
Google nabs Apple as a cloud customer - ra7
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-nabs-apple-as-a-cloud-customer-2016-3
======
doxcf434
We've been doing tests in GCE in the 60-80k core range:

What we like:

\- slightly lower latency to end users in USA and Europe than AWS

\- faster image builds and deployment times than AWS

\- fast machines, live migrations blackouts are getting better too

\- per min billing (after 10mins), and lower rates for continued uses vs. AWS
RIs where you need to figure out your usage up front

\- project make it easy to track costs w/o having to write scripts to tag
everything like in AWS, down side is project discovery is hard since there's
no master account

What we don't like:

\- basic lack of maturity, AWS is far a head here e.g. we've had 100s of VMs
get rebooted w/o explanation, the op log ui forces you to page through
results, log search is slow enough to be unsuable, billing costs don't match
our records for the number of core hours and they simply can't explain them,
quota limit increases take nearly week, support takes close to an hour to get
on the phone and they make you hunt down a PIN to call them

\- until you buy primare support (aka a TAM), they limit the number of ppl who
can open support cases, caused us terrible friction since it's so unexpected
esp. when it's their bugs you're trying to report and they can mature from
fixing them

~~~
jbaptiste
Maybe there is something special for the member of GCE startup program, but
for us the quotas requests take between 1min and 1 hour, where the same
requests over aws took a few days, and endless discussions.

Our all experience with the folks over at Google has been amazing compared to
the poor level we had with AWS.

Granted we are on a range way lower than yours.

~~~
zbjornson
Ditto -- we've had about five quota requests handled within an hour or two.
AWS took about a week for each of two requests.

------
phoboslab
Can someone explain to me why traffic is still so damn expensive with every
cloud provider?

A while back we managed a site that would serve ~700 TB/mo and paid about
$2,000 for the servers in total (SQL, Web servers and caches, including
traffic). At Google's $0.08/GB pricing we would've ended up with a whooping
$56,000 for the traffic alone. How's that justifiable?

~~~
saganus
Wow, ~700 TB/mo? That does sound like a lot.

What kind of site would serve that volume of traffic and not have 56k for
operating expenses? I mean, I can think of a few examples like Wikipedia
maybe, since they are non-commercial and such, but for a commercial business?
Maybe 4chan moves that much without a lot of revenue I would think, or
maybe... imgur? but not really sure, I mean, it would seem like they could get
that amount easily via ads alone.

What was the use case here?

Also, I think that 56k for traffic alone kind of depends on context. I mean,
how much does Netflix pay for serving their volume of traffic?

What I'm saying is, isn't 700 TB a month something that would probably be very
expensive no matter the context? Just storing 700TB would cost a lot, no?

I'm really curious about your use case here.

~~~
alainv
Why is it "not have 56k for operating expenses"? Something that can be had for
$2k is not something a healthy business spends $56k on. You should be able to
find a better use for those $650k that year.

~~~
superuser2
The engineer time to reimplement the other AWS services you're using may be
substantially more than the $54k difference in bandwidth costs.

~~~
qaq
Hmm very unlikely. Thats 5 full time people.

~~~
eru
More like 2 or 3 if you include overheads. Depends on location, of course.

------
markgavalda
We are consolidating all of our cloud services at Google Cloud and couldn't be
more happier. We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across
~6 2nd and 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer
for us.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
> We've had north of a thousand virtual machines scattered across ~6 2nd and
> 3rd tier providers and switching to gcloud has been a game changer for us.

All the of the success stories I've heard about Google Cloud are from
companies using significant resources. Why hasn't Google gone after startups?
Perhaps I'm missing something but a turnkey package of computing, analytics,
and advertising seem like a no-brainer.

~~~
boulos
We are! We give $100k to vetted startups that aren't already big:
[https://cloud.google.com/startups](https://cloud.google.com/startups)

~~~
seangrogg
Do you guys do anything for bootstrapped companies? =<

~~~
TheIronYuppie
Send me a note, please? Aronchick (at) google

Disclosure: I (obviously) work at Google on Kubernetes & GKE

------
rdl
They've been a heavy Azure user too. Probably more than AWS.

