What exactly does this mean?
Data centers don’t pop up overnight, until then they are going to use a vendor :-)
It can't compete with Azure for simple/coarse-grained services and AWS for complex/fine-grained services.
Atm, Google cloud is only good for cheap high-ram one-run-centric compute (AWS is cheaper for generic compute and reserved compute), simple container execution (Cloud Run), and ~100 TB bulk storage.
Both companies need to get something out of the deal. Listing the benefits to only one side is probably missing part of the story.
You are crazy if you imply AWS Athena or Azure Synapse are better than BigQuery.
Based on my professional experience, when we ignore cost [0] my ranking of the big three for "plain old computing" (that is, just compute, networking, and storage workloads) is AWS, GCP, Azure.
Azure is very, very flaky. Things often break for no clear reason, or things are changed in unexpected ways without warning, and then quietly reverted back. [1] I used to say that the only consistently good thing about Azure was that you could throw an entire Subscription in the trash and have everything in there be destroyed... but even that has become intermittently unreliable!
Given how godawful Azure is, I expect that companies use it either because they think they need it for its AD integration, or because they get very deep discounts on Windows licenses for VMs running on Azure.
[0] Both because I never had to pay the bills and (I assume) our cost estimators were always full of lies because the tooling (and I) had no idea what discounts we had negotiated.
[1] (Don't) ask me about the time Azure added in some sort of multi-minute "cooldown" time for reuse of a statically-assigned IP address that was assigned to a VM that Azure reported was completely destroyed, and we were attempting to assign to a brand new VM. Creation of the new VM kept failing with some wacky error. Azure support was clueless, and the problem vanished and came back several times over the course of a year.
Respectfully, I was very explicit that I was ignoring cost in my ranking.
Azure might have a ton of great features and could be (for all I know) a quarter the cost of GCP. But in my professional experience, I have run into recurring Azure issues that are entirely out of my control that blocked deployment of new VMs for hours and hours (and occasionally days). That's business-disrupting.
Meta has been doing the full stack integration of internal software down to machine builds for almost as long as google now; what's the point of outsourcing any of it after 20 years?
is it some capex vs opex game? putting fear in the platform engineering people about losing their jobs?
petesergeant•5mo ago