
Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud competitor at Google I/O 2012 - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2012/06/22/google-to-launch-amazon-microsoft-cloud-competitor-at-google-io-2012/
======
buster
Makes me wonder.. if an internet shop can build a cloud platform, what does
Google come up with? They must have sooo much experience, own tools, people,
knowledge in that area, it's hard to imagine how far this can go.

Hopefully it will not be just a half-assed experiment again.

~~~
beagle3
> if an internet shop can build a cloud platform,

That's like saying that the Wii was produced by a card-game company, or that a
wood pulp paper making company makes the Lumia 900.

Companies evolve; Amazon were experienced in managing a lot of servers, and
where looking for ways to make money on that expertise (and on the less than
100% used server capacity, although I remember hearing somewhere that within 3
months of introduction, AWS required more server capacity than Amazon-the-
store had at the time)

~~~
InclinedPlane
Amazon's experience was a natural fit for PaaS systems. Amazon moved to a
service oriented architecture years ago. And that meant that individual teams
were responsible for the deployment of their services on hardware. That led to
the creation of automation that made that sort of thing easy. Being able to
add or remove servers from a deployment group, being able to press a button
and push out a build to an entire cluster of machines simultaneously, that
sort of thing. Amazon took their experience building those internal tools and
built a similar set of systems and tools (AWS) that would be suitable for both
internal use and for selling as a service to the public. And it's done well on
both of those fronts, AWS has been successful and amazon internally has
migrated a significant amount of their back-end services and website front-end
hosting to AWS.

~~~
henrikeh
Steve Yegge's rant on Google's and Amazon's platforms comes to mind:
[https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...](https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

I couldn't find the original, so this is a copy on Google+. It discusses the
difference in how Google and Amazon approach platforms.

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grandalf
As someone who has dealt with customer service from the companies Google is
competing with in this arena, Google is either going to have to come in at
about 25% of the price or seriously up its game in the customer service
department.

~~~
waleedka
Agreed. I've been using App Engine for a while and bad customer service is my
main issue with it. I can tolerate poor support for free products, but not for
business products that I pay a lot for.

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mrslx
Google for support and services ... Right, don't waste your time.

~~~
kintamanimatt
That was my first thought. What kind of customer service experience are they
willing or able to provide?

~~~
jrockway
Google offers Apps customers 24/7 phone and email support.

------
zitterbewegung
Does anyone else think that they missed the boat? 3-4 years ago there was
little competition. Now basically EC2 has most of the market. If they want to
be successful they have to be not just cool but noticeably better than EC2 and
it doesn't seem like google wins that way.

~~~
InclinedPlane
When Gates and Allen launched Microsoft they thought they were too late, that
there were too many other established companies in the market to be able to
find a niche for themselves. When google launched web search was half a decade
old and dozens of companies were in the market. When apple launched the ipod
mp3 players had already been around for years and gone through many
generations.

An absence of competition is a near certain way to gain market share, but the
easy way is not the only way. If you have a good enough product you can steal
business from the competion and even grow the size of the total market (as was
the case with the ipod and iphone).

~~~
bztzt
Gates and Allen thought there were too many other established companies in the
_microcomputer software_ market?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Not necessarily established companies, but people working on things that would
become companies. They thought they were too late and they were pretty close
to just going off and doing something else instead.

People still think the same sorts of thoughts today, as we've seen, and they
are no more correct.

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Rastafarian
The hosting wars are just starting. There are so many features no one is
offering right now. E.g. I want to host my app and data in my own data center,
but have an automatic fail over to a cloud provider.

~~~
purephase
With round-robin DNS you have that now. It is fairly easy to setup. The data
may be a bit more challenging, but certainly not impossible.

~~~
ceejayoz
Round robin DNS wouldn't solve that. Your DNS servers will happily keep
serving out the defunct IPs of your failed datacenter.

~~~
joshu
Yeah.

I really hate how confident tech people about shit they've never done and/or
just read about on blogs. I understand that apparent confidence is a currency
but it's not the only one.

~~~
rdl
I don't think you need to be 100% precise on every hn comment.

You can do DNS based failover (short TTL), manually or automatically, and it's
the easiest to set up using entirely your own infrastructure. This works great
if you can tolerate a variable length outage for customers, or where you're
not using it to deal with outage, but rather just migrating load -- say
provider A suddenly gets expensive, you can migrate away, but don't need to
hard kill provider A, at least until any DNS cache has expired.

You can do IP based failover (various techniques -- anycast, which doesn't
really work for most apps, making your own announcements of the same netblock,
IP address failover below the BGP level/internal to a network, arp stealing on
a subnet (not useful across providers but good for HA), etc.

You can use a smart proxy in front of your app (an F5 "Global Load Balancer",
something you've developed yourself, nginx with minimal state, or an
inexpensive service like Cloudflare or their 1000x more expensive Prolexic
competition).

You can do the best thing for non-web apps, a smart client, which knows to go
down a list of servers (randomly?) and find the closest or best one. More
intelligence in the client = more better.

