shut down and ban all your Google accounts - that seems to be the main thing people here seem to warn about anyway. And when that happens there's no way you're going to get to talk to anyone who can help you.
We recently had to choose a cloud provider for a Fortune 150 company. Google was the first one thrown out - for this exact reason. We have absolutely no faith or trust in Google's ability to keep anything running or to provide any level of customer service.
My experience with Azure match Google's reputation, and no, having an Enterprise Agreement with Azure doesn't help one bit, other than having an army of evangelists and partners chasing after you.
I completely disregard any documentation or information older than 2019, and I'm a bit suspicious if it is from the first half of the year, that is how often they change things for no apparent reason.
Their support will likely try to convince you to rewrite your app with their latest stack than solve obvious issues with Azure.
The only positive thing about the whole ecosystem is that support and evangelists/presales will likely admit bugs and share workarounds they've used. For example deploying AKS from the portal has a 50% chance of failing because it will not have created the service principle before something else requires it - so they will recommend creating the service principal in advance and selecting it in the config.
Combine that with pushing out things before they should actually be considered ready for production and you have a constantly moving target of jumping on broken things and having them sunset just when they were starting to be stable, forcing you to either jump on the next half-ready replacement.
Yeah - I get this but when things are free, I no longer assume they'll stick around and I no longer hold it against the business closing the free service down. I think in the mid 2000s a lot of people saw free as a quick way to do land grabs or experiments and google especially. As a result there is this mis-conception of trust. To me it was growing up with the internet and learning that a business needs $$ to operate so anyone selling something for free that didn't have a clear monetization strategy was to be avoided. Sure study it and learn but never trust it for your own well being... my two cents
My pipedream theory about that is that Google has an AI for modeling Alphabet. If the service was normal (not that terrible), google cloud would be such a success that there would be a trial for monopoly and Alphabet would be crushed. My theory is that google tries to ensure it will earn a lot of money as long as possible and this means not killing the golden goose by being too greedy or too dominent on a market.
Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space.
They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google)
There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly eroded in the 2010s.
They suck at communicating.
They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal, l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more money.
________
GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before product, service, reliability over speed)
Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness.
_______________
The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change (unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.
I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they have their best people managing their core products running their own infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own internal services.
Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own clouds for their primary services creating a feedback loop which ensures they don't have the big outages that GCP has had over the past year.
Dogfooding usually helps with usability. I'm not sure it has much to do with big outages; GCP is big enough that all the individual decisionmakers are pretty maximally incentivized not to break it.
I know I'm nit-picking, but what's wrong with Valve's handling of Portal? It is a highly-successful franchise that continues to pay dividends for them with no further investment on their part, if I understand correctly.
Not every game needs a sequel. I agree that a smaller company would have been economically forced into milking the franchise, but that doesn't imply milking the franchise is universally a good thing.
Meanwhile, perpetual testing initiative was a great solution for keeping the game active without requiring active investment from Valve's game developers.
I agree with you in principle, but in this case, Valve hurt themselves by not releasing more games. If they released more sequels to Portal and Half Life, would Epic have released a Steam competitor? Right now, Steam has dwindled to a craigslist-like marketplace of garbage. So just like Nintendo has to release AAA games to keep the Nintendo Switch alive, Valve also has to release AAA games to keep Steam alive.
Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things. Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.
A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out.
But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them. They're all using essentially the same hardware. They all have the same cooling requirements. I wouldn't expect an average to be very interesting.
Carbon neutrality is a flawed statistic IMO and can be doctored with a lot - e.g. if Google pays a company X to plant an amount of trees, who's to say that neutralizes carbon?
Keep it simple, just publish how much power they're using and what the sources are.
I’m not sure what you mean by publish “what the power sources are.” Data centers are grid connected and are therefore connected to a lot of different generators—including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. All generators on the grid contribute to the grid. It’s really tough to single out a generation source for a particular user.
I remember walking by a google data centre on the Columbia river years ago and being told that it was sighted there so that it could use the power from the dam.
