Google's reputation is dooming GCP. On the one hand you want to say "GCP is way to big for Google just to kill" but you never know, which makes the decision to use AWS all that much easier. I honestly wonder if Google will stick it out and make GCP a true competitor to AWS or if they will just kill it in years time.

Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.

Google is starting with a handicap, in that they have a very strong reputation for killing products that don't meet unknown high standard of performance/revenue. I mean, the term "Google Graveyard" is popular, although I prefer Killed By Google[0]. To counter that handicap for GCP, they need something that stands out as much as Amazon's initial claim, and I haven't seen it. It seems clear that Google isn't running their own infrastructure on GCP. If anything, the hope seems to be that they've spent so much money on GCP, surely they wouldn't shut it down after all of that?

But of course, the bright sparks at Google are aware of the Sunk Cost Fallacy as well as anyone else, so... yeah. I have trouble trusting it.

0. https://killedbygoogle.com

> Amazon publicly stated that they ran their own business on AWS, and however much of an exaggeration that might have been, it gave people the confidence to try it out. The reasoning was clear: if AWS handles Amazon-scale business, they can surely handle my smaller workload.

I think even more important than the scalability, it implies AWS isn't going away as long as Amazon is in business.

Or say AWS is now Amazon's business.

I was on a blind focus group for cloud offerings. Turned out to be Azure, but every IT person their ranked them AWS, Azure, GCP. And GCP was #3 only because Oracle was universally hated

I mean if I had to bet development time and a product/service that has to run for years I wouldn’t bet it on GCP, precisely because of Google’s reputation.

I’m confident AWS will exist in a decade, I’m not confident GCP will. I would never recommend a dependency on a Google service, especially not one that matters where there’s potentially millions of dollars on the line.

I deployed stuff on GCP but we moved to AWS after stability issues and horrendous support experience on GCP.

And that was easy because we did not commit to any GCP exclusive services (because they tend to shut down all thr time). On AWS we prefer using things like DynamoDB and that further locks us into AWS.

GCP is a joke.

Funny, we use GCP extensively and never have any issues. I can't speak to the support issues because we've never needed any. AWS is a bit of a mess, and I always dread having to use it.

Cloud has had over 135-153% YoY revenue growth every quarter since they started reporting Cloud revenue 11 quarters ago. It's amazingly consistent high growth.

TAC (traffic acquisition costs) have exploded over this time frame. If you subtract TAC from Services revenue, the growth is merely good. Cloud revenue also seems a lot less sensitive to the recent economic downtown so far, but we'll really know after Q3.

The operating losses for Cloud are also shrinking quickly. Building data centers should be capex, but I'm guessing they count R&D as opex, which makes the losses higher now even though it will pay off later like an investment. They could probably start to have operating income any time in the next 3 years.

Of course GCP is losing money, have you seen their rate of investment in new datacenters and services? That shit is extremely expensive. AWS was losing money for many years too, they're at entirely different places.

Difference is, AWS was growing into a void. Google has to contend with established leaders.

GCP is basically number four globally in cloud - with Alibaba being number three

This tells me it won't last much longer...Google can't afford to spend all that money to be number four

> Difference is, AWS was growing into a void. Google has to contend with established leaders.

Yes, but also the market is much bigger now, and the cloud isn't something abstract people need to be convinced about. It's the de facto standard now.

> GCP is basically number four globally in cloud - with Alibaba being number three

Alibaba is niche in that few people outside of Asia would use it. It's still an enormous market, but GCP/AWS/Azure and Alibaba don't compete for the same workloads in the majority of cases. So there's plenty of place under the sun for GCP, if Google want it. Them killing it would be b2b suicide.

I think folks can finally accurately model what Google is going to kill... GCP surely wouldn't be on that list? ;)

> You can pretty accurately model what they will and won't do with this one unusual insight that they're a business... But "It's a Google product" is a weak signal about whether it's going to get killed, and there are many stronger signals. Let me know when they kill Ads and Cloud.

-u/geofft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353025

GCP's profit

* 2018: -4.3B USD

* 2019: -4.6B USD

* 2020: -5.6B USD

* 2021: -3.1B USD

(https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/02/alphabet_q4_2021/)

I realize Google is making a bet on the long term of cloud, but... it's continuing to bleed money making that investment. Meanwhile, AWS is also seeing large growth numbers while remaining very profitable.

So, while I get the "investment for the long term" angle that Google is pitching for GCP, how long will they decide to continue making that investment while they lose money on it, chasing a profitable AWS

How can they lose money at the prices they charge? They already had all the expertise to run data centers and build infrastructure. I get that there's development effort, but how can you bleed billions annually over years? Or do they discount that heavily for large customers?

I believe Cloud is an investor's playground at this point, given the huge opportunity that it presents. The fact that AWS makes a profit is due to its market position, which IBM Cloud, Oracle, Azure, and GCP have been chipping away at steadily, even if slowly. For GCP and AWS, I believe missing out on GitHub was a big mistake. Though, I fully expect GCP to loosen the purse strings for similar companies in the near future, esp given Azure/Microsoft have been on a tear of late.

I wouldn't touch GCP even with a 3 meter stick. And using it in any project is just out of the question. No.