I've set up all of these except Anycast (which I'd actually love to do
sometime, but RIPE jacked my /24) and Prolexic (because I don't want to spend
$30-100k/mo). Which is the best really expends, but IMO at least having a plan
(even if it takes a week) to switch hosting providers is worthwhile for
everyone.

~~~
joshu
None of those are "round robin DNS" as mentioned. None of them are "fairly
easy."

And yes, being more precise is necessary when you are critiquing someone.

~~~
purephase
His first example is round robin DNS. Sorry, but the terms DNS failover and
round robin are often used interchangeably when you're dealing with business
continuity.

Yes, certainly there are other options that increase the complexity, but why
not start there? While the impact to users on shitty ISPs or behind proxies is
unfortunate, it is relatively easy to implement and low-cost.

Going beyond that increases the complexity and cost exponentially and is
certainly not easy.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, RR is strictly returning a response of a set (>1 records, ideally) to
select from each time. Being able to remove those entries based on outages
(which really needs a short TTL) is an optimization.

Unfortunately some stupid resolvers cache a single answer set for a long time,
but for some applications, you're willing to accept 1/x of attempts fail
during an outage (just hit reload, or come back in a bit), since this costs
~nothing to implement.

The basic concept works great for NS, MX, and other protocols where they're
designed to retry.

------
jbarham
If Google can deliver a semi-decent IaaS offering that works well with App
Engine IMO they will have a uniquely powerful platform.

App Engine is often criticized for being expensive compared to AWS, but
putting together a _production ready_ setup (i.e., automatic failover in the
case of data center failure) on AWS isn't cheap since you need at least two of
everything: multiple EC2 instances sitting behind a load balancer (ELB) and
redundant databases (i.e., RDS Multi-AZ). I know because I'm setting up
exactly this configuration right now for my DNS hosting service
(<http://slickdns.com>).

But if Google's IaaS offering could fix all the fiddly bits that App Engine
currently doesn't do (e.g., custom SSL, native binaries) it would surpass AWS
in terms of functionality.

Selling bandwidth and white-label servers is easy. Building a production ready
arbitrarily scalable web platform is much harder.

------
cpunks
I have an extremely, extremely, extremely healthy level of skepticism. We do
substantial business with AWS. When they went down and came back up, some of
our data was damaged. I called my Amazon rep, who put me in contact with
Amazon engineers, who helped us recover. Amazon can do that -- they're a
service organization, and they're used to working with customers and making
them happy.

Google's customer service, in contrast, has a raison d'etre of avoiding
customers. As a customer, the feeling you get is mild disdain. This is
necessary -- one support call for Google.com can wipe out the profits from
thousands of people. This translate into how they handle the enterprise
market. I use Google Apps for my organization. I needed to enable Google+ for
a social presence. This required applying into a black hole which, for a long
time, did nothing. Support e-mails went to someone who clearly was in the
business of neither having nor giving out information.

Here's an experiment for you: Pretend you want to try Google App Engine, but
your cell is not on one of the providers Google supports (I've been there).
You just a credit card, and a willingness to spend a bit of cash. Try to buy
some service. See how far you get.

I use Google internal to my organization for things like Google Apps; if it
has issues, employees will deal, and it saves a big chunk of work and cash.
For anything customer-facing, I really do want a partner whom I can talk to if
there are issues, not a black box designed to reject support requests.

------
notatoad
>Not to be outdone, other sources have confirmed Microsoft is also building an
Infrastructure as a Service platform

Do they mean azure? That's IaaS, right?

~~~
Rastafarian
Azure started and still is mostly used as PaaS for .NET apps.

~~~
ridruejo
Not any more, they are now a full IaaS provider, complete with multiple fully-
supported Linux flavors

~~~
Rastafarian
Yeah, that's why I wrote "mostly" ...

<https://twitter.com/devops_borat/status/207600109469437952>

------
sherwin
This really makes me wonder what took Google so long. Google practically
defined large scale commodity cluster computing with mapreduce (2004). Amazon
EC2 was launched in 2006. The closest thing Google has done was app engine,
and my understanding is that was not a tremendous success. Does anyone have
any explanations why Google didn't move into this space earlier?

~~~
wmf
Google doesn't use VMs internally and they probably don't have a scalable SAN
(EBS competitor) either, so they don't have as much of an advantage as you
might think. Google bet big on a "legacy-free" stack (GFS, MapReduce,
BigTable, etc.) and that has worked out great for their internal services but
external customers just aren't willing to adopt it (see App Engine).

~~~
regularfry
They've got Ganeti, but I don't know exactly what they use it for.

------
100k
I wonder how App Engine fits into this? Maybe it will be an extension of the
Backend instances you can use now.

~~~
manuelflara
I've always though App Engine is kind of a half-assed version of AWS, so maybe
this time they're announcing something worthy of Google's brand. With all all
the infrastructure knowledge they have I always felt App Engine was way too
poor a service.

~~~
myko
Would you mind elaborating on why GAE isn't very good relative to AWS?

