
How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud - dwynings
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-diane-greene-transformed-googles-cloud-2016-6
======
manigandham
Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there
are definitely changes happening both in product and culture.

As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS,
Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with
simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth
of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is
just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail
which is what we saw as well. [1]

I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers
and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it
feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to
see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat
on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all
sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all
the hiring at Google.

1\. [https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-
gcp](https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp)

~~~
boulos
Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider
it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks
(there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most
questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests
from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is
having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective customer who doesn't find the
current channels working? (I ask to know what to work on, not to accuse).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
ing33k
Hi,

sorry if it's the wrong place to report an issue that I faced recently with
GCP.

I had reached the limit of max projects one can have in their dashboard. I
deleted some projects and when I tried to create a new project, I was getting
the same message .

I had to wait for a week to create a new project ( the time window in which
user can stop project deletion )

this really prevented me from trying some new services in spite of GCP giving
generous $300 credit.

~~~
boulos
Interesting, I thought there was a "Seriously, I know what I'm doing, delete
right now".

I've never run into this, and apparently that's because the issue is that we
have a limit of 10 _free trial_ projects (to prevent abuse). I'll look into
the "Seriously, let me delete immediately" thing though.

------
msravi
I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to
have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region)
a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth
costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a
massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM
flexibly to a point, which is important for me.

Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only
certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year.
And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.

~~~
harshal
Yeah, I've seen multiple folks putting off reserved instance commitments and
continuing to pay on-demand costs since they don't want to get locked in for a
year. Its a serious commitment for smaller companies.

The No-Upfront reservation options that AWS last year helped narrow the
difference quite a bit - but Google automatic discounts for sustained use are
so much better and less complicated for users.

~~~
boulos
And per-minute billing, and the ability to move between zones month to month
("Oh, Haswell zone just launched? I'll be moving there..."). It's night and
day, and if I could, I'd happily take the other side of any RI deal ;).

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

------
fpgaminer
I skimmed the article, and this seems to explain a few things for me. The
image I have in my mind is that Google is Google, masters of the datacenter.
If they can build the most reliable website on earth (e.g. Google's down?
Internet must be down) then their cloud service must be stellar. And yet,
having switched from AWS to Google a few months ago at work, our experiences
have left me sorely disappointed. It's been a nightmare, honestly. Why such a
difference between what I expected and what we experienced?

The article seems to allude that Google's cloud offerings are, like a lot of
services they offer, just side projects for them. That would explain why a lot
of their platform feels half-baked. And the article (clearly a PR piece)
waffles on about how Diane Greene has brought in lots of sales and marketing
muscle. I see that clearly in the large amount of PR articles about Google
Cloud floating around (including on Hacker News) and the sheer quantity of
Google employees on social media and on here. I don't see the same from AWS.
At first I saw that as a good thing, but it seems like the same effort that
goes into their marketing and customer engagement has not gone into the
technical side of things, despite what the article may say.

Perhaps that's a necessity of business. Maybe Alphabet doesn't want to pour
more resources into Google Cloud without seeing more revenue. So Diane Greene
is beefing up the numbers so she can get the technical resources she needs
allocated. Maybe. My personal opinion remains doubtful, given Google's
overarching track record, but time will tell.

Google Cloud is by no means unusable. It's a nightmare to work with, yes, but
it does work, and if you've got the engineers on staff to handle the extra
workload, then it's fine. We're going to continue to put up with it, because
Google's particular mix of offerings allows us to save money and at the end of
the day that's the common tongue. I just wish they wouldn't make my life more
difficult.

~~~
boulos
Sorry to hear about your troubles! Assuming you got hit by our painful network
outage, we can only repeat: sorry, and we have taken serious action internally
to avoid this again.

To explain the difference between your experience (outages taking you out) and
"Google.com", I'd guess the difference is that "Google.com" is _massively_
distributed. Perhaps you were running in just one zone or region, or maybe
even quite sophisticatedly running across two regions (say us-central1 and us-
east1). For Google.com, we have 15 "major" datacenter locations
([https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html))
which are approximately regions in Compute Engine / Cloud parlance.

To your other question though, Cloud is _not_ a side project. Google happens
to be enormous, so even though we have thousands of folks across Technical
Infrastructure (TI) working on Cloud, thousands divided by tens of thousands
is still a "small" percentage (but TI is bigger than say YouTube or Android).

[Edit: And please reach out to support! Don't be silently unhappy, have
someone call us up, even if it's just to strangle a PM about how difficult it
is to use.]

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

~~~
fpgaminer
> To explain the difference between your experience (outages taking you out)
> and "Google.com"

My comment was somewhat terse (to remain as brief as possible) so perhaps it
wasn't clear. My logic was "Google.com is supremely reliable, which is a
supremely difficult task, so Google must have really good engineering chops,
so their products must be really well engineered." In other words, I was
saying that I had in my head an image of Google being filled with great
engineers building generally well engineered products. I wasn't commenting on
reliability of service, which we haven't had any issues with that I can
presently recall (we're only in us-central1-c).

