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by iainmerrick 1085 days ago
I think that view might be a bit out of date.

Most of that stuff is available to external users in Google Cloud; so why isn’t Google Cloud more popular? I don’t have hard numbers handy, but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare.

GCP has plenty of great tools, but it can also be quite awkward to use, and it’s lacking some useful stuff like lightweight edge functions.
2 comments
re-thc 1085 days ago
> but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare

AWS has 1st mover advantage and the biggest ecosystem.

Azure has Microsoft behind it = everyone that used Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, C#, etc that wanted to move to the cloud.

Google doesn't have such a backing. Oracle cloud (huge growth) might be stronger in that sense.

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iainmerrick 1085 days ago
I agree, but it’s surprising that things are that way, especially as they’re not short of cash. If they have this big tech edge over their competitors, where’s the benefit?
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re-thc 1085 days ago
> If they have this big tech edge over their competitors, where’s the benefit?

Most of it is behind huge paywalls compared to their competitors. There's e.g. no serverless version of spanner that is pay-per-usage. Same with Big Table. Even the newly released AlloyDB has a huge starting cost.

If no 1 knows and no 1 can feel for the advantage it doesn't really help.

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kevincox 1085 days ago
A lot of stuff is proprietary so adopting it as a third party can be much riskier. While Google Cloud does have a pretty solid depreciation policy it still means that you are locked to Google Cloud and whatever their future is. At least internal users can escalate if there are serious issues.
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