Interesting article. For anyone working with Google's Cloud Platform, there are definitely changes happening both in product and culture.
As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail which is what we saw as well. [1]
I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all the hiring at Google.
I feel like GCP's losing ground to AWS and Azure has been a trend for at least before AI, though perhaps you're saying the same thing, that Google has long lost the reputational lead.
I can't speak from experience, but what I hear from friends of friends is that Azure is really on the come up, though in my experience AWS has still been the default. GCP seemed to be more tempting when they were the only ones throwing tons of money at you and Firebase had less alternatives.
GCP will do fine. I worked as a contractor at Google in 2013 and learned to love their internal infrastructure, and in many ways GCP is similar. I preferring GCP but most of my customers work on AWS, so Google does have an uphill climb.
From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure.
As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:
GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.
For every dollar you pay:
- You get more compute power per core, while paying less.
- You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.
- You get the best "data processing at scale".
Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me,
In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.
Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far.
Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.
All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.
Awesome.. As much as I dislike Google as a business, I love their engineering and despite being totally biased coming on to GCP, they won me entirely in a day. We're so, so very much happier dealing with GCP. No RAID to get perf - just ask for more. No complexity. Simple, damn fast, and cheap.
I cannot imagine how Azure or AWS compete (esp Azure - even without making a cheap comment about their terrible new portal) when it comes to IaaS. GCP is just flat out better.
As another Xoogler, I'd dispute some of your points, though I agree with the rest:
1) The Cloud Console is very meh compared to the AWS frontend. Slow and cumbersome. Otherwise GCP is generally playing catch-up, though it's closed the gap significantly in recent years.
2) Morale is low. Googlers used to see themselves as representatives of the most beneficial company in the world. Now, they're much more likely to view themselves as well-compensated cogs in the next IBM. Which is more realistic, but the negative vibe shift is real.
3) Privacy/security wise, I trust Google to do what it promises to do better than anyone. Which is to say, it will extract your data and monetize it to the maximum extent possible and make sure no one else has access to it. Still better than the alternatives, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
And two other points:
4) Hiring standards have dropped. Googlers are more competent than the average SWE on the market, but they are not generally exceptional. And their experience at Google teaches them proprietary tooling and how to navigate bureaucracy.
5) On that note, the core issue is that Google is a bureaucracy split into fiefdoms, living off Ads profits like a Gulf oil state. It hampers execution and makes genuine product vision impossible.
I keep telling people that in my view, Google Cloud is far superior to AWS from a technical standpoint. Most people don't believe me... Yet. I guess it will change soon.
I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years.
It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings.
Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great.
I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible).
This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc).
I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.
I'm a longtime AWS user. Recently I decided to see how the competitor clouds offering stack up - because I've read a lot about how the second-movers in the space have caught up to Amazon. And that now there's basically no difference between the offerings.
I decided first to try Google - specifically Google App Engine. Just to see if I could get a plain vanilla base case working quickly. And my initial reaction was that AWS is still head-and-shoulders above everyone (or at least Google). The Google UI and setup process seemed ridiculously complicated and unfriendly. With AWS, I was up and running almost immediately. Not so with Google.
So I immediately ran back to AWS and dropped Google. I'm not sure if my bad experience with Google was because I had framed my expectations through my AWS experience and thus wasn't able to use Google the way it intended to be used. But it just seemed way too unfriendly. It seemed to require needless dev installs that should just be automated.
When I went back to AWS, just the sheer amount of services they offer seemed staggering by comparison. Google still has products in BETA that AWS has in mature mode.
I was going to try out other competitors like Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. but now feel like there's no need. AWS is just good.
I have about 5 years experience with both AWS and Google Cloud (App Engine, Google Compute, ..). I agree that AWS has more services to offer than Google. Initially Google took the route of the App Engine and fell behind AWS. However, recently its Compute Engine and other related services like Container Engine, Datalab (IPython, Jupyter as a Service), Big Query, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and more started outshining their AWS counterparts. Google's network is way faster than AWS. AWS network is too slow and flaky. For anyone taking the route of microservies, Google Cloud offers a huge advantage. Google new cloud console (which is still in beta) is sleek and sexy. Google's cloud services are a pleasure to use compared to AWS (other than a few pain points). I recommend small and medium Cloud-based shops to relook into Google Compute again. Google Cloud is adding services to its arsenal at a super fast rate (much faster than AWS). Just take a look at their engineering blog: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/. In a year I see google Cloud overtake AWS in terms of the capability.
Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features, and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way".
AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional, scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant stream of updates. They apply the iterative process of startups to the cloud, and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster.
We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100% of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.
