from Hacker News

Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years

by clebio on 11/16/18, 5:59 PM with 239 comments

  • by luka-birsa on 11/16/18, 8:05 PM

    I would really hate to see anything bad happen to GCP after the changes in leadership.

    Based on my own experience as the CTO: After being an Azure shop for a year we've migrated ~50-100 VMs to GCP and I love the GCP products.

    GCP is:

    - Simpler to use

    - More tailored to people with Linux environment

    - Leader in K8S

    - Has good support

    - So much cheaper (in our case we saved ~60%)

    - Has great UI and understandable primitives.

    My only pet peeve is the fact that exporing your spend is practically impossible unless you're a BQ guy that can work directly with report exports.

    PS: We're building our future infra on K8S to allow us to migrate more easily to a different could if something goes awry with GCP, I really hope there won't be a need to migrate back to Azure and its arcane and high pricing, strange UI, worse tooling...

  • by ilovecaching on 11/16/18, 8:33 PM

    GCP is reflective of Google's internal architecture, just as Azure and AWS are reflective of Microsoft and Amazon. This isn't surprising, they're leveraging the same foundation they used to launch their flagship products in terms of infrastructure, knowledge, and culture.

    Google is very different internally from the enterprise loving Microsoft, and they're more technically fluent than the customer focused Amazon. Googles edge targeting and process scheduling are also very different.

    These differences make GCP a very different product than it's competition. Azure is essentially leveraging the ecosystem fracture that Microsoft already holds, and the fact that Microsoft knows how to speak the slow drawl of enterprise. GCP is situated to solve things the Google way, which isn't the way most people run their infra.

  • by kjw on 11/16/18, 6:05 PM

    A move that was necessary. Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. (Observable as reflected in their pricing, sales, and support challenges.) Thomas now has a similarly tough job navigating the organ rejection risk of transplanting anything that looks like Oracle culture and practices.

  • by pier25 on 11/16/18, 10:02 PM

    I prefer using GPC than AWS, by far.

    But I will have to admit that AWS seems a lot more committed to their cloud products than Google. New GCP products and features take forever to be introduced or phased out of beta.

    For example, cloud functions entered beta some 2 years ago and went out of beta a year later. Even today it's only possible to use Node and Python. Only recently the Node runtime was upgraded from old Node 6 to Node 8.

    https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/

    During that same time, a small company like Zeit has created a number of complete cloud products for developers. Not only that, but Zeit Now v2 is better in many aspects than Google Cloud Functions.

    Why isn't google invested in GraphQL? They could have come up with something like Prisma with all their talent and resources.

  • by miracle2k on 11/16/18, 8:51 PM

    It is always worth pointing out, since few people are aware of this, that the servers you rent from Google Cloud do not accept any network packets from US-sanctioned countries; if you are ideologically inclined to the idea of an internet with few borders, free software and so forth, then Google Cloud is arbitrarily crippled infrastructure.

    In any case, people should be aware of those limitations when choosing a provider.

  • by notavalleyman on 11/16/18, 9:30 PM

    Can anyone help me think this through: it seems Google/Alphabet shouldn't just be #3 cloud provider, but the cloud itself. It should have been difficult for consumers to separate the concepts of cloud/Alphabet, as cloud is so integral to the Alphabet business.

    Instead the gold podium is occupied by a book re-seller. But the entire Alphabet product line, from the amazing distributed Big Tables to the stitching of 3rd party satellite polygons, is just a front-end cloud use case.

    So why didn't it happen? Departing CEO Greene writes in the OP link that she was only supposed to be running GCP for 2 years. Why on earth was an interim CEO there in the first place

  • by mavelikara on 11/16/18, 11:02 PM

    TK has a reputation for bad temper. I have heard senior execs at Oracle say that they take great care to ensure that star engineers don't come into contact with him directly, lest they lose those engineers. Would be interesting to see how this plays out at Google.

  • by nowarninglabel on 11/16/18, 6:12 PM

    There's a great episode of "Masters of Scale" with Diane Greene where she talks about her time at VMWare and then about how she ended up taking the job of leading Google Cloud. https://mastersofscale.com/diane-greene-look-sideways/

  • by Zhenya on 11/16/18, 6:05 PM

    Oracle culture is bad: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2500 Oracle money making abilities good

  • by pbiggar on 11/16/18, 6:36 PM

    Notwithstanding that they are 3rd in terms of revenue, GCP has gotten to a great place in the last few years. The products are fantastic. Great docs, super consistent APIs and products, great pricing. Really a joy to use. The bet on GKE really paid off too.

    During her tenure it moved from something I wouldn't even consider using, to first choice for my new startup.

  • by trhway on 11/16/18, 10:32 PM

    A VMWare founder couldn't force Google culture to be enterprise-y enough, now an Oracle exec will try that ... If he fails, i guess the next guy will be a 4-star Marine general.