> [Edit: And please reach out to support! Don't be silently unhappy, have
> someone call us up, even if it's just to strangle a PM about how difficult
> it is to use.]

Google provides no way to contact support without paying them for a support
contract. It makes no sense for us to pay Google for the privilege of
debugging their service/software. And I've crawled my way to support through
sales before. For all my effort, and an inability to use the platform for a
week, I was left with "Sorry, here's an issue tracker". The same kind of issue
tracker that's filled with stagnant issues that are months or a year old.

The same argument could naively be made about AWS, which also charges for the
privilege of reporting issues to them. But in all the years that I've used AWS
I've only once needed to contact them with a problem. It was a billing issue,
which they fixed, and then comp'd us with free service for the trouble. With
Google Cloud we would need to diagnose, debug, document, and report an issue
roughly every day of development.

------
ktamura
This is probably some kind of GCP PR's placed article, but regardless,
Greene's impact on GCP has been incredible and highly visible.

Previously, the standard arguments that I've seen in sales conversations were
that GCP wasn't enterprise ready or serious enough. All of that disappeared in
the last 6 months.

Yes, GCP is still small compared to Google (or AWS) at $400M/yr revenue. Yes,
AWS still "gets" enterprise better than GCP.

And yes, GCP is back in the cloud infrastructure game and will give AWS and
Microsoft a run for their money.

~~~
TheIronYuppie
I don't think we've discussed revenue anywhere, where did you get this number?

We'll certainly do our best!

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

~~~
ktamura
Hi there,

This was my source: [http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-
hea...](http://www.recode.net/2015/10/22/11619964/google-has-its-head-in-the-
cloud)

The # is from Oct 2015, so it's entirely possible that my number is very out
of date. Couldn't figure out how to amend my original comment, so adding this
one as a substitute.

------
pm90
> _When pointing out that Microsoft also offers a computer vision API,
> translation services, and APIs for Office 365, and that IBM also offers
> weather data and language services, and so on, Greene 's got a comeback
> ready.

"We have Chromebooks." _

Is she joking? I can't see how they make Google's cloud more attractive than
others. Am I missing something here?

Edit: I also wanted to add that there wasn't much concrete information in this
article at all. Sounds like a fluff piece/advertisement to me (IMO).

~~~
bitmapbrother
Like she said - Chromebooks are very secure and easy to administer. They're
also the ideal choice for running Google Apps in the enterprise.

~~~
partiallypro
> Google Apps in the enterprise

Google Apps for business are so bad though, I genuinely don't know why a
company would pick it over 365. I could maybe see an SMB, but 365 is so robust
in its offerings and just so much better all around.

My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like
I've been thrown back into the stone age. (Went from a large corporation to a
start-up.)

I feel like an SMB is not likely to do volume purchases of Chromebooks, but a
large corporation is...which Google just fails at in their offering in the
office space, imo.

~~~
wtbob
> My former employer was on 365, my new employer is on Google Apps. It's like
> I've been thrown back into the stone age.

Oddly enough, we had exactly the opposite experience when a previous employer
went from 365 to Google. The Google apps just worked, while the Office 365
apps ranged from hilariously bad (Yammer & Lync) to not completely terrible
(the web version of Word) to mostly decent (the web version of Excel).

But man, Yammer & Lync were like a joke after using Hangouts. A really bad
joke, told by a sadist. A sadist who is shorting one's stock.

~~~
partiallypro
Yammer is useless, but I found Lync to be very reliable. Why use Hangouts if
your company is using Slack for team channels, and it has group video chat? Of
course Lync is now "Skype for Business" and I don't think its as good as Lync
was tbh. I think Microsoft should buy Slack and toss it into its Office 365
offering, if you want my honest opinion.

The web version of Word and Excel are vastly superior to Google's docs and
sheets, I don't know how you can argue otherwise. Though, I don't know why
you'd use them when you get the full versions for free in your 365 (which
totally demolish Google's offerings.) Docs hasn't really done anything since
it first launched, while sheets does have decent integrations...but it's no
Excel.

