k8s feels much more like an effort to commoditize this space through standardization. It's a pretty common business strategy [1].

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

1. Because it is a very different thing to have an internally managed cloud than it is to offer this as a product with the massive support required for enterprise, something that Google has never put much resource into.

Amazon and MS have vast support networks because enterprise wants to feel like they have some control and feedback on their systems.

Also, unless you can innovate in the space (or go really cheap), why would I ever choose a smaller player over a larger one?

This is another example of the problem these rich companies have where cash is not a problem but identity and direction is.

I completely agree with this.

But, also in think Google does have some advantages. Out of the box, their NLP algorithms seem much better than AWS’s offering. They also offer custom search as an api. I haven’t used it, but bigquery seems very good. I do agree these are probably not enough to have an enterprise shift. Maybe if they specialize on a couple industries that won’t choose amazon (fedex, ups, target, Walmart, streaming/media). It does seem like google has made strong inroads in finance as well.

There are technical reasons.

Azure is doing quite well leveraging Microsoft's existing enterprise relationships. I'm not sure how much success folks are having "lifting and shifting" their Microsoft infrastructure into the cloud, some, maybe?

However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

>However, everyone that I've heard of that understands cloud native type architectures that has attempted to deploy into Azure is looking to leave.

Extremely unsurprising, but I'd be interested to read more.

Kind of ignored this because it's a long list of stuff. I don't really want to repeat stuff that I've "heard". Friend of mine does consulting for a few big orgs, and he tells me that things are bad enough that many of his customers are looking to move in spite of being heavily subsidized by Microsoft. He mentioned numbers like >$1m in credits. Unfortunately, my friend isn't very technical so when I press him on details, I get very little.

However, that correlates pretty closely with my own personal experience. I've worked with a fair bit of the Azure products and it feels to me very much like a work in progress.

The identity management stuff has been a moving target since day one. That is, how to authorize against the service itself. This is apparent in many of the Python libraries where this is documented.

The Python libraries that I've seen look like they were produced by interns. I'm performance with ADL is pretty rough.

My main goal with Azure was to deploy Kubernetes clusters there. The list of problems is very long and has been documented ad nauseum in many Medium articles. In the 14 or so months I've been working with Azure, it hasn't improved as quickly as I'm accustomed to with AWS and GCP.

A year ago, I shifted the majority of my production infrastructure from AWS to GCP. By comparison to Azure, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the products from GCP. My company uses GSuite which made identity management and RBAC a breeze. The GKE product is way, way better than anything else, and there are a handful of things that I like better than AWS.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to shift from AWS unless they were planning a large Kubernetes implementation. I would encourage folks to try GCP and especially GKE to get a sense of the differences.

There's nothing about Azure that I've discovered yet that would cause me to recommend it to anyone. It's possible that if a company had a heavier investment in MS products that it might be worthwhile, but that's not the case for mine. We only ever use MSSQL occasionally for development purposes and I've found that I can spin up an instance of that quite nicely in k8s with the Microsoft authored helm chart.

Kubernetes also run on the competing clouds, so it isn't that much of an advantage, unless they add GCE specific features.

Well, they do. For example you can configure your node pool to automatically upgrade its members so you don't have to worry about kernel patches. They have a proxy service for their Cloud SQL product so you don't have to fiddle with configuration, its just another k8s service name. Of course Amazon could do these things but they simply haven't. I think their biggest advantage though is they abstract away the master - you just have a node pool and don't have to worry about the masters. With Amazon you will pay $300 a month just to have a HA master, before you launch even one node in your pool.

Also once you start getting into k8s you will find so much more information in the community with specific instructions for GKE; its by far the best environment to learn in for that reason.

Google falls down in so many other areas though that it probably doesn't matter how good GKE is. The biggest annoyance to me is their Postgres offering still has no point in time recovery.

edit to add: One other big advantage I forgot to mention is that launching a GKE cluster takes only a couple of minutes. I have a Terraform configuration that will launch a GKE cluster and run my deployments and my app is up and running after less than 5 minutes. This makes it much more attractive to do things like spin up a new cluster for each pull request.

EKS pricing is $0.20/hour, or ~ $144/month. Not free, but also not $300.

I will agree that EKS startup is slow, but given the way it needs to run, I don’t think many customers will want to run more than a few clusters per VPC.

$144 a month gets you one master. As I said, an HA master is twice that. If you want to compare to GKE, you are starting at $288 a month.

Not sure where these numbers are coming from but EKS has 3 masters by default. You don't get HA by running 2 clusters (I assume that's where you got $288). $144 gets you 3 masters in 3 AZs.

The only master for EKS is an HA master (to be precise a 3 AZ master).