
Google Cloud's run rate is now over $8B - simonebrunozzi
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/25/google-clouds-run-rate-is-now-over-8b/
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simonebrunozzi
I've been in the cloud space for a relatively long time, worked at AWS
2008-2014, and have followed all three big cloud providers since inception.

My personal view is that both Azure and GCP boost their "cloud" revenues by
50-60% - e.g. GSuite is included in GCP, some various Office and Enterprise
software products by Microsoft are included in Azure.

They do this primarily to convince corporate customers that they've closed the
gap with AWS, and their service is now comparable.

From a technical standpoint, and still IMHO, Google has fewer products, but
several of the ones already available are usually quite superior to AWS. AWS
has of course the broadest set of services. Azure is still quite a mess, but
that doesn't prevent a thriving ecosystem, an easier integration, etc, to
convince many customers to use Azure.

It's going to be a long battle, for a huge and growing market. And
unfortunately for their customers, it means that lock-in, FUD, and other
nefarious practices will be common.

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yyyk
So what? Had gsuite/office been made by a 3rd party company, you would have
counted them in, right? And had Google/MS not have a cloud presence so these
products would have been hosted in a different cloud, they would have been
counted in your estimation as well, right? This case is technically no
different than the others.

It is a fact Office/GSuite are rather reliable and fast. It's a credit to
their respective clouds, and obviously propels them forwards in their
competition with AWS. The respective companies are right to include these in
total revenue/marketshare, and it is good to see that they eat their own
dogfood. We could have flipped that around and ask why Amazon doesn't trust
AWS, but I recall that Amazon does have a few things there too...

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I disagree with you.

If you want to tell me how big your public cloud is, in terms of revenues, you
are not going to count revenues that come from software than runs on top of
it.

By that account, AWS could say: 30B, plus 200B more, taking into account the
revenues of Salesforce, Elastic, etc.

It makes no sense to conflate these two very different categories.

~~~
yyyk
*"revenues that come from software than runs on top of it"

I am not sure I understand you here. Do you mean "what the software is paying
to run on the cloud" (even if the payment is 'merely' internal accounting) or
"what customers are paying for the software that runs on the cloud"?

I meant the former, and that's the way I read your original comment. But your
latest comment seems to refer to the latter? I agree these would be different
categories (IaaS/PasS vs SaaS).

I was saying that MS/Google should be able to count Office/GSuite hosting
expense on their cloud - it would be no different if it were some 3rd party
product - not that they could count what customers are paying for these
products.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I meant the latter.

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tyingq
Google includes GSuite revenue, which not long ago, was half of all "Google
Cloud Revenue". I also assume a large portion of Azure revenue is O365. So
Amazon's lead is a bit more impressive than it might seem at first.

~~~
jrockway
The real question is why Amazon doesn't have email/calendar/chat/video
conferencing; "AWS for Business" or something. I am sure they could get a good
deal on the hosting costs!

~~~
whoisjuan
I think AWS has been working on an offering like this for a long time. They
sue a former exec for joining Smartsheet because it competed with a similar
AWS initiative. [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-resolves-contentious-
no...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-resolves-contentious-non-compete-
lawsuit-former-aws-executive-left-new-job-smartsheet/)

But as a former Amazon employee, the only thing that I can say is that if it's
anything like Chime in terms of quality, then Google and Microsoft have
nothing to worry about.

~~~
adrianN
Have you used Skype for Business?

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frostyj
At the mean time, there are 7 GCP services currently under outage. \--A
frustrated engineer

~~~
swuecho
I feel better, because I have only one. wonder why gcloud is so bad? not even
as good as digital ocean from a user perspective.

~~~
verdverm
I move people from AWS to GCP for cost, simplicity, and developer experience.

What do you find so bad about GCP?

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jfengel
TIL: The "run rate" is extrapolating a year's revenue from some shorter
period. So the headline means, "Google Cloud earned $2 billion last quarter,
which will be $8 billion a year if we can keep it up."

So it makes the numbers more comparable with "per year" as the standard rate,
but with all the obvious hazards of extrapolation.

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writepub
Google's strategy of standardizing microservice infrastructure around
kubernetes is likely to benefit them greatly in the long run. Any large
company wants to avoid vendor lock-in, and [kubernetes + containers] offers a
compelling alternative

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DevKoala
GCP Cloud Composer (Airflow) has been a nightmare. I cannot recommend it. BQ
is great.

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reilly3000
I found Airflow for a small to medium project to be a nightmare on its own;
I'm sure its a powerful framework, but plain Python ended up meeting our needs
more than adequately. I was self-hosting it while kicking the tires and found
it to be a lot to admin. I always thought I would look at Cloud Composer if I
wanted to revisit Airflow. Were your issues with Airflow or Cloud Composer?
Agreed BQ IS great.

~~~
DevKoala
My issues have been with cloud-composer. I like Airflow.

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nstart
I wonder how much Google's deeper integration with kubernetes and the
influence of pushing the industry towards using k8s is going to help them in
the long run. Could be pocket change at this point but as newer customers come
onboard it would be interesting to see if this helps their numbers more.

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antiviral
The AWS and Azure numbers are actual revenue, but the Google cloud number is a
‘run rate’, meaning, pick a particular high point, call that steady-state, and
multiply accordingly to get an annual rate.

I am not doubting Google’s success with GCP. However, they should provide the
actual revenue, in addition to the run-rate or whatever other vanity metric
they want. Not doing so just makes me wonder about their lack of candor.

~~~
eitally
I think it's more complicated than that (for all three vendors) because
customer contracting can involve all sorts of convoluted terms, especially
mega-deals. Using ARR makes more logical sense because it provides a less
messy way of accounting for things like guaranteed future consumption commits.

~~~
bogomipz
Interesting, so it's really just a means of smoothing then? Do all three use
run rate as their key metric then?

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IshKebab
Disingenuous mix of per-quarter and per-year figures.

