
Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate - simula67
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/03/alphabet-earnings-show-google-cloud-on-10b-run-rate/
======
blinotz
Whatever the number, it would be 10 times better if google didn’t have such a
terrible terrible customer service reputation plus a reputation for closing
services down.

Google utterly fails to understand the need for its customers to trust that
google will support and service them and not destroy their business after
building on a google platform.

Apparently they are completely oblivious to these things being important
though.

Right here on HN are the influencers who tell companies to use this or that
techonology and there’s a loud howling from everyone that googles support is
beyond bad and that you’d be mad to risk building on any google service cause
they’ll shut it down.

~~~
dangus
Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS
or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those
experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account?

I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or
three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone
and get in-depth technical help for free.

In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in
general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of
pure opinion.

~~~
YawningAngel
I'm an enterprise GCP customer, Google Support have a few superbly irritating
habits: 1\. They link to generic documentation that doesn't solve my problem
2\. They insist that things that are clearly bugs aren't bugs until they're
provided with some trivial reproduction case that satisfies them 3\. They
refuse to advise on issues with beta products despite half of GCP's products
being in a beta 4\. They are sometimes just flat-out wrong (but confidently
so) about the cause of an issue

Give me AWS support any day

~~~
dragonwriter
I'm an Enterprise AWS customer(well, I work for one), our account is special
enough that we've got extra AWS tech people on site regularly in addition to
normal support, and I've seen 1, 2, and 4 with AWS, both regular support and
our on-top handholding.

On top of that AWS documentation is often both needlessly opaque, elliptical,
incomplete, and outdated or otherwise incorrect.

On the other hand, if the issue isn't too obscure, AWS’s huge marketshare
means that you can usually find decent answers on SO.

~~~
diminish
AWS has become hard to grasp in full scale.

------
screye
Google is the Valve of the internet space.

Like Valve they have created products that took over the whole space.

They have a tendency to completely drop things when they don't pick up
traction early enough. (artifact, everything Google)

There used to be a Halo around both companies in the 2000s, that was slowly
eroded in the 2010s.

They suck at communicating.

They create good products that never see the light of day again (Portal,
l4D,Half Life) because their main product (steam, ads) makes so much more
money.

________

GCP has the same problem as Artifact, where Google bull headedly tries to
enter a different type of product/business model (b2b, instead of b2c) without
adopting any of the cultural must-haves of a b2c company. (customer before
product, service, reliability over speed)

Tensorflowv2 is failing due to a similar kind of stubbornness.

_______________

The scary thing is, if Google manages to pull off the culture change
(unlikely), I can see them sweeping both AWS and Azure in the cloud space.

~~~
zantana
I think implicit in this myopia is they don't eat their own dogfood. If they
have their best people managing their core products running their own
infrastructure which is clearly much more reliable than GCP, then GCP won't
get better. On top of which their best people will move toward their own
internal services.

Contrast this with the other cloud providers who seem to be using their own
clouds for their primary services creating a feedback loop which ensures they
don't have the big outages that GCP has had over the past year.

~~~
milesward
Not true.

~~~
vikramkr
Could you elaborate?

------
davedx
Does anyone know if there are numbers somewhere for how much energy the
different cloud providers use? Would be interesting to see which is more
efficient from that perspective for those of us who care about such things.
Energy per $ revenue or even better per compute would be helpful.

~~~
pingyong
A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy
costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit
specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of
compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between
providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out.

But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them. They're
all using essentially the same hardware. They all have the same cooling
requirements. I wouldn't expect an average to be very interesting.

~~~
killjoywashere
> I'm not sure what would even differentiate them

Distance from carbon-neutrality per dollar of revenue sounds like a good
start.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Carbon neutrality is a flawed statistic IMO and can be doctored with a lot -
e.g. if Google pays a company X to plant an amount of trees, who's to say that
neutralizes carbon?

Keep it simple, just publish how much power they're using and what the sources
are.

~~~
barney54
I’m not sure what you mean by publish “what the power sources are.” Data
centers are grid connected and are therefore connected to a lot of different
generators—including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. All generators
on the grid contribute to the grid. It’s really tough to single out a
generation source for a particular user.

~~~
sgt101
I remember walking by a google data centre on the Columbia river years ago and
being told that it was sighted there so that it could use the power from the
dam.