Personally, I don’t understand carbon neutrality. How deep does this rabbit hole go? If Google only buys and uses fully electric cars for street view and use only solar and wind to power them is that good enough? Does the manufacture of the car, batteries, solar panels also have to be carbon neutral? If not, can a company become carbon neutral by simply letting another company do the dirty work?
I know that Microsoft's datacenters, and probably many other, are parked next to cheap power sources like hydro plants that aren't near any major demand sources.
Cooling is a pretty big factor in the energy usage of datacenters, and there's a lot of room for creative use of technology there - or simply geographic advantages.
It's a lot smaller than you think these days with all the effort that has gone into it.
Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.
Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain
No, because computer chips don't operate at 100°C (let alone 300°C like a nuclear reactor). Low-temperature heat flows contain little usable work. Typically the best option is to dump the spare heat into the nearest body of water, or into the air.
I agree it's rather strange to ask for who has the lowest energy usage when you're a cloud customer. "I want to rent this computer to do X, but it shouldn't consume any electricity" is not a reasonable demand.
However: one could say that these companies are now big enough that it is reasonable to start demanding that these companies source the energy in a climate-friendly way. I think it's not at all unreasonable to demand that when Google or Amazon builds massive new data centers to be responsible about how those data centers are powered.
Google is 100% renewable and is in my opinion the leader among the giants (AWS, Azure, Google, Ali) but there might be smaller companies that is even better.
Google is not really 100% renewable in any meaningful sense. Google (and others) buy renewable energy, but that doesn't mean their purchases match up to what their data centers actually consume for the simple reason that data centers have a pretty consistent load and wind and solar do not produce electricity consistently. For truly progressive companies in this area, they need to consider matching the hourly generation and loads, not not just annualized generation and load: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/27/100-renewable-does-not-...
This seems like an overly negative assessment. If Google can pay someone else to use solar during the day instead of coal surely we can give them credit for being 100% renewal. After all the opportunities to do this temporal shifting of renewables are exhausted, maybe then it's fair to level this criticism.
How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?
For now, company Y is probably doing better (purely from a CO2 emissions standpoint). But it's not sustainable, because some of those credits are from companies that just reduced their usage below some threshold. Most of the credits are not from "negative emissions" like planting trees. So as the thresholds decrease over time, there will be fewer credits available to buy and they will be stuck with either really expensive credits or a surplus of CO12 generation.
It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).
> It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind.
You certainly could run on it on a dedicated combination of any mix of wind/solar/hydro power and stored (e.g., battery or regenerative fuel cell) power you wanted to.
In practice, you'll probably want to connect it to the grid, but directed purchases on the grid, while they don't actually select which source really powers the DC, have all the practical effect of doing so.
The providers are already financially incentivised to minimise their power consumption. I’m not sure any change is needed. I suppose the power source might be relevant to the customer (eg. Coal vs hydro, etc).
This needs to include the energy cost of data transmission to/from cloud data centers as well for a fair comparison. These server farms don't exist in isolation.
I'd say so. It makes a difference when you're doing things like hyping Google for using only renewable energy sources for their cloud data centers. OK, cool, but all the network infrastructure along the way doesn't.
Only somewhat related, but I'm quite certain that on premise solutions would win over most cloud services if the energy cost of data transmission was factored in.
All of these vendors will brag about their pue and energy sourcing. Nobody will tell you their electric bill, because it’s meaningless to you and meaningful to competitors.
Google regularly brags about their facilities and you can find info with 30 seconds of research. AWS is a little more cagey, they will brief customers. Microsoft is more like Google.
I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite and Office 365 just muddies the waters.
Office 365 and Azure with other cloud based services is still counted under the 'Commercial Cloud' division. I'm sure that's what op is referring to and with G Suite and GCP under the Google Cloud division.
I was wrong, MS seems to have changed its revenue disclosing methodology but it's still not clear how much Azure generates as it's lumped with Windows server, SQL server and Enterprise mobility under the 'Intelligent Cloud' division.
