
Google Plots Course to Overtake Cloud Rivals - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plots-course-to-overtake-cloud-rivals-11582383601
======
mrtksn
Not the Google Cloud but Firebase is by far the nicest experience I ever had
with a "hosting" provider. It is a bit expensive but I think this proves that
there are many low hanging fruits to gather out there.

It's essentially an API to access a streamlined database, file hosting, access
provider and so on. Everything integrated and can talk to each other.

Not long ago I got fed up with endless tools and configuration in the
LAMP/MEAN/MERN or whatever the latest trend is to put data somewhere and read
it, so I got into native iOS development and I am loving it.

On the client-side, I have only two UI frameworks to deal with(UIKit and
SwiftUI). On the backend side, I only deal with Firebase. You can do
everything with those.

Honestly, I don't know why not all providers are essentially like Firebase.
Surely for some scenarios, a custom solution would be needed but it strikes me
as Firebase being the place that provides the structure and you plug your
custom software to it.

That's why I am under the impression that at the end the gold rush for the
cloud, the result would be something like Firebase.

What I would love though, if an open source self hostable Firebase
alternative.

~~~
throwaway9d0291
I love the idea of Firebase but the thing keeping me off it is the pricing.
It's like regular cloud pricing on steroids. Comparing Firebase pricing to say
a $5 droplet from DigitalOcean:

\- Bandwidth egress uses Google's standard pricing, which is hilariously
uncompetitive (~0.12$/GB vs. ~0.01$/GB) and totally inappropriate for anything
bandwidth-intensive like image hosting.

\- $5/month will get you 2.7M writes, 8.3M reads or 25M deletes on Firebase
while Postgres running on a DigitalOcean droplet should be able to handle at
least ~500 transactions a second, or ~1.3B per month.

\- A GB-month of RAM costs $6.48 on Firebase and is included as part of the $5
droplet from DO.

\- A month of CPU time costs $25.92 on Firebase and is included as part of the
$5 droplet from DO.

So a $5 DO droplet will give you 1GB-month, 1 CPU-month, 1.3B write
transactions and 1TB of bandwidth.

For those same resources you'd pay $6.48 for RAM, $25.92 for CPU time, $2332
for 1.3B writes, and $120 for bandwidth, for a total of $2484.40, or 497x
more. Even if you just look at the CPU and RAM, it's 6x more expensive.

I can imagine this being great for a pet project where you might only use a
few minutes of CPU time each month but for any kind of scale, the resource
costs just seem crazy.

~~~
vinay_ys
Are you equating one droplet with no redundancy or scalability to Firebase's
services? Also, will postgres sustain 500 transactions/sec for a month to
reach 1.3B. Sounds like serious stretch to me.

------
orf
Microsoft is pushing Azure _hard_. Not to disclose specifics but there are
cases where deals with Microsoft for unrelated things are reliant on the
company adopting/moving parts of their work to Azure, with _huge_ amounts of
free credits for the first year as a sweetener. It's not in writing on
contracts but it's very much a requirement.

I'm not sure how they can hope to become the number 2 cloud provider when
pitted against that. Say what you want about Microsoft but they are in a
really good position to take large chunks of the enterprise cloud market, and
that's where the money is.

~~~
quadrifoliate
A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large volume
deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes a
piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why not
use their cloud too?".

Google could solve this by fixing Linux on the desktop, or essentially making
as many parts of ChromeOS open as possible. With Windows 10's bloatware,
Microsoft has made many missteps – a Google Linux that looks and works like a
Mac, and has native G Suite as well as meaningful GCP integrations would be an
Azure-killing app. Unfortunately chances seem very slim that Google will ever
have the imagination to do something like this.

~~~
GordonS
> A lot of the Microsoft Azure stuff is simply because companies do large
> volume deals with Microsoft for Windows/Office/Sharepoint and Azure becomes
> a piggyback. "Well we are paying Microsoft millions of dollars anyway, why
> not use their cloud too?

It's not just about licensing fees - it's also practicality. That, and Azure
is actually really good (relative to the other major players, GCP and AWS).

If you're a Microsoft-shop, you use Active Directory. Naturally, Azure Active
Directory (AAD) works well with your existing on-prem AD deployment, so with
very little effort, your employees get SSO for your shiny new cloud services.

~~~
eropple
_> That, and Azure is actually really good_

This doesn't match my experience at all, from the inconsistent and weird
horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface to thrown-over-the-wall
API libraries[0] to Azure AD being a complete waste of time and effort if you
don't want them owning your entire directory (I'm sorry, I have to pay for
_Office or separate API access_ to manage users through Okta?) to real fun
stuff like servers not recording restart or shutdown events in their audit
logs if they were under load.

In fairness, I will say one nice thing about Azure: their CLI tools, under
Powershell, are pretty good. I was impressed. Powershell Core is _not_ ,
however, a good experience on a Linux machine, and while WSL2 is a lot better
it's still not replacing my normal day-job workflow.

But it's been over a year since I had to use the comprehensively bad
clusterfuck that is Azure, and honestly I'm still pretty mad about the
experience. Azure is the one cloud provider that a company can't pay me enough
money to work with. Well, one of two; there's also IBM Cloud, which, whoa-
nope.

[0] - [https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-
for...](https://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-
ruby/issues/61)

~~~
karatestomp
> weird horizontally-expanding OG-Xbox blades user interface

God do I hate this. I've given up hope that I'll get used to it at this point.
I have yet to even figure out how it's _supposed_ to help me, let alone find a
way that it actually does. It's so very weird to seemingly no purpose. And
someone had to put in a ton of effort to make it that way!