Now 365 has baked in project management, Delve, business insights etc. There
is no comparison.

------
2pointsomone
Wow I did not know she gave her $150m on the sale of Bebop to charity. That is
very very impressive and must be celebrated more.

~~~
zaroth
Yes, but... At her tax bracket and future earning potential, the money is very
likely to be worth _more_ as a donation than as income. Total tax rate would
be above 50%, but as a donation you get a $1-for-$1 deduction against future
income. So the choice is something like 'keep 40 cents on the dollar today, or
negate 60 cents on the dollar in taxes tomorrow.'

Also, the money isn't really all gone to a 3rd party, it's in a foundation-
type entity similar to how Zuck does it.

~~~
phonon
That doesn't make any sense. The deduction is in the same amount of the income
she just received (I assume her basis (since she was a founder) was very low
or near zero). It will not be available for "future income".

The foundation-type entity is correct though, she will still be overseeing how
it's spent.

~~~
zaroth
No, that's just it! You donate the appreciated security directly without
exercising/selling them first, so there is no recognized income on the
personal tax return. Plus you _still_ get to take the deduction on the fair
market value of the security.

See: [http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-
esta...](http://www.fidelitycharitable.org/giving-strategies/tax-estate-
planning/appreciated-securities.shtml)

~~~
phonon
Ummm...the _whole_ point is that she _sold_ those shares to Google, donating
large "paper profits" is a total other thing.

EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund
first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but
that's not what the SEC notice said.

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316000722/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml)

"Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop stock for 200,729 shares of
Alphabet Class C Capital Stock at $740.39 each in the Merger, plus cash for
fractional shares. Ms. Greene intends to donate the shares exchanged to a
donor advised fund."

~~~
zaroth
Getting past my 'expertise' in this area, but she didn't personally sell her
shares to Google. Her company was acquired by Google, and her shares in bebop
were exchanged for shares of Alphabet. A merger/stock exchange is not a
taxable event, she would keep her near-$0 basis in the now Alphabet Class C
shares, and then donate the highly appreciated Alphabet shares to the Fund.

You have to structure the deals this way, otherwise you lose more than half of
your company to the government. When marginal rates exceed 50% and you have
dependable future earning potential, yes, giving away unrealized gains can be
worth more than realizing them.

~~~
phonon
Yeah, but at that point, ABC shares are basically cash money--they may as well
be Treasury Bonds given how liquid they are. She could easily sell half to
cover the tax bill and keep the rest. So no, I don't see how "the the money is
very likely to be worth _more_ as a donation than as income."

~~~
zaroth
Liquidity of the shares is not in question. If the tax rate is over 50%, you
have two choices; sell the shares and keep < 50 cents on the dollar by
realizing the gain, or you can donate the shares to your Charitable Fund, and
carry the charitable deduction against future income. The next year when you
earn $XX millions, half of that is now tax free because the charitable
deduction carry-forward. Dollars which otherwise would have been taxed at > 50
cents on the dollar. Selling the shares is worth < 50 cents on the dollar, but
the charitable deduction is worth > 50 cents on the dollar because of the
future tax liability that it eliminates. That is why I say it is "worth more
as a donation".

By donating $150m to the Fund, you not only get the self-directed Fund with
$150m dollars in it (which is a fun time in and of itself) but you also get
$150m in charitable deductions. Each dollar of that deduction eliminates > 50
cents on the dollar of tax liability. Donating to the Fund effectively lets
you have your cake and eat it too, again, with the caveat that you expect to
have enough future income to use it all up, while remaining in the highest tax
bracket.

------
bootload
Diane Greene talking at Startup School in 2013, VMWare ~
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSEeFxq2X_c)

------
bitmapbrother
GCP will be adding 2 new regions by the end of 2016 and bringing an additional
10 regions online by the end of 2017. How does this compare to the scale of
AWS?

~~~
boulos
AWS currently has:

\- three in the US (1 in Virginia, one in Oregon, one in Northern California)

\- two in Europe (Dublin and Frankfurt)

\- four in Asia (Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul)

\- one in South America (São Paolo)

and both Montreal and India announced. So by part way through 2017, the
"numbers" would be sort of comparable but the real factors are your latency
requirements, data sovereignty (hello Germany!) and the features you need (and
not all features are available in all regions!).

