GCP lost $5.6 billion on $13 billion in revenue. It’s growing a bit faster but not much considering the small base. The “we’re losing a ton of money because we’re growing” argument smells like the sort of thing unprofitable startups without a viable business model say. It looks really off when you’re competition is also growing super fast and is very profitable.

On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in their back about their Emacs setup being able to run a web server from a raspberry Pi.

We're at a place where it's fairly counter intuitive to continue arguing against cloud providers. I doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business (and even then it should be recoverable). The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app. But thars more about your ability to recruit disciplines engineers, no point blaming it on the cloud.

Look at Imgur. For the most part bootstrapped, scales extremely well, and if I'm not wrong, is very frugal, also runs off AWS.

As CTO from two unicorns, I’d say that it’s pretty much wasted money.

AWS is a monopoly and they use their cash to buy early customers. Initially it was Amazon's money, but now AWS has enough cash of their own to push whatever they wish to. The same goes for Google and Microsoft.

AWS directly building up the software side of what started out as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is only going to hurt software vendors. We can only expect new software players or ones with low capital to restrict their licenses even more.

Open source licenses are not only for ideological freedom, but very necessary for companies (end users) to integrate and modify products on their own. We will migrate more toward source-available licenses instead since big giants are going to corner the small companies.

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Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).

Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.

Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.

Here are my key points:

- What makes aws great is NOT ec2... it's the ALB, route53, ecs/eks/fargate, redshift, rds, lambda, SQS, Kinesis, cloudwatch, cloudfront... ect. The last startup I was at our production MySql got corrupted... glad I paid for RDS and had their 5 minute interval backups to s3 that required 1 click.

- Nearly everyone is on aws, if aws is down the internet is down. The down time from aws is often hand waved away.

- With aws I have access to 3rd party services like snowflake and databricks. Hiring and training talent is more expensive then ease of use services.

- The cost to performance ratio had always been worth it for every startup* I worked at (double given aws gives baiscly a free year when you raise a round of vc funding). Its costly to dedicate staff/time to infrastructure. I had a real time data pipeline up in under 2 hrs using kensis and imply. Just having to set up somthing like kafka alone will take a multiplitude longer. *The exception being the startup that did billions of requests a day... I doubt they regretting paying aws to get to that point after 6ish years.

Why is that guy still giving money to GCP if it's so bad?

Go back to AWS. There's a reason if AWS is still the market leader.

Kubernetes' uptake is nowhere close to AWS by any measure. And AWS is the #1 public cloud that hosts Kubernetes workloads.

It's every IT vendor in the world vs. AWS, and so far, they're winning. Kubernetes and open platforms have a shot, but they're not moving fast enough yet in the direction that matters - up the stack.

>> If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

Heck yeah! And startups are not the bread and butter of AWS. They are trying to go upstream with enterprise and government contracts that are multi million $$.

Admittedly they don't have to vertically integrate, and they wouldn't pay list prices if they use any other cloud.

But honestly, if the idea is to get off of Google search, what exactly is the gain by relying on a third party albeit at a lower level?

You have to ask yourself: Is running a search engine the best thing that Apple could be doing with its time? Is the fact that they don't run their own search engine a danger to their core business?

In the end it comes down to projected cost and income, and obviously I'm not in a position to calculate either one for Apple, not being in the room with their ruthless negotiators.

But yeah, the starting point of dropping google is losing out on these $15B. So already that's what you have to work with. And then the cost of public cloud egress traffic, which is famously ridiculously expensive.

Your comment seems a bit like "why don't they just…", which seems a bit naive when dealing with business at this scale.

I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP.

I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.