
Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business - scommab
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/technology/google-picks-diane-greene-to-expand-its-cloud-business.html
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nodesocket
Google compute has taken some awesome strides in the last year. I now prefer
GCE over AWS, because of pricing (per minute) and simplicity. AWS quickly can
get overwhelming and overly complex.

~~~
slashink
Pricing is fine. Tech support is a joke. I wish I could pay more for Google to
actually offer good support. We tried GCE for a while but it just didn't cut
it in terms of mean response time to questions. AWS really leads on support.

~~~
boulos
We do have paid support tiers
([https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/)) with
explicit time-to-response targets. Which were you using?

Disclaimer: I work on GCE.

~~~
slashink
Well tbh we got answers but they usually were; nope not offered, cannot be
fixed. 3 weeks later I met a Google engineer working with GCE at a party who
fixed it for us the day after hearing about our issue, which means it probably
was able to be fixed from the first time.

~~~
boulos
Sounds like we should throw more parties ;).

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miles932
I think this is a top priority customer ask; I'm running it up to our new
brass.

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pinkunicorn
I don't understand why the reporters hold Google in such high regard,
particularly in the cloud business. Here is a statement from the article:

> "At the same time, analysts say, the company’s offerings in cloud
> development services — computing, storage, data analytics and others — are
> already comparable to Amazon’s."

AWS is far far ahead of GC and it is in no way comparable. Plus the ecosystem
around AWS has evolved and is much more stable. There are a lot of articles
explaining "how to fix X or how to do Y" with AWS than with GC.

I also don't think Google will ever have the level of customer obsession that
Amazon has. Your account got hacked? No worries, AWS will waive the fee, but I
honestly don't think Google will ever do that.

Google is a technology company and might outrun Amazon in terms of technical
superiority, but I don't think they can simply outrun Amazon in cloud
business.

~~~
nulltype
In the ones they mentioned, GCE vs EC2, GCS vs S3, and BigQuery vs Redshift,
they seem pretty comparable to me.

~~~
pinkunicorn
But what about ECS? Lambda? Role Based Authentication? EBS snapshots?

~~~
boulos
GKE is miles ahead of ECS, and being based on Kubernetes is huge. We don't
really have an equivalent to Lambda (yet?) but classic App Engine isn't
actually too far off 'technology-wise' (pay per use, containerized, instant
start).

Our lack of IAM is _beyond_ painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it.

PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even
encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"!

~~~
vyshane
GKE is why I am personally switching from AWS to GCP. I'm running Kubernetes
on AWS at my current gig, but I'd rather not have to build and maintain the
cluster myself if I don't have to.

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sinatra
Diane was 43 when she founded VMware, and 56(?) when she started Bebop. That's
encouraging. Does anybody have details about her background in the years 1978
to 1998?

~~~
npalli
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/11/computing](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/11/computing)

> What is known about her life is that she grew up in Annapolis, on the coast
> of Maryland, in a house on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Her father was
> an engineer and her mother a teacher. It was on the north-eastern seaboard
> that she developed a passion for water sports, especially sailing and later
> windsurfing. She helped to organise the first windsurfing world championship
> in 1974 and two years later won the women's national double-handed dinghy
> championship.

> Her love of the sea influenced her choice of college education after she
> studied mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. She moved to
> MIT to study naval architecture before a brief spell working for an oil
> consultancy based in San Francisco. She left that job relatively quickly to
> go to Hawaii to design windsurfing equipment, but returned to the US a few
> years later to study computer science at Berkeley. She worked for a
> succession of Silicon Valley stalwarts: Sybase, Silicon Graphics and Tandem.
> But her first big break came with the founding of her own media streaming
> business, VXtreme, in the early days of the dotcom boom. It was sold for a
> rumoured $75m in 1997.

~~~
Someone1234
She needs to write a book. Interesting life...

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zck
She gave a talk at Startup School 2013:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c)

~~~
simonswords82
She did indeed, I was there and she was not only intelligent and knowledgeable
but probably the most endearing speaker on the day.

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clock_tower
I'm glad to hear that "the cloud" is becoming less likely to mean "the Amazon
cloud". Monocultures are dangerous, and I doubt that any monoculture is quite
as dangerous -- or at least as unexpected -- as a monoculture for providing
distribution and resilience.

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obulpathi
Relational Databases is one key area where Google Cloud can improve. Adding
support for the most used databases (Maria, Postgres and may be Google own
version of SQL-like AWS Aurora to support large data stores) and easing the
migration path for companies to move their databases into Cloud can ease a lot
of customer pain. This can accelerate the migration to Cloud much faster. It
is very difficult for companies to move to Cloud and adopt NoSQL stores
simultaneously.

~~~
mikecb
[https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/introduction](https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/introduction)

~~~
obulpathi
I know. Compared to Amazon's offering of MySQL, MariaDb, Aurora, SQL Server
and Oracle, Google MySQL offering looks not so good. It's hard to persuade
everyone to migrate to MySQL. Everyone has their own reason to use different
databases.

~~~
mikecb
Oh yeah, in terms of variety, totally true. I tend to just spin up a compute
instance if I need any one of those though.