I will agree that Google mostly has higher quality infrastructure, but faster boot times and lower latency networking aren't what most cloud consumers care about.
AWS has been diligently moving up the stack, creating higher level services that are "good enough" for many of their customers, who are increasingly enterprises teams who want to outsource as much as possible to Amazon. They can go all-in with AWS and expect a constant stream of new features and services at relatively competitive prices.
With Google, their cloud platform still feels non-core to their business and they have a history of retiring services when their priorities change. I hope Google and Microsoft become fully viable alternatives, but for now, enterprises seem more comfortable betting on AWS.
I think Google does much better in terms of UX / DevX. Particular features that I appreciate are the cloud console shell and their API explorer/fiddler. Still, they do not have as many services, and the services they have do not have the same features so actually getting things done may still be easier on AWS.
I've been jumping between AWS and Google Cloud ( with a bit of Digital Ocean sprinkled in ) for the last several years. I chose Google as our cloud platform when we founded our company last August. I could War and Peace a bunch of things but that article does a very nice job in the details. Instead, I'll give a one liner:
AWS is to Linux as Google Cloud is to FreeBSD. "Rock solid performance and everything is exactly where you think it should be"
A rare opinion but one I share wholeheartedly. I started my career at Google Cloud but spent the rest of it working with AWS. AWS always feels like an uphill struggle, lots of micro management and resources that need to be duct-taped together. I'm lucky to have recently landed a Google Cloud gig and my God, things are so much easier and smoother now. It just seems better designed and integrated to me, albeit much fewer services to choose from if you don't buy into their ecosystem.
AWS is stable. In that, the DX is predictable. I'm using AWS for over a decade and had huge gaps in between but coming back never was shocked or surprised by things totally reshuffled.
On GCP, not the same. The GCP console of around 2012 if memory serves me well, is barely recognizable. That just the UX and I'm sure APIs would have changed as well in the meantime.
The hip product management culture of Google is beyond me. Today's cloud console would be something else tomorrow and I'm sure some hip and smart PM is chalking that out on their Chromebook or something. Sorry for the stereotyping.
As of speaking to customers, I bet AWS (real people) directly, routinely reach out to even 2 person startups. I have experienced it myself. They really do care. Even I had multiple hour long calls with Azure representative for an account who's monthly spend was a joke.
On the other hand, good luck with getting anyone from Google on email let alone phone.
>Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin
After trying all of them, I found that Google is last in the "easiest to use" category. Just not a good experience for me, and I have 30yoe. YMMV. AWS has been extremely easy, everything just makes sense, is well documented, and there's an API for everything. It's miles ahead of Google as a cloud platform to build on.
I'm not saying it's a done deal but I think Yegge's rant holds up well. 10 years later, GCP has fallen behind Microsoft and is still a third of AWS' share. What would concern me more as a Google shareholder, however, is the relative feature set and progress — I use both professionally and GCP has been a real disappointment for how periodically running into basic functionality which is a checkbox on AWS but on GCP is a 2 year old issue in their tracker with no progress and a suggestion that you build/buy something and run it yourself. It's not like you can't use it successfully but it's hard to shake the feeling that one of these companies is a lot more committed than the other (which started having to cajole them to show up and sell their product).
More succinctly, I’ve recently seen a number of AWS announcements for things which make my life easier and/or save money, some of which I am already using. The last news I got from GCP was that cloud storage prices are going up.
I’ve used GCP and I quite like it. However I would not recommend betting big on it. GCP as an extension of google has the same problems, they are way too big to care about small companies. They change their minds every now and then without upfront notice and kill things or deprecate them. Support is hard to reach.
In any case, think for your own self what you care about. There are tradeoffs of each cloud providers. I’ve found AWS provided me with a human touch and cares about my problems. Never quite used Azure (their portal is too complex).
In my mind, Google’s gonna be Google. They value automation and algorithms over human touch. It’s in their DNA. It’s what their hire for.
As a company that's used all the major clouds and vendors out there (AWS, Azure, Softlayer, GCP, Internap), Google's has been the best so far with simple fast tech that works. They are clearly behind in features and breadth of offering but I agree with Diane's statements that the underlying tech is just better. Quizley has a good article recently that goes into more detail which is what we saw as well. [1]
I do wish the GCP team was easier to reach though. They have lots of engineers and PM's who are active on social media and discussions forums and such but it feels like things are too "informal" in conversations right now. It's nice to see everyone passionate about helping on their own time but AWS has them beat on the vast amount of help and resources they pour into getting clients of all sizes onboarded quickly. I'm guessing that will change soon enough with all the hiring at Google.
1. https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp
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