    As far as i heard, the VMWare people Diane brought into the Google Cloud org were screaming from the pain of being an adapter between the hard place of the rest of the Google (i.e. the infrastructure, etc.) and the sledgehammer of enterprise customers who, still mentally being unenlightened dwellers of the Dark Ages, fail to understand the 30 seconds shutdown notice suddenly coming from deep inside the Google infra guts as an "advanced maintenance notice".

    Lets see what happens to the Oracle guys who are already coming upon the Google Cloud like Viking drakkars upon Northumbria shores.

  • by whoisjuan on 11/16/18, 6:58 PM

    This is Google's problem. Total and complete lack of long-term view. Just look at how many projects they shut down every year.

    Do they really think they were going to become market leaders in three years? Come on. The market for cloud infrastructure is in its infancy. The opportunities are there. But you don't build a large business within a potentially multi-trillion dollar industry by being impatient.

    And hiring a former Oracle executive just shows how impatient they are... It a complete change of the playbook and it likely means that they are scrapping a huge chunk of Greene's original go to market strategy for Google Cloud.

  • by ChuckMcM on 11/16/18, 8:42 PM

    I wish Diane well in her future endeavors and I certainly agree it would be great to see more women in the C suite.

    I would be curious to know if her passions are intertwined with her departure, specifically if she felt that Google had structural issues with women in leadership roles. She is essentially being fired as the lead of this organization and being replaced with a fairly prototypical male lead. I am not implying that Thomas isn't qualified, his LinkedIn profile suggests he have very relevant experience, Diane also has the experience in her resume as well. What will help Thomas succeed in this role?

    The bottom line is I would like to see more women in leadership positions and I am sad to see us lose one. I would like to understand (although I realize that isn't possible) if her departure was preventable, and if so what would have had to be different.

  • by alexnewman on 11/16/18, 9:11 PM

    I hate to be a negative nancy, but this is a huge blow to GCP. People really underestimate how badass she is/was. I really worry that GCP will really hurt Google Morale since they were so sure that they would win this market.

    "Those the gods wish to destroy, they first make arrogant"

  • by mathattack on 11/16/18, 10:07 PM

    Google’s Cloud weakspot is Sales and Support - the handholding to get clients over the finish line. The new hire should be able to layer this on to Google’s existing technical strength.

  • by gigatexal on 11/16/18, 9:34 PM

    GCP is great but we couldn’t find a way to get logs to go anywhere but to StackDriver and it being so expensive we had to jump ship because of it. Basically try as we might all the pods that ran our containers had stderror and stdout hijacked by StackDriver

  • by pwarner on 11/17/18, 2:56 AM

  • by urda on 11/16/18, 9:07 PM

    Based on how Google is quick to mothball products, I can't honestly trust the GCP for production-grade services.

    Unfortunately, there's not much the Cloud team at Google can do. Google as a whole needs to demonstrate long-term support in a superior fashion before I can trust their products for building my products.

    Why is this getting downvoted? Provide some input on it, has Google suddenly stopped killing projects that are in their infancy? Why should I entrust my platform to that behavior? Anything instead of just mass downvoting.

    HN you're better than this.

  • by yazr on 11/16/18, 8:23 PM

    Will this lead to price hikes (a-la Oracle death by a thousand cuts of "improved plans", surcharges, etc)

    Wondering what people think about this.

  • by kenhwang on 11/16/18, 9:23 PM

    The "Google is the new Oracle" phrase sure rings more true with this change.

  • by notatoad on 11/17/18, 5:53 AM

    I assume new leadership means they'll be rebranding again?

  • by perfmode on 11/16/18, 6:06 PM

    diane and mendel are a powerhouse pair.

  • by rawrmaan on 11/16/18, 6:13 PM

    The new CEO is the former President of Product Development at Oracle...I wanna puke. Oracle has some of the most hated products in the industry. I hope he's able to adapt to Google's style and not the other way around.

  • by Arcsech on 11/16/18, 6:11 PM

    Gonna be totally honest: From the headline and Google’s previous behavior, my first thought was “Huh, I didn’t expect them to shut GCP down already...”

    (To be clear, they are not shutting down GCP, this is just a leadership transition)

  • by moretosee on 11/16/18, 9:09 PM

    a new leader from oracle? google cloud will be doomed...

  • by ak007 on 11/16/18, 6:00 PM

    interesting !

  • by sheeshkebab on 11/16/18, 7:08 PM

    I wonder what does Oracle fusion middleware guy have to do with selling cloud tech

  • by alexnewman on 11/16/18, 9:28 PM

    Am I the only one who has had much better experience with kops or just straitup kubeadm then aks/eks/gke? Stock k8s in my opinion is not hard to bootstrap.