I'm glad there's now at least 2 and probably 3 competitors for public cloud
infrastructure. So many things were at risk, including adoption of public
cloud in general, when it was a sole source monopoly from Google
(OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn, and VPSes aren't the same
thing, nor was VMware ever really credible for public cloud)

Neither GC nor Azure are as comprehensive as AWS, but together at least one of
them is usually a viable alternative for any given deal.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>OpenStack/Rackspace/etc. was basically stillborn

What's wrong with Openstack/Rackspace?

~~~
paulryanrogers
Feature creep if I recall correctly. Though Openshift is an interesting
implementation.

------
pori
Can someone provide a little context towards this exodus from AWS to Google
Cloud? I understand in DropBox's case that they (questionably) need their own
infrastructure for cost saving. But then there's Apple and Spotify suddenly
changing over. What's the advantage?

I have a fear that this trend among large companies is going to trickle down
to smaller ones and independent devs. Considering these "Cloud Wars" I can see
stories like continuing with different providers. Ultimately, a scenario could
occur where one year, one provider is king. Then the next, everyone decides
they need to migrate to the next big thing. That would be irritating for us
contractors. We would have to learn new interfaces and apis at the same rate
of JS frameworks.

~~~
outside1234
There is no exodus. There are a lot of companies moving to multi-cloud, which
makes sense from a disaster recovery perspective, a negotiating perspective,
and possibly from cherry picking the best parts of each platform.

This is what Apple is doing. They use AWS and Azure already in large volume.
This move adds the #3 vendor in cloud to mix and isn't really a surprise.

~~~
pori
Thanks for the answer. That makes a lot of sense. I guess To some degree, I
did know this. But the media has been portraying these moves as a complete
move, hence the whole "exodus" hype. It bothers me still, because this
rhetoric may lead to scenario I described above for smaller companies.

~~~
grrowl
The media is sensationalist as ever — I would worry about any CTO or
Engineering Lead who based such a huge important decision on a Business
Insider article.

------
imperialdrive
I so sick of EC2 rogue 'underlying hardware issues' and EBS volumes dropping
dead... AWS Console status will say everything is 'Okay' even when there are
major problems - it's a joke... I wonder to myself, is it because I recently
migrated (December 15) over and they are starting to buckle? Really a bad
experience. At this rate I'll be looking at Google next month, or going back
to Colo (25 servers, 100TB) so not much, but still worth doing right.

~~~
soccerdave
I've had ~25-30 instances running for the past 3 years and only had 1 or 2
instances have hardware issues, never had issues with EBS. Running on us-
west-2 but it seems like more issues happen in us-east-1.

~~~
mmmBacon
1 or 2 failures out of 30 is a really high failure rate for HW.

~~~
ac29
I challenge you to build enterprise grade hardware, run it hard and have a
hardware failure rate of ~1% a year.

~~~
mmmBacon
Challenge accepted. Been building carrier grade equipment with significantly
lower failure rates than that for >15 years. Gear I designed in my first year
out of grad school is still in field use today.

~~~
skippytheroo
New challenge: build your machines for low cost from commodity hardware, rent
your machines out to millions of customers and never have a single customer
have > 1% of the hardware they land on fail.

~~~
imtringued
That's moving the goalpost too far for my taste. But assuming this is true and
AWS/GCE are doing this then why are their prices so high?

------
dantiberian
Would be interesting to know what kind of discounts Apple got on this. It's a
massive PR win for Google, the kind I expect they could give $100m for. Apple
is also notorious for getting a very sharp price from their suppliers, so the
combination suggests there were some steep discounts.

~~~
vidarh
The public cloud prices bear _no relation whatsoever_ to what large customers
pay.

I know people spending less than $1m/month that are paying ~25% of the public
prices on one of the top three cloud providers. Frankly, I'd be surprised if
Apple is paying more than 10%-15% of the public pricing.

The reason is that anything above that, and you can save massively by going to
more traditional dedicated hosting.

------
fidget
My guess is that it's pretty much just BigQuery. No one else seems to be able
to compete, and that's a big deal. The companies moving their analytics stacks
to BQ and thus GCP probably make up the majority (in terms of revenue) of
customers for GCP

~~~
kodablah
I doubt it. Not only does Apple (maybe?) run one of the largest Cassandra
clusters in the world, but surely they wouldn't leverage cloud provider
features over open source alternatives for fear of vendor lock-in.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Cassandra and BigQuery are not at all comparable. BigQuery's open source
competitors are Impala, Presto, and Drill.

------
dzhiurgis
So it makes sense for Dropbox to build it's own infra but it doesn't for
Apple.