~~~
egillie
GAE sandboxes you with their proprietary libraries, whereas AWS lets you write
for unix/windows platform with minimal sandboxing. If you want to write a LAMP
stack, you can just write a regular old LAMP stack with AWS. With GAE, you
have to learn their java/python server libraries, then their blobstore/google
cloud storage/googleQL, and so on.

~~~
StavrosK
Sure, but GAE has zero setup and administration and infinite scaling.

Myself, I prefer something like gondor.io, that looks very much like a
dedicated server but also has zero setup/administration.

If price is an issue, you can't beat an actual dedicated server, though.

------
Hikari
for more about the subject here is an interesting read from a google insider
talking about their lack of understanding platforms and service oriented
architecture. <http://steverant.pen.io/>

------
fpp
Been told at a Google meeting recently that there will be a new GDrive SDK
introduced during the Google I/O

If they are expanding their offerings it might go more towards Box(.net) than
vs Amazon

By that also the App Engine etc fit into the picture - we'll know next week

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davidedicillo
It will be free, but it will have targeted ads in your source code :)

~~~
Rastafarian
Hah put ads on 404, 500 and other errors pages :D

------
harryh
If this includes some sort of public access to borg it could be extremely
interesting. No more borg is one of the top 3 things I miss from my days at
Google.

~~~
wmf
Those of us who didn't work at Google have no idea what you're talking about.

~~~
flyt
<http://www.quora.com/What-is-Borg-at-Google>

"It's the system that manages machines. If you want to run a program that uses
x CPU and y memory on 100 machines, you don't specify which machines to run it
on. Instead, you request 100 machines using a Borg library."

------
da_n
Am I the only one who read this headline thinking Google is going to launch a
cloud rival to Microsoft called Amazon?

------
twog
Competition is always healthy, but its going to be pretty tough for Google to
launch something that makes our startup move away from AWS or Rackspace. EBS
would be the main service to attack of Amazons.

~~~
fizx
How about cost? If Google was 20% cheaper, would you switch?

~~~
glimcat
I strongly prefer not to deal with Google in a business context. It's great
when everything is running smoothly. But if things break down, there's usually
not a damn thing you can do about it besides post to your blog and pray.

~~~
notatoad
this is only true with google's free services. as far as i know, any paid
service google offers includes phone and email support.

------
dsirijus
Isn't this all about who can get cheaper electricity?

------
Xcelerate
This is good news. We'll have cheaper prices all around! And with that article
on Google having their own hardware manufactured, it may end up better than we
think.

------
wavephorm
Shouldn't Google have done this before everyone started migrating off of GAE
due to the price hikes, and before AWS pretty much cornered the cloud platform
market, and before Dropbox cornered the cloud data storage/sync market, and
before Heroku cornered the auto-scaling web services market?

~~~
ajross
I don't see that AWS has really "cornered" the market. They're leading because
they're better, which is a different thing entirely.

Cloud services like EC2/EBS and (to a lesser extent) S3 are really fungible.
It's comparatively easy to move between providers, or even to your own
hardware if you want. If someone were to come along and offer a comparably
performant and reliable service to AWS at half the price, Amazon's customers
would flee like rats. Obviously the devil is in the details, but it seems to
me like Google is better positioned to offer that kind of value proposition
(c.f. Google Drive, whose retail price is already cheaper than S3) than
Microsoft or Rackspace.

Basically: linux boxes are a commodity. You can't compete in this market on
features. That makes Amazon's (admittedly) dominant position more precarious
than it looks.

~~~
taligent
I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't.

AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are
proprietary with very Amazon specific APIs. As each new developer starts to
use these it "locks" them into the platform as a whole. And since many of
these are core services I just don't see customers moving to a competitor
unless there is a massive difference in price/features.

Also don't forget: NOBODY offers the complete range of unified services that
AWS does right now AFAIK.

~~~
ajross
No, AWS == EC2/EBS/S3. Period.

That's where the money is. Yes, Amazon offers that other stuff. I'm sure
someone buys it. I refuse to believe it's a significant fraction of AWS
revenue without evidence. Huge numbers of successful sites are built on the
core stuff. Are any large sites using the Amazon lock-in features? I'm
certainly not aware of any.

~~~
taligent
I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site
is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in
nature.

But people ARE starting to look at them and it is an area (PaaS) that is going
to become more and more compelling for businesses in the future. And Amazon is
right now is the only player I know of in that space. And every new user they
attract could well be locked in for life.

~~~
ajross
But I think you're missing the point. Google App Engine (and Heroku for that
matter) _is_ a PaaS product. They were there first, and they lost to the
commodity metaphor. You can argue that Amazon will succeed based on the
quality of their offering, I guess, but not simply because it's "PaaS". The
market has spoken, they don't like that.

~~~
nl
PaaS hasn't lost - it's just a smaller market than IaaS (Infrastructure as a
Service), and it will take longer to become mature.

IaaS is immediately useful to anyone who needs a Linux box. PaaS needs longer
lead times for people to adapt to a new platform.

Amazon's approach to the PaaS market is probably a lot better than Google's.

Google went: here's a new set of APIs, write custom apps to use them.

Amazon let you host standard LAMP apps, and then slowly started offering parts
of the stack as a service (oh, you need a database? Here, use our managed one.
You need search? We have that. Load balancing? Just use ours, it's easier than
doing it yourself.)

