First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore's law and how the service should be cheaper.
Why do I trust google less? Because I don't get a feeling Google has any long-term strategy here. It seems like they're winging it every 6-12 months. In contrast Amazon and AWS have been steadily marching in one direction.
I want to like GCE/GAE, I still run services from it, it's good for some use cases. But in back of my mind, I know google can pull the rug at any moment, depending on the popular flavor of the month.
So what am I saying? Use it at your own risk. It's good for somethings but there are other solutions and there are businesses where cloud services is their main or only business. You know those guys will steadily innovate and build up their services.
App Engine is absolutely second to none as a PaaS. Fact is I sleep better at night on App Engine that I ever could on AWS.
Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with Google.
Disclaimer: I work for Google.
Speaking from (direct personal) experience, someone that malicious needs to be identified quickly and removed, because that's without question not the only thing he's doing due to his disgruntled attitude. Nothing against him, just clearly Google has wronged him in some way and the responsibilities of his legal agreements are no longer important. That means it's time to move on before he harms the company.
Whenever I've spoken about my employment at Google -- even though I was fired inappropriately -- I'm careful not to divulge information that I promised to protect as it's important for my own integrity. And that's even when I have a pretty legitimate gripe with Google. Now that I'm with Apple, a company that ostensibly takes secrecy to an entirely different level than Google, I don't even discuss Apple in public. Ever. I know better.
I'd talk to Global Security about this if I were you since a case could be made that he tried to throw your LDAP under the bus.
Anyone can append a disclaimer to an anonymous comment claiming all sort of stuff.
Also one would expect Google employees to be smart his/her comment conveys the opposite: there is no inherent conflict between being mostly about mobile while providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares which are also becoming increasingly mobile.
There is a large amount of malice targeted at Google and much of it manifests in HN comments, as this threat would suggest.
If "joebar" here completely made up the question and answer I bet one of the numerous lurking Googlers would have called him on it by now, even though it's a confidential meeting because (a) not everybody cares about nondisclosure to the same extent you and I do and (b) it's not like you're divulging corporate secrets, you're just saying that's a made up story. Pretty simple. "That story isn't true." Done. Legal gray area, but Google is pretty lax on social media until you fuck up.
I should clarify that it's probably a safe bet that the Q&A happened (and, honestly, sounds like Larry) but I disagree with the commenter's analysis.
> Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy?
Granting, for the sake of argument, that the story you relate is true, um, yes? One of the big things in Google's cloud platform push has been to build infrastructure that on which applications can be built for Google end-user platforms -- Android and Chrome. If Google was adopting a mobile-as-central-end-user-focus strategy, then backend services that support mobile development like Cloud Platform (and tools that rely on it like Cloud Endpoints) would seem to be rather important.
> you're business depends
> better position then if
How did you get a job at google?
Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.
I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.
Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.
Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.
I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.
The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and acquihires.
Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.
You're also hopping the goalposts around a bunch between revenue, success, and some subjective measure of "quality", but Android has over a billion activations, Chrome has three-quarters of a billion active users, GMail has 600+ million active users...again, one would have to be a complete fool (or a recent immigrant from Mars) to think that "only GoogleX and AdWords have had success".
By the way, in case you're planning to move the goalposts again to focus on only revenue, if you can't understand the concept of a product having monetary value without directly being a source of revenue, then I'm honestly just in awe of how little you understand how any of the industry works.
Also, user experience is not the be all and end all. Profitability on the other hand...
Yes, yes, I know. Adwords. They better hope licensing for self-driving cars takes off.
... Sorry, everybody. I'd missed that one yesterday. :( We now return you to your regularly scheduled Google-skepticism
Disclaimer: I too work for Google.
2nd Disclaimer: No I don't.
FWIW, the Google products that are subject to the deprecation policy [1] will give a year's heads-up before they are shut down.
We aren't doing our job well enough if you can't easily transition off Cloud Platform (at least for the components that have obvious competitors... something like BigQuery is necessarily less simple). You should stick with us because you believe in the product, not some sort of lock-in, so you should find it easy to leave within that year.
As for whether that deprecation is likely, it would require a sea change. In the Wired article that came out yesterday [2], the quote is '“We will spend the majority of our development efforts on this New World,” wrote Hölzle.' And this is true, Google really is throwing Technical Infrastructure behind Cloud Platform. That's not to say Cloud Platform going away can't or won't happen, but I feel confident in my job sticking around.
[1] https://developers.google.com/cloud/terms/deprecation [2] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-stor...
I agree entirely with @bcantrill's comment. I look at Google's PaaS services with the very real concern that they may be switched off or changed at any time.