Also wondering why Apple isn't hosting exclusively with IBM, they seem to have
the best geographical coverage.

~~~
justinv
I think Apple does a combination. Both (from the article) of hosting on AWS,
Google, & Microsoft, but also on its own data centers.

I suppose it also depends on what is being hosted. If you look at Netflix &
Dropbox, they both took control of their core piece (CDN & Storage) - not the
entire end to end platform. I'd imagine Apple does something similar.

~~~
dzhiurgis
I winder what would constitute Apple's core?

~~~
notatoad
Apple's core is consumer hardware. Anything they're doing on the cloud is
ancillary.

~~~
discodave
I think you could make the case that iCloud is core to Apples business.

------
conradev
They've been using Google Cloud Storage for blob storage of iMessage
attachments for a little while now. They seem to use a combination of Amazon
S3 and GCS (just watching connections coming out of the app on OS X).

------
kozukumi
God damn Diane Greene hit it out of the park with this one! Amazing work
getting Apple to migrate so much away from Amazon.

~~~
kzhahou
I guess the article does say it was attributed to her, but whenever I read an
executive-focused press article, I just think of the team that worked hard for
months to get to this point, and suddenly the newly-hired senior executive
marches in, attends a few meetings and reviews, makes a few phone calls, and
then winds up getting all the credit. Seen it so many times at big companies.

Especially irksome is whenever a product launches or a deal is signed, the
exec replies-all to the mass internal celebration email with a "So proud of
this team!" message. Ok, thanks for smiling upon us peons with your lordly
approval, after the 4 hours total you personally put into the effort.

Sorry... slightly bitter :-)

~~~
chickenbane
Consider the possibility the team doesn't mind the executive getting the
credit, or perhaps does enjoys doing great work regardless. I also used to
view myself as a lowly peon, but that overshadowed the satisfaction of a job
well done.

Also, consider Greene's (no relation) Law #1: Never outshine the master.

------
nodesocket
It is reported that Apple accounts for 9% of Amazon's AWS revenue. If that is
true, this move by AAPL is a serious dent in the financials of AMZN.

~~~
partiallypro
From my understanding, and I could be wrong, Apple does more on Azure than
they do AWS. Also they aren't leaving AWS or Azure, but are diversifying to
other cloud providers for scalability and uptime.

------
mahyarm
If you run little snitch on your mac and have your photos sync with apple,
you'd notice the photos agent going to google for quite a while now. Maybe it
was a trial?

I say this is why icloud is about 2x the price of other cloud providers,
because they don't run it themselves and want a profit margin.

~~~
Polyphonie
iCloud Drive pricing is equal to that of Google Drive: $3.99 for 200GB (Google
doesn't offer 200 but 100GB at $1.99). At 1TB, both iCloud and Google prices
are $9.99.

~~~
mahyarm
Last I remembered it was $20/month for 1TB. OneDrive is $7/mo/1TB and Amazon
is $5/month equivalent.

------
tn13
I don't think someone at Apple looked at Amazon's pricing table and Google's
pricing table and decided to move to Google.

Very like sales teams of Azure, Amazon, Google must have done the mating dance
for few months sharing their future plans etc. Very probably government's
stand on encryption could have been one of the things that were discussed.

Some people must have played golf together and eventually made some decision.
Also, very likely Apple will be well invested in all these three players and
will remain so for a long time.

------
karlshea
I'd be super interested to know what their backend looks like (at least the
new stuff, not WebObjects), I wish they were as open as Facebook with regard
to tech.

Unfortunately that's probably a wish that will forever be unfulfilled.

~~~
ajessup
Announced today - [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-
shares-s...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/Google-shares-
software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-GCP-networking.html)

~~~
karlshea
Sorry, I guess I wasn't super clear. I meant Apple's backend.

------
jessegreathouse
I can't see this as anything but a good thing for us lowly consumers.
Competition in the marketplace is a great thing.

------
hans
Does anyone enjoy working at AWS? maybe the Zon will have to up its game to
compete but they're so mired in employee-thrashing it seems unlikely. Is it
getting better there or worse? this seems to question that.

~~~
mmmBacon
I've heard their layer 1 network is a mess and they have a small army of PhDs
troubleshooting basic problems at layer 1. Sounds like misery to me.

------
Implicated
This seems to be good for everyone but Amazon, can anyone offer some insight
otherwise?

~~~
mikecb
Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price.
They have been quick to introduce products, but their technical infrastructure
and abstractions thereof seem to lag Azure and GCP, and investment in those
take a long time to pay off.

