It was (for better and for worse) the #1 reason to adopt GCP for our main cloud platform, and we're not alone.
It's has seen immense adoption that it wouldn't have had if it hadn't been in a neutral foundation. The work was definitely not done by Google alone (~30%).
IS GCP "still" #3 ? Yes. Is it because they didn't get a tighter grip on k8s and try to use it as a competitive advantage ? absolutely not. Nobody would have touched k8s with a 10 foot pole in that situation.
The strength of k8s is in its eco-system and that wouldn't have happened without the CNCF.
And I'm saying this as an early adopter of k8s, it's insane for the Google brass to see anything other than an immense success in the handling of k8s, at least from the perspective of how much money it made Google (indirectly)
It's not because of K8S strategy that GCP is #3. It's just because MS & AWS are better. PERIOD. Better at service, better at marketing, better at some product design sometimes, better at abusing their current dominant position (hehe it sucks doesn't Goog ? heh? Doesn't it ?)
I think you underestimate the revenue OpenShift is generating... If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that.
Comparing consulting bills to IaaS bills is apples/oranges. Consultants are really just Humans as a Service (HaaS). A lot of the work we do is to bring in expertise in something that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to hire for and augment a team for a short period. We actually help customers with cloud-stuff (like AWS and Azure) all the time.
A lot of the work I've been doing lately is stuff that would have to be done if you were using K8s on cloud instead of OpenShift. I'm currently helping to migrate services from older platforms (like BlueMix) to OpenShift. You can look for that "feature" all day long in the cloud console, but you won't find it :-)
I'm also a freelance consultant mainly focused on OpenShift and k8s, my bill is separate.
If I see the support contract bills of my clients,
holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP
for that.
on a more serious note: in order to compare apples to apples you should compare red hat support bills with GCP support bills (i think they call that "professional services"). I guess they aren't cheap either.
Sadly, also my experience. Response SLA of 2 hours? Please attach sosreport is ALWAYS the first reply. Even if you attached it in the original ticket (which we always do). The technical quality of the support is sub-par, most of the time when we include technical information, they don't seem to understand it at all...
Just wanted to say this one weirdly petty/obnoxious concluding line tainted an otherwise solid comment. Seems unnecessary.
i should check if it's still the case, but I remember a time where every effing kubernetes tutorial would make you spin up a k8s cluster on google cloud.
I'm trying to look up how to make my own cluster, not use someone else's. Figured it out eventually but it took way more searching then for learning how to use k8s.
Android brought people into Google's ecosystem.
Kubernetes could have positioned Google better in the cloud space but I think they were late to the party due to their failure to understand what customers want.