I'm new here, so are you that snarky Twitter guy with an open jaw pic as a profile pic? I'm not sure if you still consider an at least 8 billion dollar annual revenue run rate business (GCP) as a 'hobby'.
More specifically, they should just break these huge corporations up. Better for everyone long term, except maybe their tax dodging share holders. Google has conflicts of interest competing against their own cloud customers, some of whom are also ad customers, with products that get preferential treatment on the same platforms. Same for MS. Same for Amazon. Same for Apple. They each have overlapping businesses that are used to subsidize other parts of their business and snuff out competition.
I understand that this is probably legal under the current system but there have been plenty of calls to change that system lately as it has been heavily pushed to its current shape through decades of lobbying & special interest. It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP. That's not a free market anymore but a form of corporate dictatorship.
> It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP.
It has been, actually, normal for there to be corporations with revenue dwarfing the GDP of most nations on Earth (the UN is a recent distraction) for nearly as long as joint stock corporations have been a thing.
Largely because GDP isn't exactly equally distributed among countries; the median GDP of a country on Earth right now is only in the neighborhood of $15 billion, which is in the neighborhood of the GDP of a quite small city in the developed world.
> That's not a free market anymore
“Free market” is a non-existent abstract ideal, not a thing that actually exists or can exist.
It is totally normal for corporations to dwarf nations in GDP. Corporations are far less powerful now then they used to be - during colonial times the british east india company was not only larger than many countries, it actually had it's own army twice the size of the british army and invaded and colonized and controlled many countries. If we're talking about corporate dictatorship, it's been far far far far worse than google competing with their own customers.
I don't know about that. As someone who has worked for some of the big companies, there's a ton of efficiency gains in being able to use a common set of internal tools and software that these companies have and while the public clouds have externalized a lot of those internal tools, they haven't externalized all of them yet nor would you benefit from the common set of software reuse.
I completely agree. Both Microsoft and Google only release inflated cloud numbers, I guess to look more competitive with Amazon. This way Google only looks like a 1/4 of Amazon rather than maybe 1/8....
Edit: according to other comments Microsoft's numbers are no longer inflated.
Doing some rudimentary math on the below statements suggests Azure proper is about 20% of 11.9 Billion i.e. approx 2.38 Billion.
The rest of it is from Windows Server and other server products like SQL Server, SharePoint ... and Enterprise services. As an example SQL server running in AWS also counts in that number.
<quote>
"Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:
Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency)
It's 'inflated' as in a large section of their enterprise software is included with Azure, similar to GCP with G suite. That being said, Amazon Chime and Workdocs are also included in AWS revenue, but probably make up a much less significant portion of AWS revenue compared to GCP and Azure.
It's still inflated because azure revenue is counted with other server products like Windows Server, SQL server and Enterprise mobility under the 'Intelligent Cloud' division.
I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google.
How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.
So predatory pricing is very illegal, and considering that there are three major players in this space (azure/gcp/aws), all three of them would have to coordinate to kill other competition (since otherwise one of them could break from the deal and make their own money by betraying the other two), which is also very illegal.
And why would they even need to do something like that? AWS is wildly profitable anyway with enormous amounts of market share. When would it ever make sense for them to give up billions and billions and billions of dollars in profits to wipe out tiny cloud providers while also screwing up the economics of the space (changing people's expectations of how cloud should be priced meaning they won't accept prices as high as they are currently) and hoping and praying that GCP and Azure play along when it's time to hike prices back up?
What about the case of Amazon vs Diapers.com? Amazon basically undersold this company on diapers to the point where diapers.com was told to sell to Amazon or fuck off and die. The company ended up selling out for $540M USD.
This behavior is illegal yet Amazon is still here. While there’s no obvious case for their cloud division, it’s not unprecedented within the company to do so.