The reality of this is not just that it will have a financial cost but may well deal a mortal blow to the business. Unless Google makes a long term implicit (big customer) or explicit (rock solid 5-year SLA) commitment to these services they're just too risky to build a complex business on (unless it's a business which is enabled by the marginal cost savings).
The "meh" of GCE so far has really just been that it is behind the times vs. AWS kicking out new features monthly and is years late to the game.
When they keep adding features to their ecosystem (and driving down prices like the crazy cheap $0.02/GB cost of storage vs $0.68/GB for S3) usage will keep increasing.
I haven't had or heard of a single customer not choosing GCE because they are worried it is just going away, it is just lack of an ecosystem and knowledge/awareness from the end-user that these Google services are something worth looking at.
There is always a chance that a service will be shut down in a year no matter who the provider is.
Even if you think it's equal, we're probably in a regime of "nobody got fired for building on AWS".
When was the last time AWS EOL'd a service? Honestly, I can't remember, and I've been using AWS (S3/EC2 to start) since 2007.
GAE, storage, etc could be close to free, and I'll still stick with Amazon; I'm paying for consistency and the long-term lifecycle of AWS as a system.
When was the last time Google Cloud Platform EOL'd a service? I mean, if you are asking about AWS and not Amazon, you should ask about Google Cloud Platform, and not Google.
File that with "will always be free we promise".
Just so you know there is no such thing as "rock solid" with respect to legal contracts. There is always wiggle or weasel room. Better predictor is past behavior (which is what everyone is discusssing).
Not only that but a company like google has the finances to take any kind of legal action hit if they do decide to go against the contract even w/o a leg to stand on. And a band of users and a class action won't stop the process. [1]
Even Apple has in the past killed products (clones, xserve, newton for example). I remember specifically that a close friend told me that "they will never kill xserve" he was a big rep in sales and had tons of business in that area. Yet they killed it. Oh yeah mobileme also. I know I'm forgetting many other things.
While it's not unusual that companies kill products or services and there is never an explicit guarantee there are definitely companies that are more likely to do so if the product doesn't meet certain goals or fit in.
[1] Re-read this part. In other words promise one thing, do another thing, then simply clean up the resulting mess.
https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=9...
For context, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Lifecycle has mainstream support dedication from 2009-2015. The extended support date is 2020.
a) That's what is written in the contract
b) I think you should be able to migrate off the platform within that timeframe, and you shouldn't join our platform if you don't think we're making it easy enough for you to leave again (I deeply believe in initiatives like Google Takeout)
I didn't make any comment, nor will I, on whether I perceive that time frame to be long enough. I think it's smarter to stick to the facts when it's my own job I'm talking about. I would like to continue engaging with the Hacker News community (which, you'll see from my history, began many years prior to my joining Google) and offering context and information. But I can't do that if I don't stick to facts, lest my opinions be bent around to imply something I didn't mean that could put the job (that I enjoy very much) in jeopardy.
The reason Google's whole cloud division doesn't take off in the same way as pretty much everything else Google releases is because it feels like you guys have no idea what you're doing. Which is incredible considering you obviously know what you're doing - you keep Google running! Would you give your Search team 1 year notice to migrate all of their servers off their current hardware and datacenters to AWS or DigitalOcean? Obviously not, they would probably fire the lot of you and run it themselves. Why do you think other enterprises would think any differently?
For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud.
until they run a private fiber [which don't also have NSA's splitters attached] directly to the MS datacenter, they are being sold a snow in Antarctic [ie. mutually exclusive dichotomy between "100% never let anything onto the public Internet" and "use of a Microsoft private cloud"].
We are happy to talk about the actual location of your data for privacy purposes: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/priva... I don't know how often this is actually done, but it's not out of the question that a large customer might prefer to run their own fiber to our datacenter(s).
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/a-sysadmins-view-of-...
Re the NSA splitter issue, that's just a reality of life. If you've run a large email, backup or similar system for a length of time, you've inevitably come across requests from law enforcement or litigating attorneys for data. So don't assume that nobody is accessing your stuff because it's in a room in your building.
It's ... 12:55 PST ... do you still have a job ?
I think that the people directing the App Engine lack a clear vision. They should know that price isn't what's stopping GAE. It certainly makes a statement about Google's vision for the App Engine if they have all of their good product people working on something else.
during last 14 years i've worked in 3 BigCo's and 1 mid-size. The corporate portal search in all of them i can describe only using long sequences of Russian unprintable words. Google not being able to penetrate these companies when these companies have during last decade bought so much of other enterprise software, incl. a lot of junk, is a very indicative in my view.
