Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years (opens in new tab)

1: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/creating-mana...

And one of the advantages of having a zillion different products approach is that you can trust AWS to grow with you and improve their products over time. Same can't be said of GCP.

You need to drill down to the network card primitive, figure out which subsection you need to configure and applying the same rule is again an exercise in clicking.

In GCP: Apply a tag. Create firewall rule that targets the tag.

But then again, this is higly subjective and I do understand that somebody would prefer Azure way.

Re: tooling, when I was using CLI was in both Node and Python, docs were lacking and the strange Resource Manager vs. Legacy had so many quirks we had to run windows to get proper powershell for configs of VMs.

I don't think we use any Alpha features, I know there are a couple Beta APIs from Kube we use, but we would be using those no matter where we ran our Kube deployment. We use fluentd for our log collection and Prometheus for metrics and alerting combined with Elastalert. So don't have any experience with Stackdriver.

Why is working with SSL certs an issue? We use the NGINX Ingress with cert-manager and have yet to have an issue. We only have a couple domains pointed at the cluster though, not sure if thats where your issue comes from. The two just worked though with very little tweaking.

Average availability for the year across those environments is 99.99%.

I'd say that's decent enough to use.

Their support is hilariously bad at times, though.

That was my experience when we needed something.

Dont get me started on docs and operations.

Eg: Using Azure we found out the hard way that the Firewall was cutting connections after 5m of inactivity. Changing that setting? Their docs are wrong, stack overflow kindof helps, but to fix it we had to use windows based tooling in a vm since their linux based stuff didnt work.

I know this will happen sooner or later with anybody, but on average the experience with GCP was superb.

I do agree re: certs. That is the only thing I really hate, doing LE when they could run this for you. But they will launch an SSL solutio since they have one now for AppEngine.

StackDriver error reporting is a lite product intended mostly for folks with small applications on AppEngine.

There is a recent post by Corey Quinn entitled CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It discussing the extremely poor usability of Amazon CloudWatch [0]. Here’s another story about the general weirdness of the product [1]

I would strongly recommend using a dedicated exception tracker like Sentry.io, they have an excellent full featured product at a extremely reasonable price.

GCP has clearly documented Platform Launch stages for Alpha, Beta, and General Availability [2].

The Kubernetes project itself follows the same definition for these identifiers as GCP.

Specifically Beta is considered to be acceptable for most production use-cases, but it is not guaranteed that the API will remain backwards compatible.

So if you’re running the majority of cloud services, beta is fine. If you’re running a system that will cause permanent harm to humans, don’t use beta.

One last note, GCP has just released a fully managed certificate product for their global load balancer. There is fully integrated Kubernetes support which has not yet been announced formally [3].

Certificates for Kubernetes on Amazon are less integrated than the above. There’s several options, it’s not clear without extensive research and testing what the tradeoffs are, and in the end it turns out that there is not an officially supported Amazon option.

[0] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/cloudwatch-devil-i-must... [1] https://www.circonus.com/2016/10/no-fixed-glitch/ [2]https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages [3] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gke-managed-certs

Its funny that Hacker News hates on Oracle, but their database is far ahead of the competition in a highly competitive market. Say what you want about their other products (that are indeed terrible), but that core database gets them billions in revenue for a reason.

Why? A salesman says whatever he’s paid to say. Tomorrow he could move again and be flogging IBM’s joke of a cloud.

IMO, Google was just too focused on solving problems for human beings vs. outside institutions; that's why they neglected to invest in making Borg into a public platform.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-...

That said, I'm not sure I'd use it for anything that might scale heavily with datastore writes. They get expensive very quickly if you can't cache and group the writes.

Most enterprises don't have a clue about computing though, so I can buy that they would prefer bling like certificates to getting a contact who is a real engineer.

They haven't done any pricing change like that, nor anything else effectively equivalent to forced short-notice deprecation, for generally available Google Cloud Platform services. (The famous Google App Engine pricing change happened upon GAE's departure from preview.)

Hopefully the new CEO can disentangle the horribly messy branding conflation of orgs which work rather differently.

Google is now effectively a conglomerate, even ignoring Alphabet, maybe even multiple conglomerates within Google. The impacts of their org chart on their users shouldn't be this opaque to people who haven't worked at Google. (Disclosure: I have worked there, though not since 2015.)

However, I was referring more to Google's general tendency to shut down projects across the board. The list of consumer products shut down by Google is pretty long (Google Reader, iGoogle, Aardvark, Google Inbox, Orkut, etc..)

Yes you can save money by killing a product, but I would argue the second order effects are more important. People lose the faith to bet on your products.

Having had to scramble - twice - when google cut products under me, I would never make a big bet based on an assumption that they will keep faith after I commit to their products.

Maybe they should read H Edwards Deming e.g. "maintain consistency of purpose".