Good point. As a counter, this article (It's a national review article, so take it with a large grain of salt - I don't agree with it entirely but you and I have likely read the same articles on the other side of this and the NR article provides a good alternate perspective) suggests that the Quidsi case is not really predatory pricing (as the FTC determined in their investigation) as this did not drive amazon to achieve a monopoly in diaper sales (most diapers are still bought in grocery stores etc), even in the online space did not have a long term effect (The founders of Quidsi did quite well for themselves in their next venture, Jet.com). The allegations of undercutting to kill quidsi also came primarily from the founders and hasn't really been backed up. In the long term, that didn't really impact the consumer at all, even if amazon did kill Quidsi, they weren't able to shape the market.
Sorry for the miscommunication then, since if it seems like I was implying that, I clearly wasn't explicit enough in stating that this sort of tactic would not work because it absolutely requires communication in order to coordinate. The game theory does not support the idea that coordination could happen without communication. AWS, Azure, and GCP are all competitors who are incentivized to make moves that hurt the others at their benefit. Coordinating would be moving away from the nash equilibrium, and that behavior would not be able to be sustained without a defined punishment as a part of a collusive relationship, and they would need to communicate to set that up.
They have to target a different market. They have to provide customer support. They need to provide a lot of white glove services. They have to offer "tours of our facility" to those who think that has value. This could be businesses like lawyers but not tech businesses.
> while the small businesses slowly bleed out and die.
This is what killed small grocery businesses. The bigger corporations lose money on lots of popular items and make margins on other products. Walmart is especially bad, they can take lots of losses on grocery because they're making margins in other areas of the store.
The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigger businesses to operate more efficiently than a small business? Offshoring labor forces, offshoring manufacturing, low to no import tariffs, ability to utilize immigrant labor (small companies have no shot in the H1B process), corporate HQ's in lower tax jurisdictions, legalized accounting fraud (CapEx vs OpEx), skirting labor laws by hiring 'contractors,' getting outright handouts from municipalities (see Amazon HQ2 or any NFL stadium), onerous regulations, etc, etc.
Democracy in action. This is what everyone keeps voting for. Kill small business, empower multinational corporations.
> Democracy in action. This is what everyone keeps voting for.
What's amazing is that, literally nobody goes to the polls hoping to vote for such outcomes, yet despite that fact, it is indeed what we end up getting. Democracy is simply unable to fix this.
Democracy is the root cause, let alone able to fix it. And when people finally have a referendum to cast off their overlords, the overlords decide that democracy doesn't matter and jail your leaders.
>The ultimate question is what is allowing these bigger businesses to operate more efficiently than a small business?
I would think technology allowing businesses to scale with extremely low, near zero, marginal costs would be the big reason. That's why the per employee net income figures are so high for the leading tech companies, they can do so much with so little. I predict lots of vertical monopolies in the future.
Focused customer service directly meeting the needs of your existing customers, and serious attention to the products and features they need.
It's not a guaranteed formula---AWS, Google, even Azure have big moats around their offerings and significant table-stakes features implemented. But "focusing entirely on the needs of the customer" is the thing their scale makes challenging; they have customers with multiple disjoint or competing needs.
That's not the problem. It's when the little guys try to compete with what the big giants are doing and get completely blocked out. Amazon/Google are all about being magnanimous and supporting startup growth, just as long as they are getting a piece of the action and that it doesn't threaten their market duopoly too much.
Not every market and product needs to be accessible to the little guy. Things like infrastructure have huge scale benefits, and if the big guys are doing it at modest profits already and some at a loss it's very economically efficient.
kubernetes on google cloud rocks. If they kill gcp like they do with other random services I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, kubernetes is open source and there are lots of other provider. For now, I don’t feel trapped in the least, it’s a great serive, it’s priced right, and the time I save not dealing with AWS nonsense far out weighs the potential downsides of using their services.
Even looking at comparative offerings from different providers, they're really lackluster [1], and in some cases, even more expensive [2].
What could be contributing to those large numbers?
