[zarzavat]

Cloud services are sold on the basis of an exchange. I build my product, or my entire business, on your cloud platform, submitting to a huge amount of risk by doing so. In return, you promise to minimize my risk by being a trustworthy and reliable steward of that platform.

Cloud platforms are a lot like banks. The value proposition of a bank is not that they store your money: my mattress can do that. No, the value proposition of a bank is that it’s a safe and trustworthy place.

There is some second-order thinking involved. If I believe that other businesses are questioning the future of a given cloud platform, then I might decide that I need to start migrating to another provider sooner rather than later. If everybody decides that they need to migrate then it could make the platform actually unprofitable. Like a bank run. Only there’s no FDIC protection for cloud platforms.

Google clearly just doesn’t give a shit what people think of their cloud platform. That’s scary. It means they don’t understand that they’re in the trust business. They truly believe that they’re just selling computing services.

[tourmalinetaco]

They haven’t understood trust as a selling point for at least a decade. At the end of the day Google is an ad company that dabbles in technology, all of their core services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome) are all about reinforcing/showing off their advertising network and any possible benefit consumers derive from that are secondary to selling/displaying ads.

[ttfkam]

Yep, they screwed the pooch with Google Reader and forced Google+ registration. Rather than learn their lessons, they just keep doing the same things over and over, eroding trust, and wondering why they can't get more marketshare in new endeavors.

They just can't see why folks have such loyalty to search, gmail, docs, and Chrome: they are consistent. Folks aren't loyal to Google Cloud, chat, etc. precisely because of their inconsistency and likelihood of getting the rug pulled out at any moment.

[surajrmal]

Google domains is not a cloud product. Google cloud domains is. The latter is unaffected other than the fact the registrar backing the product is going to change to be square space. I'm not sure if any other major cloud vendor is the registrar backing their equivalent product.

[zinekeller]

> I'm not sure if any other major cloud vendor is the registrar backing their equivalent product.

How to shoot down your argument 101: Amazon (https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars?iana-number=4..., https://aws.amazon.com/route53/amazon-registrar-policies/, note that the third-party links are the registries itself like Verisign), Cloudflare (https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars?iana-number=1..., https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/), and Microsoft (https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars?iana-number=1..., https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/manage-c...) are operating their own registrars.

[tyingq]

Making them one product seems possible/reasonable. Cloudflare does it.

[traceroute66]

> Cloud platforms are a lot like banks.

I would argue that your comparison is incorrect.

The correct comparison to a bank is dedicated hosting or own-hardware colocation.

Cloud providers are selling you an abstraction over that base.

Therefore the correct thing to compare cloud providers to are NBFIs (Non-Bank Financial Institutions).

NBFIs know they are not a bank, they know they can't sell you the trust-model of a bank. Instead they try to incentivise you with attractive sounding interest rates in the hope that you will conveniently disregard the fact that you will not benefit from the government-backed deposit safety scheme that you would gain with a bank.

[paulgb]

I think you're taking the analogy too literally. Of course there are certain dimensions where they differ; that's true of any analogy. OP's point is that in both cloud computing and banks, trust is the product.

[traceroute66]

> you're taking the analogy too literally

The OP was the one who said "there's no FDIC protection for cloud", so..... ;-)

> trust is the product

Well, to be fair, too many people put too much trust in the cloud.

"upload all your data to us, we promise we won't look at it" "trust our key-management service where we too have access to the private-key/API" etc. etc.

I wouldn't "trust" any of them further than I can throw a 1U server.