This is not true. Diane was the founder of VMware. VMware is a virtualization technology that runs independently of underlying hardware and infrastructure. It could succeed only because it was able to convince its customers and partners that it is neutral to all forms of infrastructure, whether it is compute, networking or storage related. Most of said partners - companies as IBM, HP, Netapp etc. - are direct competitors of EMC.

This is the reason that EMC allowed VMware to operate independently, be listed on the stock exchange as a independent entity and have its own operating culture. And Diane was the main reason that VMware maintained this kind of independence. Source: I was a VMware employee.

Diane was a founder of VMWare. VMWare was very successful at getting Enterprise customers to convert their massive single use servers into "Liquid IT" where VMWare instances ran the world. NetApp, when I was there, was selling a bunch of NAS into clouds of servers running VMWare. Then she left VMWare and started BeBop, a company that was dedicated to getting Enterprises to move their applications into virtualized compute clusters. When she was acquired/hired by Google is seemed like a slam dunk that she was the person who was going to make Google Cloud the premier service for Enterprise companies to host their infrastructure on.

As I read it, that was very much in line with where Google saw Google Cloud going.

Then we see from the market analysts that Microsoft has (according to the analysts here, I can't really vouch for them) edged Google into third place in the 'Cloud' market by capturing Enterprises moving their applications to the enterprise space.

Then we see Google replacing their head of cloud with a high power sales guy.

And as always, "reading the tea leaves" as an analyst might say, is always an inexact science. So folks outside the situation (like myself) can't know what is really going on.

> Based on my experiences with Diane she was an extremely gifted technical talent and an extremely poor saleswoman and leader.

This seems to be a pretty damning statement, as someone who has direct experience with Diane, what did you see that she could have done differently?

They need to offer a better product with more features, support etc. Because adoption within the enterprise isn't driven by the CEO or CTO. It's driven by individual architects and developers.

Separations can happen for several reasons and they have different terms, I recognize that most people associate "fired" with incompetence or misconduct and that likely wasn't the case here[1].

Generally, with senior leaders, they have a set of objectives that they are tasked with working toward, and every year is a negotiation over whether or not they are meeting their objectives. When they aren't meeting those objectives (or perhaps enough of those objectives) then there is a discussion about next steps. Which is a euphemism for "this isn't working for us, we need to replace you with someone who can meet these objectives."

Now is that getting fired? or laid off? I think it's semantics. At the end of the day you don't have a job with the company any more. Few senior leaders that I've interacted with have ever called out the company for telling them they were going to lose their job. If you have reached that level you should have the maturity to understand that it is a fact of life that this happens. Scott McNealy used to send congratulations to people who were promoted into the senior ranks with "One step up, one step closer to the door." That reflected the reality that there are few alternative positions within a company for someone who is leading a big chunk of the company.

When the separation is the idea of the employee (which is to say they quit), the notification pattern seems proactive on the employee's side. A press release that the employee is moving on and that the company is working on finding a successor, and then sometime later we get the "I'm actually leaving now, and here is my successor." press release. But there is no hard and fast rule.

Bottom line is that the term 'fired' has the connotation of malfeasance and that doesn't seem to be the case here, I should have used "likely involuntary separation" but that seems a bit wordy, although it avoids the baggage of the word fired.

[1] As we can see from documents about Andy Rubin's departure, all of the press at the time read like Andy was just moving on to bigger and better things, when in fact he was being separated from the company because of credible accusations of sexual harassment. My point being that we on the outside can't know why a senior leader is leaving really, the copy in the press releases is carefully crafted regardless of the actual reasons.

I knew there must have been a good reason they overcharged everyone for everything...

In all seriousness, I imagine this is the type of thing you can do when you have (or traditionally had) close to a captive market for specific things (government contracts) that allows for massive profits. It's easy to throw a few tens of thousands of dollars at black swan support events so you can point to those as examples of what you're paying for when people point out that you've been repeatedly found to violate contracts and fraudulently misrepresent yourself.[1]

1: https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/07/30/whistleblower-details...

Disclosure: I work at OCI.

Even if GCP accepted packets from Cuba, your problems probably would have persisted on the Cuban end too.

It's ironic that it's fine for Google to provide it's products in those countries, but not for me, if I host my app on their cloud.

US sanctions do not require an infrastructure provider to do this, much like they do not require a broadband provider to filter packages destined to those countries.

And once IBM launches their cloud I would actually put them ahead of GCP given how useful their Compose suite is.

There's a reason they are 3rd in cloud tech.

To be fair, there was a single tweet in March that used the phrase, so it's been said once in history.

While votes are usually reserved for content quality, HN also finds them acceptable for disagreement in opinion, so most likely people disagree that stock K8S is easier to setup than the managed offerings.