[1] - Memorystore only allows vertical scaling, no support for GCP managed Redis clusters, no hybrid functionality (only instances in the same VPC network can access Memorystore, whereas ElastiCache offers all of this.
To be fair, it seems Memorystore instance is not the same gb-for-gb as Elasticache, since Memorystore gives you extra memory overhead, and on aws you have to manage it yourself. Memorystore also has free network egress/ingress. There is also a RedisLabs offering on Google Cloud with integrated billing.
if you run Redis you need at least 25% of extra RAM on top the instance memorysize if you want to avoid a lot of nasty OOM scenarios. Memorystore gives this memory by default and in aws you need to tweak the reserved-memory. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/...
Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their competitors, and that's unlikely.
Per this quarter's results, AWS grew at 37% while GCP notched up 54%. Microsoft claims 62%, but as discussed elsewhere in the comments that seems dubious (unless you also believe that Azure is already larger than AWS). MS "Intelligent Cloud" grew at 27%.
Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune 500? There are many ways to look at this
It can, right up until Google decides to change the pricing structure on 30 days notice to make everything several times more expensive than before without any provision for grandfathering or transitioning existing clients. My company had to switch off GCP entirely due to pricing changes increasing costs by nearly 5x!
AWS and Azure are both much better about launching new pricing structures, and generally when they make something more expensive its because they're adding new features (and corresponding price tiers).
Aside: This was the first time I've tried to read a techcrunch article in Austria (or the EU in general). The splash screen implies I must consent to tracking cookies or I can't view their content. Is that not illegal?
Edit: On second thought, I'm not sure if the cases are sufficiently similar as Der Standard offers a subscription free of tracking and advertising as an alternative for those who reject cookies. I'm not sure if buying a TechCrunch subscription means they will stop tracking you.
Techcrunch breaks navigation for me on iOS/Chrome. Cant go back without longpressing back and choose referring page from history. Gonna check that plugin. Thanks.
Also, they immediately set a cookie "GCUS" with some hash-id as value, before redirecting to the consent domain. So even if you don't accept they already set a cookie!
IANAL, but why would it be illegal. Isn’t that like saying a company can’t charge you for a product if you don’t want to pay for it. Tech crunch chooses tracking as its fee for reading its content. The law simply states that they must notify you of said tracking. It’s not a public service, and the content is generally pretty crap anyway.
Tracking and advertising cookies are hardly personal information as defined by GDPR, which has a very specific and well defined meaning - name, phone numbers, addresses, government-issued IDs.
> ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
If the tracking id cannot be correlated to a name, identification number, precise location data (not country level), then it's not PII as far as the law is concerned. The criteria is clear: "relating to an identified or identifiable natural person". There is no way that simply a session ID stored in a cookie can be traced to an identity IRL.
I fell that I know what I'm talking about as I designed and implemented an customer authentication system for a medium-sized company that is based in EU, needs to respect GDPR, and I worked closely with their lawyers and operations to make sure we are fully GDPR compliant, and we passed the relevant audits.
The word indirectly in "who can be identified, directly or indirectly" seems like it opens everything up. A session ID isn't directly PII, but it can be linked a user account and from there someone's name, address, etc.
Which is still not PII. More importantly, 3rd party advertising cookies CANNOT be linked to a user account if you don't have code that stores them in your environment. CAN has a very limited meaning, whereas it requires all the preconditions to be true (i.e. I'm storing both 3rd party cookie ID, AND session ID, AND the tables have a correlation), it does not mean "COULD if more code was written".
> and from there someone's name, address
Only if you ask for AND store those. If you're asking for example for a real name and address for an e-commerce transaction, and you're passing them to the card processor, and not saving them anywhere, not even in logs, then you're not storing PII, and you CANNOT link tracking cookies and session ID to data.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still using Firefox containers, and uBlock Origin, and pi-hole, so I totally don't like to get tracked, even if anonymous. But the tendency on HN to label anything that could be used to track a user as PII is actually damaging, because it creates false expectations about how the law actually works and how much somebody is protected.
