Comments on: Why performance will help Google steal cloud customers from Amazon

By: timfreemandotorg

timfreemandotorg — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:30:25 +0000

The tech lead for Google Compute Engine comments here about I/O performance: http://www.peakscale.com/noisyneighbors/#comment-575367712

By: Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:23:25 +0000

I wrote up an analysis of the hardware that is *probably* more accurate than the one from ExtremeTech: http://www.autonomoussystem.net/2012/06/770000-cores-analysis-of-google-compute.html

By: Andi Mann

Andi Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:51:02 +0000

James, as always an interesting and thought-provoking opinion. But I do not see any evidence that Google is going to pull a rabbit out of their hat and – ta-da!! – market-winning performance!

For a long time I have advised anyone who would listen that you cannot compete in public cloud markets on a par with AWS and win. You need to do more to win. This is borne out by our customers in the cloud provider markets who are differentiating with value-added service through better security, broader compliance, enterprise-style SLAs, greater flexibility, more heterogeneity, and other elements that large enterprises demand. (More on this in my upcoming July vid-cast of CloudViews Unplugged – http://www.youtube.com/user/CloudCommons)

So on the premise of competing and differentiating against AWS, I agree with you. Google has to do something different – and better – to win against AWS. Offering better performance would be a small step, but perhaps important enough to win share.

But in Google’s history there is nothing that shows me they will be instantly able to deliver better performance than AWS. This IaaS thing is new territory to them. They bring no apparent experience of running other people’s workloads at massive scale, or of assuring a mission-critical service in a way that is clearly intentional and reliable. This is a huge learning curve, and you don’t get there just by being big; you get there through years of experience in applying performance management discipline to diverse and complex mission-critical workloads. Where is Google getting that from?

So like many other commodity cloud services, I am more inclined to believe Google will attract great business from SMBs, and perhaps a few growing enterprises (just as I discussed in my recent blog, on why public cloud is a big fat enterprise fail – http://community.ca.com/blogs/perspectives/archive/2012/05/29/why-the-public-cloud-is-a-big-fat-enterprise-fail.aspx).

But I don’t see better performance as a fait accompli; and even if they do deliver better performance, a truly competitive public cloud will need a whole lot more to win.

By: Sebastian Meyen

Sebastian Meyen — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 09:21:14 +0000

I agree.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:49:24 +0000

Shouldn’t the title of this article be “Why higher performance could help Google steal cloud customers from Amazon”?

By: Robert Kraig

Robert Kraig — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:44:27 +0000

I doubt that googles product offering will be environment agnostic. I think they will release some tools right away in mostly java & python oriented and the rest of the environment will be left. You will either use their specific product offerings or you will probably end up having to stay with AWS. Google has a lot of proprietary products which they will probably offer access to, but you will probably have to do it the “google” way. Some will argue that the google way is the right way, and others will say that flexibility in their own view is more important. I think that unless google offers an identical product offering, in terms of alternatives to mysql/postgresql/elastic-search-ebs/load balancers/etc that people won’t have the time or money to translate their existing stack to fit the needs of the compute engine environment. Also my guess is that the compute engine is mostly just a much more scaled out App-Engine environment.

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:43:14 +0000

This is an accurate comment. Tuning is important.

By: Carl

Carl — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:41:31 +0000

This is in private beta- like hiring an amusement park for a party, result: no lines for the best rides. Google still needs to demonstrate they can handle scale as it happens in a true commodity cloud style environment. They haven’t proved that thus far. I bet they can bring some great engineering to this game, but I think its too early to say we’ve seen evidence of that. Also, a lot of performance in cloud is in how you squint at it, is it CPU, IOPS, open pipe that you need? Every provider seems to have an organically enforced niche they excel at, and areas they are complete crap at. I have no doubt GCompute will be the same.

that said, they are positioned to pull the developers bees out of the AWS cloverfield in ways nobody else is. Be interesting to see if they can deliver when this hits the open market.

By: Abhijeet Kumar

Abhijeet Kumar — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 21:11:53 +0000

I thought Compute Engine at its launch caters only to compute-intensive workloads. Where did I/O performance and Google compute engine meet for this article to be written? I have found using AWS, there is plenty of options that I get to store and retrieve my data on-demand. Is there any technical proof reading of articles here? Has anyone seen the page load speeds of Pinterest? Compare that to Facebook or Youtube.

By: Enzo

Enzo — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 17:16:14 +0000

I agree. Amazon has built a suite of products, reducing complexity and lowering the barrier to rapid development and deployment of services in the cloud. E.g. RDS, SQS, Route53, SimpleDB, DynamoDB, Elastic Map Reduce, to name a few. Google has an opportunity in front of them, if they are able to provide complementary services and features, similar to what Amazon has done. EBS is Amazon’s Achille’s heel and will be for some time, given the insidious dependency so many AWS customers have on it. Since the courts have ruled in Google’s favor that the ‘name’ of an API, in and of itself, is not a violation of copyright infringement, providing a set of compatible libraries and tools to aid in migrating existing AWS customers would be a big win for those who are to deeply dependent on the AWS platform to move.