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univalent
An easy area of improvement is documentation, samples etc. They are seriously
lagging behind AWS and Azure. Becomes hard to choose Google because the cost
of learning is higher.

~~~
x0x0
I dunno, I've found aws documentation to be atrocious. For example, I've had a
very hard time figuring out how to do things like reattaching ebs volumes to
ec2 spot instances. Maybe it's because I don't use aws much, but I get
frustrated and have a hard time understanding how simple tasks need to be so
complex.

I wonder how effective the Microsoft style API lockin strategy will be for
aws. My personal guess is very effective.

~~~
vonklaus
I second this. I like digital ocean a lot for the simplicity and the
community. Obviously, it takes a much more bare bones approach, but being
greeted with 50 icons on your dashboard, each of them a proprietary product
and cost/second pricing services makes it super hard to figure out what you
even are paying, much less receiving.

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jzelinskie
Moving to GCE would be great, if they offered to eat the cost of moving all my
data off S3 ;)

~~~
boulos
How much data? 10 TB will "only" cost $900. Alternatively there's the "ship us
hard drives" option. Failing that, if you're at a crazy scale, we did announce
a switch-and-save program as part of Nearline
([https://cloud.google.com/storage-
nearline/](https://cloud.google.com/storage-nearline/)).

Depending on how much you're storing, the one time hit to move may make sense
given our ~25% lower cost per byte (and as you mention way better GCE
pricing).

~~~
jzelinskie
How'd you arrive at that number? To my understanding, you get hit up twice --
paying for data leaving S3 and data entering GCS. The other thing to keep in
mind is that if lots of your customers are also using AWS, their S3 traffic
from you is free.

~~~
boulos
No, you only pay for egress (outbound traffic) not ingress. You pay for
operations (GETS and PUTS) on each side but the total costs are going to be
dominated by the egress.

In addition to free egress within GCP regions, we also recently announced
reduced egress pricing for major CDN partners:
[https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-
interconnect](https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect) .

So how much data do you store and serve? ;)

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IBM
In 5 years will AWS still have 25% operating margins?

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notatoad
I suspect yes. AWS seems to be pushing hard towards more managed application
services (things like lambda) built on top of their core AWS services like EC2
and S3, and they can maintain their margin on those services even if
competition drives down the prices on EC2.

~~~
wstrange
Those services are incredibly proprietary to AWS. I really question why
companies would want to tie themselves to a single cloud provider.

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yeukhon
Because technology evolves too quickly to do cross-platform, cross-cloud
solution and the demand for getting work done now is more demanding than ever.
Tried to do it for two cloud platforms + on-premise, you will literally want
to kill yourself for supporting your code three-way. Do it right once for one
platform, and then next step. AWS isn't going away any time soon. But
seriously, you don't just click buttons all day to spin up your
infrastructure. Lock in with GCP is like lock in with AWS or herkuo, or App
Engine, their APIs belongs to them, you built around kubernetes, and you lock
yourself into their BigTable Query. Whatever your SRE/Infra/DevOps team are
building now for your company's infrastructure automation is totally locked
down for one kind of solution.

~~~
wstrange
Why not Kubernetes?

It run's on all major cloud platforms, VM environments and bare metal.
Supported by every major player _except_ Amazon (for obvious reasons, why
would they want to support something that makes it easy to migrate away from
them?)

~~~
yeukhon
You can, but is Google going to make their environment so compatible with
other cloud platform? Actually, how many major players do we have in this
space, capable of delivering a true cloud environment?

AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

When AWS first started, it was EC2 and S3, so the model was about VM without
worrying the bare metal. But as the platform continues to grow to challenge
its competitors, the platform will begin to add more services which are only
available and are proprietary to the its own platform.

~~~
wstrange
> is Google going to make their environment so compatible with other cloud
> platform?

Yes. Google's strategy with Kubernetes is to commoditize the cloud - making
them all functionally interchangeable. Write to Kubernetes, and your app runs
on AWS, GCE, Azure, etc...

They are betting that they can deliver raw CPU cycles, network bandwidth,
lower latency etc. - better/faster/cheaper than their competitors.

~~~
yeukhon
I am not familiar with GCE so I can be absolutely wrong, but my way of
thinking is that any time anyone says something can run the open source
version anywhere, true, but when it comes to offering a paid service, making
some technology native to the platform, means there can be difference such as
customized APIs or customized features which may never get backport into the
community/open source version.

~~~
SEJeff
That is very clearly not how they are working with Kubernetes. They are doing
it entirely in the open and even recently hired one of their huge community
contributors (shoutout to Kelsey Hightower) to the team. If they were doing an
"open core" version, my money would be on Kelsey speaking out against it.
Besides, given their goal of making the cloud a commodity, they can't do what
you say.

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elizaway
yeah totally

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nodesocket
Did Diane's bebop even launch? I can't find their website. It is kind of
frustrating that everybody involved (employees, investors) in bebop are
getting a payday, without really putting in much work, or verifying their
ideas. Just leaves a sour taste in my mouth (old boys network) as a two-time
failed entrepreneur.

~~~
x5n1
It is who you know.

~~~
exw
Seriously? You feel it is unfair that Google would talent acquire a company
with a founder that revolutionized virtualization and dismiss this with an
implication that she was acquired because she knew "the right people" (and you
apparently don't) vs. being one of the most impressive people Google could
hire to run their cloud business?

~~~
eitally
And besides this, she's not even an unknown quantity herself. She's been on
Google's board for 3 years! :)