It’s enforced for the public sector. Which is frankly great in my opinion. Our communication departments have always been the black-sheep of privacy.
Between us, I’m not sure why they are so addicted to various tracking that tells them that absolutely no one clicked on 90% of their content, but they are, and they lack the technical ability to do it themselves without relying on frameworks that steal privacy information.
I believe people have gotten pretty good about auto accepting anything, in no small part due to the 'hey, just wanted to let you know we use cookies, like every other website on the planet!'.
But if people really did overwhelmingly say no, I just see no way for most of the internet to exist. You get overwhelmingly less per click/impression for 'dumb ads,' and news sites have already had to resort to click bait today. It'd pretty much guarantee anything not owned by one of the top 10 would be paywalled in some way.
Sites that rely on tracking to generate targetted ads might not exist. There are still plenty of sites that don't depend on ads, or get sufficient context without tracking. E.g. a car enthusiast forum doesn't exactly need tracking to know it should show car adverts.
I think the internet would stay much the same as it is now. Companies would simply be breaking the law. As a side effect, I think they'd be more willing to do other illegal things too, such as straight up selling your data. They're already breaking the law after all.
For me it redirects to a page from https://guce.advertising.com, telling me my browser is out of date and that I have to go to browsehappy.com to get a new one...
You're right. Disable javascript on [*.]archive.org, and you can read techcrunch just fine. Arguably, better :D
TL;DR: Google cloud revenue includes Saas offerings (docs, gmail etc), in addition to the infrastructure part. They may make roughly 2.5bln per quarter now, but it's still small compared to Microsoft (12.5bln per quarter, includes Azure + Office/outlook) or Amazon (10bln per quarter, AWS only). What is impressive is the growth of the business unit - more than 50% in the last year (they do have to keep it up at the same rate for 4 more years to catch up to competitors though)
This is a more complicated question that it seems!
Cookie banner are not directly related to the GDPR, but to the Eprivacy directive, which, not being a Regulation, is subject to variation in national law transcription. So the answer may vary depending on your country!
Still in an effort to have a uniform position on the question, DPAs( Data protection agency) are working at the EDPB (the European Data Protection Board, a sort of council of DPAs) to have a common position.
One of the currently shared position is that a cookie wall impedes the "free" part of the consent, since you have to support a negative consequence.
In a communication regarding the (future?) Eprivacy regulation, the EDPB clearly stated that:
"In order for consent to be freely given as required by the GDPR, access to services and functionalities must not be made conditional on theconsentof a userto the processing of personal data or the processing of information related to or processed by the terminal equipment of end-users, meaning that cookie walls should be explicitly prohibited." [1]
If I remember correctly the Austria DPA is not of favor of a cookie wall ban though..
Per GDPR it is not, you can't be banned from something if you does not give you consent. But nobody cares, if you have smart lawyers they can argue that those consents are essential for a given page to work and everything is compliant... The same with being opted out from consents by default. Nobody cares too - to opt out you typically need to click through maze of screens searching for small print links that let you say no. That's also against GDPR, BTW.
For now GDPR seems like one more toothless EU regulation. Maybe they manage to catch some big US company and make them pay a few millions just to make a big show and justify the existence of GDPR. Maybe they will catch some poor guy maintaining forum for some hobby group and does not provide "right to be forgotten" functionality (that's why effectively all independent forums are going away in favor of Facebook - good job, EU). But I doubt GDPR will manage to give people more privacy.
I hope that people themselves will figure out what's going on and start fighting back (by using browser plugins, stubbornly reporting misbehaving sites, trying to engage authorities to enforce GDPR, etc.). If yes, maybe GDPR will turn out to be something valuable, for now, it is not.
It's almost certainly illegal but the GDPR is not 100% clear about it and it has literally never been enforced, so most sites are happy to do this because they have plausible deniability and safety in numbers.
Conflating consumer software and cloud infrastructure is a big lie. Microsoft is famous for having started this years ago.
Why do they do it?