>I think that the people directing the App Engine lack a clear vision
another possibility would be that they calculated how much it would cost Google to implement the AWS's level of features/support/quality, and thus how much they would need to charge to break even, and probably they just balked at it as it is hard to beat Amazon in margin/pricing business. I mean, all these anecdotal "horror" stories about overworked Amazon engineers vs. Google guys enjoying the life/work balance :)
For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs.
App Engine is a no brainer for me now. The amount I save on not needing an ops team for a long long time overcomes any slight misgivings that Google might abolish App Engine in a few years. I don't think App Engine is going anywhere, BTW. You look at the number of languages they are adding, the number of people they are hiring ... to compare that to Google Reader is a bit ridiculous.
The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.
I kinda like Datastore though. Maybe I'm just use to it. The limitations just make sense if you want to scale.
They also have a RDBS you can use though ... I've never used it.
Still haven't figured out a clean way to do geospatial stuff with Datastore, so that is one big caveat.
How is that an advantage over App Engine, given the existence of AppScale? [1]
[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-bri...
We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.
The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it.
Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg they will start 4 at once even though only 1 is needed for the load).
At one point they were starting hundreds of instances due to some of our aggressive inter-app traffic (thundering herd problem). Things would have worked fine if we could limit the number of instances, but tough luck there. It required considerable engineering and tuning to make the problem go away that would have trivially been solved (in the short/medium term) by limiting instance numbers.
Also, with managed VMs you can basically run anything you want and still get Google to manage things for you. Manage VMs give you a sort of script you can define that apt-get installs the packages you need. You can also use Docker if you like to make your own VM images.
Haven't used it yet, but it looks good based on the demos. They showed a demo with Node.js today.
While no longer necessary because of managed VMs, it would be very good to have Ruby support also. I tried JRuby and Sinatra on AppEngine many years ago but the long loading request times were a killer. Plain Ruby and Sinatra would be good.
In October 2011, Google upped its Maps API pricing to $4+ for 1,000 map loads [1]. Developers rebelled and switched over to OpenStreet Map [2]. Eight months later, Google dropped the price to $0.50 for 1,000 map loads [3].
[1] http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2011/10/introduction...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/google-maps-api-vs-openstre...
[3] http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/22/google-maps-api-gets-massiv...
What's to say the GCE pricing won't also yo-yo like this?
I know a group of engineers who work on a very high performance (500k ops/second) distributed system running on hundreds of nodes that have an unofficial church of dtrace. It's the debugging tool of choice for when weird shit happens.
[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Debugging-Production-Syst...
they are obviously putting incredible resources into GCE - comparing that to some of their consumer app experiments is just ridiculous
google appears to create products via the shit and giggles method, with concomitant level of (non)commitment. it's an incredibly fair question to ask if this doesn't move the needle by becoming a $1B+ business inside a year or two, is Larry going to more wood fewer arrows it out of existence? And what would that do to any company with a couple person-decades of work poured into gce apis and services and internal training
also, if larry where smarter he could directly address this, eg: "Come hell or high water I promise google will support this business for a decade"
edit - clarification.
The fact that Google does business as one might imagine an immature 13 year old might is troubling enough that I avoid them like the plague. The only service I use is analytics. Everything else is as though it didn't exist, docs, gmail, cloud services, etc. I don't trust them and I make it very clear to clients and associates that they should steer clear.
As you say, what I do like about Google announcing price cuts is that they are usually followed by AWS making adjustments.
If Google start behaving as adult responsible business people they have a shot at earning my and others' business. Until then I view them as teenagers more interested in popping zits in front of a mirror than adults conducting business in an environment of mutual respect.
Trust is one of those things that takes a thousand times more effort to earn back than it does to nurture and to keep.
Obviously, this is not exactly the same as a service being killed, but I think it speaks to same sort of distrust - a feeling that your needs as a customer are at Google's leisure.
If you had used any of those services, would you ask the same questions about AWS? The notion that any company would shut down a service handling billions of queries per day is patently absurd. Just because Google shut down some duds that you used doesn't make them any more likely to shut down their cloud offerings.
How can Google, MS or the other players know, that the customers don't infringe on their patents? Don't they have the right to inspect? (trust is good, prove is better ...) Or does just a lazy sysadmin sell my data in this moment to the competition?
I also wonder, if the price drops now are a reaction to a big trust-drop (also because of Snowden) by the users ...
I think, cloud based services are a good idea, but until such issues are addressed, I would really recommend to think twice, which data can go cloud.