... but then I kinda hate all of the big 3 cloud web UIs.

~~~
eropple
I don't like Amazon's, though the incremental spread of their redesigns is
helping. GCP's is okay. But Azure's is straight-up bad. And you're right--I
can't for the life of me figure out _why_ they did that.

I have been told, too, that the team that made it is very pleased with it.
"Why" comes to mind.

------
more_corn
I hope part of their plan is fixing their documentation. Their documentation
is crap and they can't win if they don't fix it. Apparently GCP technical
writers have not been tasked with creating task/goal oriented documents. For
grins, look up how to create a load balancer. You'll find 5 different
articles. There won't be one containing the specific instructions you're
looking for. The whole thing needs to be torn out by the roots and recreated
around achieving specific results. They are unlikely to do this, so they are
unlikely to catch up let alone win.

~~~
tmpz22
It’s so abundantly clear that most documentation writers at google have NEVER
used their own products in production (nor do they ever intend to).

This is how I imagine their meetings to discuss this goes:

“Users leave our documentation pages in under 15 seconds! Our documentation is
so clear and efficient! For some reason their hardware analytics show that the
device falls 20 meters and shuts down afterwards, but that is surely an
unrelated event!”

~~~
verst
Honestly most techdoc writers have never really used their products in
production. You are lucky if they have built their own test and sample apps.

So the solution is having the engineers building the service write the
documentation right? Wrong. They also don't know what assumptions a real
customer makes and how they would use it. Quite likely they too don't
understand real external production use.

Writing technical documentation is hard.

~~~
Ididntdothis
"Writing technical documentation is hard."

So true. Good documentation can make or break a platform. I think a big part
of the success of C++ is that Stroustrup is an excellent writer. A lot of the
posts I have seen from Linus were also very well written. In the 90s Apple had
documentation that seemed written by people who actually knew how to develop
software. Nowadays it feels less so.

------
gamesbrainiac
I still don't understand why companies like Microsoft and Google hire folks
from Oracle to run a cloud business. Oracle is the only player that can't do
anything on the cloud; even IBM has a better game.

~~~
reaperducer
Because good people sometimes end up working for bad companies and want a way
out?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Yup. Many of them didn't even choose to work for "bad" companies: eg. Oracle
made tons of acquisitions, including Sun.

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

------
Aeolun
I think a good start would be building a reputation for decent support and
longevity, but surprisingly they seem to be going in exactly the opposite
direction.

~~~
joncrane
Building a reputation takes a long time.

They have already built a reputation for being capricious with support and
sloppy with documentation.

Re-doing a reputation is even harder than building one.

------
yalogin
This is something Google cannot abandon or be complacent about. Cloud is their
turf and they ceded it to AWS and then Microsoft.

------
unabridged
Easy. Cut bandwidth costs. Even just putting everyone at the lowest price and
removing all tiers would change the market completely.

~~~
adventured
The bulk of the customers generating the $40 billion per year for AWS do not
care enough about bandwidth (transfer) costs for it to change the market
completely. While it may be in the top ten as a consideration on cost, it's
nowhere near the top.

All Google would do by slashing transfer pricing is lure a lot of low value
customers - and worse - to their shores and harm their service in the process.

It's a benefit to the cloud majors to keep transfer costs artificially high,
which is why none of them have pulled the trigger on that competitive angle.
It helps keep various types of low value + high abuse risk customers out and
of course the transfer pricing is a profit center. Google isn't eager /
desperate to saturate its services with terrible customers any more than the
other large providers.

------
justlexi93
Documentation just needs some serious work. Though been a while since I last
went digging, so maybe it's improved.

------
hashbig
if a cloud provider out of the big 3 adds hard limit budget (taking down the
service) so I don't have to worry about getting a 100k bill if I fuck up and
not turn off some service before I go to a 2 month vacation, they can take all
my money.

~~~
Orcus90482
You can do this on GCP programmatically.
[https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-
to/notify#cap_disa...](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-
to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage)

~~~
hashbig
How hard is it to turn this into a checkbox in their billing page?

~~~
Orcus90482
This is clearly not a recommended process. GCP probably does not want a user
to check the box and not understand the consequences given how severe they
could be.

------
monksy
How do they plan on doing that if they've downsized the group recently?

~~~
vlovich123
Engineers are why things take so long to build. Without engineers things will
build faster.

~~~
Ididntdothis
To some degree that’s true. Less engineers definitely can speed things up if
they get autonomy.

At my company there are a lot of people talking about work, doing planning,
scheduling and whatever. They don’t contribute much but also hold the
engineers up with constant information requests.

~~~
xiphias2
The days of autonomy for engineers at Google is over.

At this point product managers fight for their ideas to be implemented so that
they can get promoted, even if it's an inferiour solution.