~~~
skeletonjelly
> Good for Amazon too: it'll make them compete better on innovation and price

That sounds like it's good for consumers (of the cloud services)

~~~
amnesia
Whoever wins... we lose. But really, I'm glad that Google has stepped up with
their cloud services (they will be revealing more awesome stuff at the GCP
Next 2016). And looks like they have the best "cloud core":
[https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-
gcp](https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp)

------
iqonik
Side note, but I'm impressed the article didn't try and put a positive spin on
it given Jeff Bezos' interest in Business Insider.

~~~
jacquesm
Would it even have gotten coverage in business insider if he had not had an
interest in it?

------
Xcelerate
Does anyone know if GCE offers discounts or grants to graduate students doing
research?

~~~
ac29
Doesn't look as broad as Amazon's program, but Google does fund research, at
least in Computer Science and related fields:
[http://research.google.com/research-
outreach.html#/research-...](http://research.google.com/research-
outreach.html#/research-outreach/faculty-engagement)

------
kloud_ops
I expect they want a multi-cloud presence for HA now that there is good
tooling to support that such as Spinnaker (
[http://spinnaker.io/](http://spinnaker.io/) )

------
lobo_tuerto
"It's been only four months since Google convinced enterprise queen Diane
Greene to lead its fledgling cloud-computing business, but she's already
scored a second huge coup for Google"

Who was the first?

~~~
frankthedog
Spotify
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159840)

------
pinkskip
I love aws _fanboy_

------
serge2k
Have the google PR guys been working a lot of OT lately?

------
anacleto
This should be read as: "In exchange for keeping Android crappy, Apple to
reward Google on his Cloud efforts."

(being downvoted? little sense of humor)

~~~
halayli
Because of the # of trolls here, sometimes it's hard to differentiate between
sarcasm and trolling.

~~~
anacleto
Huge difference bw trolling and sarcasm.

As my old professor used to say "Sarcasm is a closed number class".

------
obulpathi
This move will be a "GAME CHANGER" for the Cloud industry.

~~~
jacquesm
Why do you think so?

~~~
obulpathi
I can clearly Google Cloud winning the Cloud industry. It's only a matter of
time and not a matter of if. Cases like this and Spotify, will make the shift
happen sooner than rather.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't see any evidence in your assertion.

There are quite a few very powerful players in this segment and I don't see
anybody 'winning' to the point where they will exclude the others. Just a lot
of secret sauce and attempts at locking in the customers.

What you _will_ see is a shift from dedicated hosting providers to cloud
providers, which is one of the reason why almost every large dedicated hosting
provider now has their own cloud offering.

And that _is_ born out by evidence, in fact, if Google 'won' the cloud battle
and let's say Amazon would end up as a Google customer we'd all lose. I don't
think that's even a remote possibility at this point.

~~~
eitally
Yes, Google will not "win" at the total expense of Amazon & Microsoft, but I
would bet a good deal of money that they'll become the market leader within
the next five years, and likely sooner. The rate at which Google has been
open-sourcing things, too, will further expedite this, and the fact that they
just joined OCP will give them better industry credibility on the data center
/ computing side.

~~~
scholia
However, Google seems to be trailing in third in the cloud, at least for
enterprise users. And it seems to be falling well behind AWS and Azure. See,
for example,
[https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519](https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519)
and [http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/diving-into-IT-cloud-
ser...](http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/diving-into-IT-cloud-
services/report/) and [http://www.techinsider.io/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-
topple-in...](http://www.techinsider.io/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-
the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10)

Be interested to see any reports/surveys/data that show Google leading in
cloud services, but Google didn't find me any ;-)

------
phragg
Apple vs FBI in Encryption Lawsuit.

Pentagon Grabs Former CEO Larry Page to head technology.

Google nabs Apple as cloud customer.

 _i put on my robe and tinfoil hat_

~~~
Polyphonie
You mean Eric Schmidt:

[http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-
head...](http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head-
pentagon-innovation-board/)

------
ocdtrekkie
So, it will be nearly impossible to buy a phone in the United States that
isn't designed to send your data to a Google datacenter?

~~~
dchest
"Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a
key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and
the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The
encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying
information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows
Azure."
([https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf))

Although your IP address and some other connection metadata will be known to
Google.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
That's not too bad then. As long as the 'iCloud account', where Apple likes to
store the keys, are never third party hosted.

