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by fairramone 1810 days ago
Wow, that has got to sting for Google Cloud and Oracle.
4 comments

Google withdrew from the original bid due to objections by its employees.
Google was already considered unlikely to win before its withdrawal, so I'd be hesitant to attribute the withdrawal primarily to this.

Unlike AWS and Azure, Google doesn't offer any GovCloud regions, only Fedramp which seems to apply to unclassified data only.

If GCP have fedramp high that’s roughly equivalent to AWS govcloud (fedramp high ~= IL4).

AWS and Azure also have IL6 regions (able to hold secret information).

Finally AWS runs a top secret cloud for the intelligence community. I believe Azure announced a similar project but not when it’ll be open for business.

A memo went out last year about all federal networks supporting IPv6 only in the coming years. Since Google's cloud doesn't really support IPv6 at all, I don't think they were going to win the contract anyway.
That was an excuse and a convenient cover story. GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government. Couple that with the leaked plans to shut the thing down because it's an abject failure (it's a money pit for Google), and why would you want to be on the platform of certain disaster?

I've had demos from GCP sales reps, and the platform is shambolic. It doesn't even work during sales presentations.

> GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government.

Not sure where you’ve gotten this information from. GCP serves many “large organizations” including government agencies [0].

> I've had demos from GCP sales reps, and the platform is shambolic. It doesn't even work during sales presentations.

This feels very hyperbolic to me. Either way, demos don’t always work out the way you intend.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/government

Your example of a "large organization" is the state of Arizona? Australia Post, a tiny regional mail delivery company? What's your definition of "large"?

Also, it's evident they cannot service those customers. Australia Post has a large contract with AWS. Whoops.

I've worked in many large organizations. I've received GCP pitches. I've participated in evaluations of GCP as a technology solution. It's substantially worse than Azure, plus according to their leaked massive losses on the product it'll be shuttered this decade.

>This feels very hyperbolic to me

Their dashboards are typical Angular heavyweight clunk, with confusing error messages, infinite loading spinners and things break constantly. It's been discussed here extensively. [1]

Their actual decent products (BigQuery) are hamstrung by the rest of the failing platform.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357409

You know for all the shit Microsoft gets here, Azure is pretty amazing to work with. I'm gonna say it.
The best thing that happened for Windows Server and Exchange is Microsoft started to run them at scale in house. Suddenly things that had been complained about for decades magically started getting fixed :)
Yes Australia post, the tiny regional mail carrier that delivers over a million items a day.
GCP has some good bits. They're just running into the same problem everyone had catching Windows: it's really hard to compete from a fresh start with something that's been incrementally improved over years of significant use.

Especially when you're Google (our customers aren't as smart as us) competing with Amazon.

It serves companies like checks notes Google, Apple, Spotify. I think it works just fine.

As for anecdata, the only cloud platform I've heard nothing positive is Azure.

GCP runs on Google, Google doesn’t run on GCP.
+ Twitter and Snapchat
> Twitter

Except the most important part of Twitter -- timelines, of course. [1]

> Snapchat

Except the $1 billion contract from AWS, of course. [2]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/twitter-taps-aws-for-its-l...

[2] https://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/

That doesn't mean GCP is bad unless they totally switched to AWS. I believe this is just part of multi cloud approach.
Google Cloud bowed out of the race several years ago

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-...

Looks like good news for VMware, I believe one of the few players focusing in multi-cloud setups
Everyone bar AWS is focusing on multicloud. And VMware's offerings are utter shite and very poor features wise ( where it matters), so I doubt they'll be impacted.

( Their offerings were so bad they were forced to sell their vSphere as a service arm to a low cost hosting provider. Even with the popularity of that dumpster fire in DCs and most companies moving away from DCs they still couldn't capture any market share)

And IBM Cloud.