Because AWS is at a $40B run rate, and both Google and Microsoft have to show analysts and customers that they are catching up, and that they are big enough, etc.
Real "cloud infrastructure" revenues for Google are probably less than half that.
The worst part is that famed and well-paid analysts perpetrate the lie, either by collusion, or by ignorance.
Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful.
This has become a meme and urban legend at this point, but Office 365 revenue isn't included in Azure's revenue. G Suite is included in GCP revenue though.
See below thread, but Azure + Enterprise services + server products are reported as "Intelligent cloud". It's intelligent cloud that has the $48bn run rate. So it's not a like-for-like comparison with AWS even though it doesn't include Office365.
Follow up question: It would be interesting to see the market share and revenues excluding the use from the own company or different orgs. E.g.: AWS without the Amazon Website use, Azure without the Office use, etc.
Is there any public information about it available?
On the flip side, if Google started 'buying' capacity from GCP for their search, ad, and other infrastructure, they would be the largest cloud vendor tomorrow by most measurements.
>Turning to Microsoft, it reported a combined cloud revenue, which includes SaaS (Office 365, Dynamics, etc.) and cloud computing (Azure), of $12.5 billion for the quarter.
Could you provide a source? I can certainly believe TC is wrong, but contradictory information isn't great.
"Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $11.8 billion and increased 17% (up 19% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:
· Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 16% (up 18% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 27% (up 30% in constant currency)
· Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 19% (up 20% in constant currency) with continued growth in Office 365 Consumer subscribers to 37.2 million
· LinkedIn revenue increased 24% (up 26% in constant currency)
· Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 15% in constant currency) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 42% (up 45% in constant currency)
Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $11.9 billion and increased 27% (up 28% in constant currency), with the following business highlights:
· Server products and cloud services revenue increased 30% (up 32% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 62% (up 64% in constant currency)"
So Office 365 falls under category "Productivity and Business Processes", while Azure as well as 'server products' and 'enterprise services' fall under "Intelligent Cloud".
Their third category is "Personal Computing" which was $13.2 billion and includes Windows, Surface, Search / advertising (I guess Bing), Xbox.
Why should Google and Microsoft separate those just because AWS doesn't make much in their "cloud" SaaS revenue, despite the fact that AWS doesn't separate it either?
Where do you draw the line? If I use the BigQuery UI to analyze data, is that "infra" or "software"? I use Cloud AI Notebooks to spin up a private Jupyter notebook in the Cloud, is that "infra" or "software"?
Yeah I find it interesting that all of the cloud providers do this when in reality it benefits microsoft the most, since they make the most money from their office suite
What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.
Shouldn't it be more important how it can grow, and current costumer satisfaction so they don't switch?
Current market only accounts the "now", you need to access possibilities and risk to understand if a stock price is cheap or expensive.
Maybe that's precisely why they are _not_ doing it. AWS is likely winning compared to them both, and having easily accessible, official market share figures could deter customers who want to avoid the "second best".
It’s a little unrelated but Azure and Office 365 are becoming the same thing in large enterprise, utilising the same Azure AD, letting you run the same powershell/python managed services on your office 365 platform from your Azure platform. Utilising things like OIOSAML for multi-organisational setups for IDM with a mix of local, azure AD and office 365 account management.
I personally prefer things like digital ocean or even heroku becaus they are so much easier to use and manage, but it’s really hard to build a business case on non-azure when you have 365, and there is no alternative to 365 if you’re in a GDPR sector.
We have plenty of procurement projects that are hosted in AWS by private suppliers, so it’s not like we’re somehow against other cloud vendors, it just doesn’t make sense to not chose Azure when you have 365, because that means you’re already partly there and already have the Microsoft certified and trained it staff.
And even more specifically, that Azure has been approved as a third party cloud vendor by your internal security, procurement, legal, and audit teams - no mean feat at lots of organizations.
Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that google will support and service them and not destroy their business after building on a google platform.
Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important though.
Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause they’ll shut it down.