Didn't realize Google Cloud was so far behind in revenue and growth. Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard.
Google is unparalleled at building efficient data centers. Cloud already has tons of enterprise customers with contracts. They've spent $$$$$$ creating the infrastructure to be able to cash in over the long term.
Anyone who thinks Google will get out of Cloud (already more than an $8 billion business [1]), as if it were comparable to Reader (which made $0, AFAIK), isn't looking at the economic realities here.
I repeat: Google Cloud has more than $8 billion in annual revenue. And AWS proves that clouds are a profitable business.
I just can't understand how anyone can suggest with a straight face that Google might shut it down.
Corporate leaders set stretch goals all the time -- that's part of their job. Not meeting them just means certain VP's might not get their full million-dollar bonuses -- not that a billions-dollar business will shutter and lay off 1000's of people.
In a large company, sure, but in Google? They nuke their own stuff all the time, users be damned. Since AWS offers a larger ecosystem, and doesn't have the Google product TTL of like 5 years, I really don't know why anyone would use GCP unless they're going for multi-provider redundancy
Tired and bad meme is tired and bad. Why would prior evidence of Google shutting down things that are not anything like GCP suggest that Google would shut down things that are like GCP?
Highlights from fiscal year 2019 compared with fiscal year 2018 included:
Commercial cloud revenue, which includes Microsoft Office 365 Commercial, Microsoft Azure, the commercial portion of LinkedIn, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and other commercial cloud properties, increased 43% to $38.1 billion.
It’s not really about “will they shut it down?” But rather, will Google continue to invest heavily in GCP if it’s not gaining traction at the pace they want it to? Maybe they’ll find better ways to spend that money. Microsoft got out of the mobile phone business, which seems ludicrous to me, but they weren’t gaining traction, so...
You’ve just kind of described the problem with GCP. It doesn’t matter how technically good they are if they don’t have good Enterprise support and they have no ability to meet the enterprise customer where they are.
The first step of a major cloud migration is often a combination of hybrid solutions and lift and shifts.
Revenue is inconsequential. What is there profit? Cloud is profitable for AWS and MS. We don’t know what the margins are for GCP.
I don't know what you're talking about. By all accounts, GCP enterprise support is perfectly fine. Why do you think it isn't? Again, it's not consumer Gmail or YouTube accounts. Major companies wouldn't be signing contracts with them if they didn't.
And in what universe is revenue inconsequential? Profit comes whenever you want to stop investing in growing. There is zero reason to believe that Google will be unable to turn a profit off GCP whenever it decides to. Particularly given that it was building datacenters for Search before AWS even existed.
I worked for two shops that migrated to GCP, one from leased space in DCs, one from AWS.
> Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard.
Yeah, there's definitely that risk, and in one of those cases, I disagreed with the move because of it.
That said, depending on what you're doing, GCP's key-value store (BigTable) and analytical DB (BigQuery) struck me as technically more sound than the AWS versions (DynamoDB, Redshift/Athena). As an ecosystem, AWS was far superior, there are more offerings, and they tend to have more features. It's just that they're most likely a managed version of an open-source project.
One place moved specifically because of BigTable. They were on HBase (and not happy with it), so it was the least painful migration option.
I understand the narrative that's going to carry after that article the other day, but I've really enjoyed working with GCP over the last 2 years.
The structure for VM use and their Live Migrate capability for upgrading the hardware underneath with no downtime has been excellent on my more long-lived servers.
My biggest wish is some equivalent of Aurora for PostgreSQL.
Another fairly happy GCP user. They have their issues (everyone does), but GKE is pretty amazing if you don’t have the resources for an in house k8s on AWS team.
I am however fairly pessimistic about their chances. Especially considering the person at the helm is ex-Oracle VP.
I also don’t understand their alternatives... do they want AWS to own the cloud market? They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light?
> They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light?
Android has a lot more synergies with their consumer ads business. It's the extreme version of writing your own browser.
GCP is completely different; it's in the B2B space, and it's a pretty standard business relationship between businesses and a supplier. Being customer-focused and business-focused isn't in Google's DNA.
On GKE, you don't need to define node-pools if you tick enable node-autoprovisioning. This is effectively an EKS fargate profile without any of the limitations (discrete node size, inability to mount volumes etc)
On GKE there's no need for bastion hosts, you can connect to private nodes automatically by tunneling through identity-aware-proxy
On GKE, there's no faffing about with aws-auth-configmap, nodes automatically join the cluster
On GKE, you can use regional persistent disks if you need to store state rather than single zone EBS
On GKE, you can use a single static ip for your nginx-ingress load balancer without needing to faff about with AWS global accelerator (which in any case gives you multiple ips)
On GKE, managed node pools are automatically repaired and upgraded with the choice of google's OS or ubuntu unlike Amazon Linux which is currently the only choice for EKS' managed node pools. GKE can automatically use spot instances unlike the farce on AWS with a 3rd party (spotinst) charging a premium for the same functionality
On GKE, managed istio is ticking a box versus a self-install on EKS
On GKE you need to worry much less about ip exhaustion as they use alias ips vs dedicated ENIs for EKS
Associating IAMs with kuberenetes service accounts is much easier with GKE workload identity than with EKS' oidc webhook
GKE has several features which EKS doesn't (calico, vertical pod autoscaling, binary authorisation, export of cluster data to bigquery)
GCP is fantastic! I've been especially pleased with their network (the GLB is awesome!), BigQuery, Bigtable, GCE live migration, and of course... GKE. I cringe at the thought of having to run Kubernetes myself or settle for an inferior managed solution from Azure or AWS.
Google really dropped the ball on missing cloud computing. With their expertise, they should have owned the space, it's just never the sort of idea that would bubble up in that org.
But balloons to deliver internet in rural areas? They're the leader in that space.
I think it's more they wanted to do it on their own terms. They wanted to provide the best most scalable cloud platform ever in GAE, but users wanted more of a dumbed-down lift-and-shift-friendly variant that AWS offered.
> Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard
It's sort of a Catch-22 for them. They are this far behind in part because people fear they might not be around long term, and they might not be, because people don't want to sign up, because they fear it might not be. :)
Chasing AWS's APIs probably isn't a good use of their time, and wouldn't encourage a lot of people to move.
API compatibility is not the biggest blocker to changing clouds -- moving one's data is.
The could work out a deal where outbound data from Google to AWS is free, but that probably wouldn't be in their best interests either.
I think their strategy of being the best place to run K8s is a good one. If you standardize on K8s you can run on any cloud, and they want to be the best place to do that.
To some extent they are doing this by embracing Kubernetes. For us, almost all of our infrastructure other than databases is running directly on GKE, so moving to AWS or Azure would be fairly easy.
You’re falling for the “OMG Lock In” fallacy. Even if all of the APIs are compatible, if you have any type of scale and even if you’re just running a bunch of VMs, the pain of migrating infrastructure, security, data, network, auditing, connecting back to your on prem network is often a painful multi month process with huge risks of regressions
And what if some Google employees decide they don’t like your organization? Google has already demonstrated they will cave in to that kind of pressure. How can any non-trivial sized organization bet the farm on gcp after that?
Anyone who thinks Google will get out of Cloud (already more than an $8 billion business [1]), as if it were comparable to Reader (which made $0, AFAIK), isn't looking at the economic realities here.
I repeat: Google Cloud has more than $8 billion in annual revenue. And AWS proves that clouds are a profitable business.
I just can't understand how anyone can suggest with a straight face that Google might shut it down.
[1] https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-annual...