[jbooth]

If I recall correctly, it took Google a while to actually offer the boring stuff. For a while, you could get a Google Compute Engine but you couldn't just get a dang VM image, because Google knows better than you and you should do things their way. They've fixed it now, but lost a lot of potential market share for that conceit.

[boulos]

"So"?

If you're evaluating something today, how does it change your decision that we were late to market with Compute Engine (and in this specific case "bring-your-own-kernel")?

If it's about future boring stuff, I think the list of boring stuff isn't too long ;).

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

[engizeer]

All given, the fact that Google itself doesn't extensively use GC is kind of a red flag(I know quite a few Googlers from search infrastructure and none of them said their teams used GCE internally).

A solid guarantee with AWS is if AWS goes down, then a multitude of Amazon's services also will go down(ex Amazonian myself), so it gives me a belief that AWS's uptime is more important to Amazon itself that it is for external customers.

[boulos]

Search Infra (and Ads for that matter) is an extreme case. Google Search might be one of the worlds most highly tuned infrastructure projects: a marriage of code and hardware design to maximize performance, scoring, relevance and ultimately ROI.

Before we had custom machine types (November 2015 GA), we wouldn't have been remotely close to what they needed. I'm not even sure we've had anyone evaluate the amount of overhead KVM adds in either latency or throughput.

tl;dr: Don't let Search be your "not until they do it". We've got folks in Chrome, Android, VR, and more building on top of Cloud (as well as much of our internal tooling being on App Engine specifically).

[tlarkworthy]

Google Firebase uses GCP including GCE extensively.

(Firebase Engineer here)

[jbooth]

"So" Google lost potential business for a while from people who wanted to spin up VMs rather than wanting to ship code to a proprietary execution framework.

[boulos]

I think you're agreeing: We certainly missed a huge segment of the market at the time, but now that we've got GCE new business can certainly come our way.

[vgt]

If I recall correctly myself (getting old!), Google has had the ability to build your own custom image since GCE went GA 2.5 years ago. Now, admittadly, it took a while to get IAM and VPC going, but we done did it now!

I'd love to hear what other boring stuff has been a showstopper for you, in case we missed something dumb :)

[pritambarhate]

Not having Managed Postgres and Managed Redis are 2 main showstoppers for me.

[vgt]

True but There are 3rd party managed services from both...