~~~
bnt
Or for water cooling the CPUs?

~~~
mcny
Personally, I don’t understand carbon neutrality. How deep does this rabbit
hole go? If Google only buys and uses fully electric cars for street view and
use only solar and wind to power them is that good enough? Does the
manufacture of the car, batteries, solar panels also have to be carbon
neutral? If not, can a company become carbon neutral by simply letting another
company do the dirty work?

~~~
pinkfoot
Yes. It goes all the way down. That is what makes it very, very hard to fix.

------
georgewfraser
I would really love to know what the quarterly revenue is for just compute and
storage, for each of the major cloud providers. Including things like G Suite
and Office 365 just muddies the waters.

~~~
scarface74
Will this meme please die.

[https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-
reven...](https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-revenue-
up-14-on-office-365-and-azure-growth/)

Office is not counted in cloud. It’s counted in “Productivity and Business
Processes”.

~~~
random001
Office 365 and Azure with other cloud based services is still counted under
the 'Commercial Cloud' division. I'm sure that's what op is referring to and
with G Suite and GCP under the Google Cloud division.

~~~
random001
I was wrong, MS seems to have changed its revenue disclosing methodology but
it's still not clear how much Azure generates as it's lumped with Windows
server, SQL server and Enterprise mobility under the 'Intelligent Cloud'
division.

------
xyst
I hate how we are just giving away control over the internet to Amazon/Google.

How does a small cloud provider stay in business when up against these multi
billion dollar companies? At any point in time, these companies can just lower
the cost of their products, and suffer through a few bad quarters while the
small businesses slowly bleed out and die.

~~~
vikramkr
So predatory pricing is very illegal, and considering that there are three
major players in this space (azure/gcp/aws), all three of them would have to
coordinate to kill other competition (since otherwise one of them could break
from the deal and make their own money by betraying the other two), which is
also very illegal.

And why would they even need to do something like that? AWS is wildly
profitable anyway with enormous amounts of market share. When would it ever
make sense for them to give up billions and billions and billions of dollars
in profits to wipe out tiny cloud providers while also screwing up the
economics of the space (changing people's expectations of how cloud should be
priced meaning they won't accept prices as high as they are currently) and
hoping and praying that GCP and Azure play along when it's time to hike prices
back up?

~~~
xyst
What about the case of Amazon vs Diapers.com? Amazon basically undersold this
company on diapers to the point where diapers.com was told to sell to Amazon
or fuck off and die. The company ended up selling out for $540M USD.

This behavior is illegal yet Amazon is still here. While there’s no obvious
case for their cloud division, it’s not unprecedented within the company to do
so.

~~~
vikramkr
Good point. As a counter, this article (It's a national review article, so
take it with a large grain of salt - I don't agree with it entirely but you
and I have likely read the same articles on the other side of this and the NR
article provides a good alternate perspective) suggests that the Quidsi case
is not really predatory pricing (as the FTC determined in their investigation)
as this did not drive amazon to achieve a monopoly in diaper sales (most
diapers are still bought in grocery stores etc), even in the online space did
not have a long term effect (The founders of Quidsi did quite well for
themselves in their next venture, Jet.com). The allegations of undercutting to
kill quidsi also came primarily from the founders and hasn't really been
backed up. In the long term, that didn't really impact the consumer at all,
even if amazon did kill Quidsi, they weren't able to shape the market.

[https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/misplaced-trust-
antitr...](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/misplaced-trust-antitrust/)

------
rudolph9
kubernetes on google cloud rocks. If they kill gcp like they do with other
random services I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, kubernetes is open
source and there are lots of other provider. For now, I don’t feel trapped in
the least, it’s a great serive, it’s priced right, and the time I save not
dealing with AWS nonsense far out weighs the potential downsides of using
their services.

~~~
arcticfox
Cloud Run is so freaking cool too, and it's a nice combination of totally
hosted and totally portable (since you can just run it on k8s if GCP dies)

------
shahsyed
Even looking at comparative offerings from different providers, they're really
lackluster [1], and in some cases, even more expensive [2].

What could be contributing to those large numbers?

[1] - Memorystore only allows vertical scaling, no support for GCP managed
Redis clusters, no hybrid functionality (only instances in the same VPC
network can access Memorystore, whereas ElastiCache offers all of this.

[https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking](https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/networking)
[https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-
inst...](https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/scaling-instances)

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-
ug/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/accessing-
elasticache.html) [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-
ug/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-
ug/Scaling.html)

[2] -
[https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/](https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/)
vs.
[https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/pricing/)

~~~
ssambros
To be fair, it seems Memorystore instance is not the same gb-for-gb as
Elasticache, since Memorystore gives you extra memory overhead, and on aws you
have to manage it yourself. Memorystore also has free network egress/ingress.
There is also a RedisLabs offering on Google Cloud with integrated billing.

Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud.

~~~
pdeva1
what do you mean by ‘extra memory overhead’

~~~
ssambros
if you run Redis you need at least 25% of extra RAM on top the instance
memorysize if you want to avoid a lot of nasty OOM scenarios. Memorystore
gives this memory by default and in aws you need to tweak the reserved-memory.
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-
ug/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonElastiCache/latest/red-ug/redis-
memory-management.html)

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/kjOTs](https://archive.md/kjOTs)

------
mohamedattahri
Article is missing the point. Growth is not the hardest problem in a fast-
growing market. The real question is whether they're growing faster than their
competitors, and that's unlikely.

~~~
redwood
Do you mean in terms of revenue dollars growth, revenue percent growth? Total
number of customers growth? Growth amongst solo devs? Growth amongst fortune
500? There are many ways to look at this

~~~
koheripbal
% growth of revenues among the top cloud providers is the normal comparison.

~~~
redwood
It would be shocking if Google were in last place by that metric! After all
their baseline is so much lower.

Are they really?

------
diminish
Does GCP still have a cost advantage compared to AWS and Azure?

~~~
milesward
Yes, for most use-cases. Google "understanding cloud pricing"

------
iandanforth
Aside: This was the first time I've tried to read a techcrunch article in
Austria (or the EU in general). The splash screen implies I _must_ consent to
tracking cookies or I can't view their content. Is that not illegal?

~~~
sakisv
There is this add-on for Firefox that allows you to toggle js on and off and
remembers your setting per domain [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/android/addon/disable-javas...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/android/addon/disable-javascript/)

It improves the user experience by a lot on Techcrunch, medium and a bunch of
other news sites.

~~~
ubercow13
Can’t you do this with just uBlock origin?

~~~
aikah
Yes, you can do that with uBlock, the <\> icon blocks javascript, very handy.

~~~
sakisv
Ah, didn't know that, thanks!

------
morerunes
I hate to be that guy, but why is it called Butt services?

~~~
vikramkr
Because you installed that one extension that changes cloud to butt a while
back as a joke and apparently somehow forgot you did.

~~~
morerunes
Bahahaha I've been pranked! Either by a coworker or possibly myself.

------
simonebrunozzi
Conflating consumer software and cloud infrastructure is a big lie. Microsoft
is famous for having started this years ago.

Why do they do it?

Because AWS is at a $40B run rate, and both Google and Microsoft have to show
analysts and customers that they are catching up, and that they are big
enough, etc.

Real "cloud infrastructure" revenues for Google are probably less than half
that.

The worst part is that famed and well-paid analysts perpetrate the lie, either
by collusion, or by ignorance.

~~~
milesward
This number does not include that conflation...

~~~
jsight
The article says that it does, as it includes enterprise gmail/drive/chat
revenue with the infrastructure revenue.

------
Pandabob
Meh. I'd wish Microsoft and Google would start separating their actual cloud
platform (Azure, GCP) revenues from their "cloud" SaaS revenue (Office 365, G
Suite). It'd make comparisons to AWS a lot more meaningful.

Edit: Apparently Microsoft is already doing this.

~~~
belltaco
This has become a meme and urban legend at this point, but Office 365 revenue
isn't included in Azure's revenue. G Suite is included in GCP revenue though.

~~~
discordance
It looks like this has changed [0]. Microsoft now places Office365 under “
Productivity and Business Processes”, which earned 11.8b in FY20 Q2.

Azure is under “Intelligent Cloud”, which earned $11.9b this last quarter.

0: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2/press-release-webcast)

~~~
alpb
Based on that last sentence, Azure has a 12*4=48B$ annual run rate.

AWS has $40B annual run rate ([https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-
nearly-10b-in-sa...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-brings-in-
nearly-10b-in-sales-for-amazon-in-q4/))

Something is not quite adding up.

~~~
seanhunter
See below thread, but Azure + Enterprise services + server products are
reported as "Intelligent cloud". It's intelligent cloud that has the $48bn run
rate. So it's not a like-for-like comparison with AWS even though it doesn't
include Office365.