In terms of trust, I would tell you that trust needs to be earned -- and that it can only be earned one day at a time and that it can be frivolously spent away with a single bad decision. (Trust me that Joyent has learned this the very, very hard way.) So I would say that you should force anyone to earn your trust. That infrastructure is such a trust business is part of why I so fervently believe in open source as a business strategy[1]; companies can change (or be bought) and earned trust violated by a new regime -- but open source can always be forked and its communities liberated from such abrogations.[2]
So while I would (of course!) tell you that Joyent is worthy of your trust (and ask for the opportunity to earn it), I would at the same time say that the open source projects we lead (SmartOS, node.js and -- yes -- DTrace) are the components in which you can have absolute faith.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/corporate-open-source-an...
Again, my apologies -- and to my point, trust is very hard to earn, and very easy (too easy) to piss away. :(
And yeah, just illustrating how even the best-laid plans of the best of us can't always work out great for all customers.
Anyone remember the "life-time" hosting fiasco?
... so far. Trust is fragile, it only takes one incident to completely take it away. Just because AWS hasn't faced such an incident so far doesn't mean they never will. And when they do, they will be at the same level of trust as Google. It can happen overnight.
Similarly, there is really no guarantee that Amazon won't decide to shut down AWS at some point in the future for some reason. The two companies are really on an equal footing on these two points.
Which is why I think the reasoning "GCE is not seeing traction because people don't trust Google" is flawed. There are several possible reasons why GCE is not growing fast and Google is slowly addressing them one by one.
Don't discount them, and don't think for a second that their competitors are magically immune to the flaws you are currently seeing in Google's offer.
I don't understand this, or at least cannot re-parse 'marquis' into something relevant. Can you explain?
Every time someone hijacks a Google announcement thread doom crying about potential shutdown it gets under my skin, especially in this case when these “arguments” are so intellectually bankrupt.
If you are suggesting that GCE or the whole Google Could Platform endeavour is in anyway similar to any of the appendage service or features Google shelved over the years, then that calls into question the adequacy of your critical faculties or any vested interest you may have in undermining their efforts, and leading with a disclaimer doesn't take that option off the table.
The sales-force, dev-rel, and the enormous infrastructure investment isn't something you can honestly compare to a discontinued 20% project: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/02/03/googl...
There is also the argument that when Google deprecates something you are more likely to hear about it which creates the false impression that they depreciate more stuff or more important stuff than others.
Somewhat mysteriously, perhaps, given a history that has included a series of fairly high profile outages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History
When AWS made the news in late 2012, it wasn't good news, it was breaking the internet.
Trust is not the issue. Google wants to sell "management" while AWS (et al) are selling raw resources. To use Google Cloud you have to change or build your system for it, using new APIs, configuration systems, other managed services and even programming languages. Todays announcement was: you can have raw VM control with our management too! I don't see it being any easier now (even MORE options!) but I think they're on the right track. They need to make it simpler rather than cheaper.
tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE.
In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually something much more basic: trust. After the abrupt deaths of services like Google Reader and Wave and surprises like the GAE repricing nightmare, customers simply don't trust that Google won't wake up one morning and decide that self-driving cars are actually a lot more interesting than running infrastructure-as-a-service -- and announce the death (or repricing) of GCE. AWS, by contrast, generates no such doubts: one can say what one will about Amazon (and there are certainly many reasons why I believe the future is not AWS's alone), but AWS services do not have a trust issue. (Or, to recast it in the aphorism once said of previous giants like IBM and Microsoft, no one gets fired for deploying on AWS.)
It will be interesting to watch the GCE announcement unfold, but previous Google announcements have lacked a critical ingredient: IaaS customers. (Amazingly, journalists don't seem to notice or demand this; smaller companies can't get away with this, but the aura of Google seems to give them a free pass.) If Google wants to really compete in this space, they should pull across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer -- at any cost. In doing this, they would probably learn both how profound the trust issue is -- and at the same time learn any remaining technical hurdles that they need to clear to really compete with AWS. There are several high profile AWS customers to pick from, but the obvious customer to start with is Netflix: they care about GCE's putative differentiators of price and performance -- and Amazon is a mortal threat to Netflix as a competitor, which should give some boardroom-level urgency to the discussion. Until Google gets Netflix (or an equivalent) on GCE, I don't think that the price drops will move the needle because they don't address the fundamental issue of trust. (Indeed, one could make the argument that they exacerbate it: if GCE is a money loser for Google, the feared slaying of GCE may actually be more likely, not less.)
Finally, if GCE can't get a marquis AWS IaaS customer, how about just a marquis Google customer? Knowing that new Google services are being deployed exclusively on GCE (by executive fiat if needed) may itself go a long way to make Google much more competitive in the space by knowing that GCE at least has the trust of Google, even if no one else...