[pori]

Can someone provide a little context towards this exodus from AWS to Google Cloud? I understand in DropBox's case that they (questionably) need their own infrastructure for cost saving. But then there's Apple and Spotify suddenly changing over. What's the advantage?

I have a fear that this trend among large companies is going to trickle down to smaller ones and independent devs. Considering these "Cloud Wars" I can see stories like continuing with different providers. Ultimately, a scenario could occur where one year, one provider is king. Then the next, everyone decides they need to migrate to the next big thing. That would be irritating for us contractors. We would have to learn new interfaces and apis at the same rate of JS frameworks.

[outside1234]

There is no exodus. There are a lot of companies moving to multi-cloud, which makes sense from a disaster recovery perspective, a negotiating perspective, and possibly from cherry picking the best parts of each platform.

This is what Apple is doing. They use AWS and Azure already in large volume. This move adds the #3 vendor in cloud to mix and isn't really a surprise.

[pori]

Thanks for the answer. That makes a lot of sense. I guess To some degree, I did know this. But the media has been portraying these moves as a complete move, hence the whole "exodus" hype. It bothers me still, because this rhetoric may lead to scenario I described above for smaller companies.

[grrowl]

The media is sensationalist as ever — I would worry about any CTO or Engineering Lead who based such a huge important decision on a Business Insider article.

[lugg]

Is that a bad thing? Competition good.

[pbarnes_1]

Mmm... I think you'll be seeing them push more AWS/Azure stuff onto GCP. :)

[jmspring]

This.

If you can afford it, multi-cloud makes sense. Reduced risk to outages, etc.

Personally I've seen smaller companies also doing the same.

[campers]

Its more catch-up than an exodus, but also overtaking in some ways. Short version I'd say pricing and data processing (DataFlow, DataProc and especially BigQuery) Their core network infrastructure is more advanced, and Live Migration is pretty nice too.

Long version the recent posts of Spotify and Quizlet’s moves to GCP dive deep into their reasons why.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Spotify-chooses...

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/free-online-lea...

[rodgerd]

> That would be irritating for us contractors. We would have to learn new interfaces and apis at the same rate of JS frameworks.

Heaven forbid cloud computing move beyond the current 1960s "You only buy from IBM" model, especially if it's "only" benefiting the customer.