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

~~~
coleca
Also one additional region being added to the US this year, Ohio was announced
last year.

------
querulous
google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is
fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's
homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop,
kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they
either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented
the work required to do it

~~~
jpatokal
Managed Spark & Hadoop = Cloud Dataproc
[https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/](https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/)

One-click deploys for Kafka and Postgres:
[https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-
la...](https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-
launchpad/kafka), [https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-
la...](https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-
launchpad/postgresql)

~~~
jordanthoms
To be fair there is a big difference between a button to deploy an image and
something like RDS which manages that instance going forward.

------
williadc
tl;dr - Greene convinced Google to get serious about providing cloud services
to enterprise.

~~~
ryanobjc
I know internet comments are pointless, but this isn't the truth. Google knew
it had to take things seriously, and as a result hired her.

New hires, even at the exec level, usually don't have the social capital to
make huge changes. So they usually tie in to an existing sentiment.

~~~
eitally
I think you'll see huge changes as a result ... and you also need to remember
Diane was a Google board member for three years prior to taking this role.

------
nmy
I use both AWS and GCP. GCP has better engineering but fails to offer a good
business experience. And this aggressive GCP PR feels a bit desperate.

------
deafcalculus
The one thing I've found baffling about both AWS and GCE is the bandwidth
pricing. At about 0.1$/GB, it's 10x more expensive than competitors like
linode. Why is that?

Bandwidth cost is the primary reason I'm afraid of hosting side projects on
AWS/GCE.

~~~
aiiane
Because Linode and similar overcommit their bandwidth given that they're
charging a package deal - most people won't actually use the full allocated
bandwidth.

AWS/GCE charge for actual bandwidth usage, which means that everyone uses
exactly what they pay for, and the folks who use less bandwidth don't
subsidize the folks who use more.

------
bogomipz
How exactly did she "transform" it if they were number 3 before and are number
3 now?

~~~
bogomipz
Really? Down-voted for asking a legitimate question related to the article?
Why? HN is becoming a bit silly with this isn't it?

~~~
manigandham
I think it's because you severely limited the perception to a basic ranking.
It's a massive undertaking to actually move up against AWS or Azure
considering the incredible scale of these platforms so continuing to be #3 in
customers is not really an accurate measure of progress.

The article is pretty clear on what's she's done so far. There's no denying
that they have a lot of work to do but if you're actively using the platform
then you'll notice that there has been a lot of change in just a few months
with them, which should all help to increase that customer number.

~~~
texthompson
Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.

------
krakensden
> Google's competitive strength, Greene believes, is the breadth of the tech
> it can offer an enterprise.

> Enterprise-app developers can tap into things like Maps, Google's computer-
> vision engine (the tech that powers Google Photos), weather data, and
> language/translation/speech recognition. They can build apps on top of
> Google's Calendar, documents, spreadsheet and presentation apps.

> And, under Greene's new integrated organization, they can even tap into the
> tech that powers Google's ads or YouTube, search, or its many other
> services.

Probably a good time to reshare the famous Yegge rant about platforms:
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
p0rkbelly
Not to get into a technical discussion of the merits between the two. But, I
don't get the excitement around Diane Greene? Wasn't she asleep at the wheel
at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their cloud offerings? Seems like a
major blunder and sitting on your laurels.

~~~
frostmatthew
> Wasn't she asleep at the wheel at VMWare when AWS/MS were building out their
> cloud offerings?

She left VMware in 2008, that's only two years after AWS launched and two
years before Microsoft Azure. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight "cloud"
seems like an obvious next step but I imagine it wasn't as clear in 2008ish -
even Amazon didn't move its retail operation to AWS until two years later[1].

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-
au...](http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/2011-aws-tour-australia-
closing-keynote-how-amazoncom-migrated-to-aws-by-jon-jenkins)

------
djhworld
I'd like to play with google cloud using my personal details but here in the
UK it says you need to be a business/commercial entity on the registration
page with the following clause

> This service can only be used for business or commercial reasons. You are
> responsible for assessing and reporting VAT.

whereas Amazon don't seem to stipulate that (at least not explcitly, there
might be something in their t+c's) and they deal with all the VAT stuff.

Oh well.

------
shade23
Someone from BI or anyone,please fix the "&quot;" text in the article.Its
distracting considering nearly 30% of the article is quoted by Diane Greene.I
guess I am nitpicking or is a fault with my browser?

~~~
scholia
Sorry if this is not much help, but I'm not seeing any instances of "&quot;"
in Firefox or Vivaldi (Chromium-based) in Windows 7 Pro.

~~~
shade23
I just reopened the article on Firefox Aurora too.Its become worse now. I can
see <p> and <img> tags too.Wow

