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Google's Close To Beating Amazon, Microsoft For a Major Cloud Client: Sources (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the cloud-race dept.

An anonymous reader shares a CNBC report: Google's aggressive push into cloud computing, where it trails Amazon.com and Microsoft, has put the internet giant in the lead position to land a marquee client: PayPal. While Google is the front-runner, according to people familiar with the matter, PayPal is evaluating the other leading providers and hasn't made any final decisions. PayPal is unlikely to move its technology infrastructure in the fourth quarter, the peak period for online commerce, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential. Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, Google is out to prove that it's a legitimate player in the rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure market.

59 comments

  1. hybrid vigor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maintain enough presence in each provider to provide resiliency, and a big enough stick to push down pricing.

    1. Re:hybrid vigor by lgw · · Score: 1

      Maintain enough presence in each provider to provide resiliency, and a big enough stick to push down pricing.

      Microsoft and Google are definitely selling at a loss right now. Everyone was surprised that AWS was profitable as the same prices.

      Currently Google cloud stuff is a rounding error next to Azure and AWS (the pie chart is mostly AWS, a slice of Azure, and a sliver of "other" right now). I'd be very nervous using them, given Google's history of abandoning projects that aren't getting traction, but OP had good advice there - just make sure you can move.

      Of course, once you start using all the other cloud services beyond server rentals (file stores, DBs, queues, etc) then you're basically stuck, as there's very little in common there, so again maybe not Google.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:hybrid vigor by swb · · Score: 1

      How much virtual machine compatibility is there between providers?

      Can you maintain a single image that easily runs on all providers, or does it involve micromanagement of differences between them?

    3. Re:hybrid vigor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How much virtual machine compatibility is there between providers?

      Can you maintain a single image that easily runs on all providers, or does it involve micromanagement of differences between them?

      a vm is a vm -- you can snapshot your disk and boot it interchangably on any of the IAAS providers. cloud-init and metadata take care of the naming/networking to set up in each environment on boot.

      the real value is at the higher levels or in the additional services provided beyond booting a vm image. The providers will try to have lock-in with those features while competing at very low cost on hosting the vms themselves

    4. Re:hybrid vigor by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      Can you maintain a single image that easily runs on all providers, or does it involve micromanagement of differences between them?

      Using Docker images instead of VM images, this is easy. However, once you need persistent storage or use hosted apps, such as databases, then migration may be more difficult.

      Google's Kubernetes is a great way to manage containers and is open source. There is no reason AWS or Azure could not support it.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    5. Re:hybrid vigor by swb · · Score: 1

      Using Docker images instead of VM images, this is easy.

      Unless of course you don't want to or can't use Docker images.

      I get that using cloud vendor integrated infrastructure elements like database service or specialized storage ties you in ways to the provider that are hard to break, but it sure seems like a lot of people have workloads that aren't easily redefinable as Linux Docker solutions.

    6. Re: hybrid vigor by Killall+-9+Bash · · Score: 1

      Right after we send the Caucasians back to the Caucasus.

      --
      "Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
    7. Re:hybrid vigor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm surprised that Google and Microsoft would be selling at a loss. If this is the lowest price they can offer, they should get out of the game or start firing people.

      AWS is overpriced, mainly for the bandwidth. Buying your own equipment is cheaper than anything you can have AWS do. AWS doesn't start looking cheap unless you buy the entire package, not just one thing.

      And I can't shout this loud enough to the idiots that see the word "cloud" and whip their internet dick out to see how much bigger theirs is. It's not a question of "why" should you consider the cloud, but "if"

      There are reasons to use the cloud sometimes. Perhaps you don't own datacenter space in some region that has shitty data-protection laws, like Europe. So instead of going through the effort of finding space with good connectivity, you instead outsource it to a cloud vendor in that country. Data protection laws are going be driving "cloud" adoption because the internet as we know it is becoming balkanized.

  2. Cloud Wars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Looks like The Cloud is about to go cumulonimbus.

  3. Scale. Thats what Paypal needs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hypothetically if they needed to store 18 months to 2 years of transactions for "know your customer" legal requirements, google would be a good bet for Paypal as they do things at scale in ways other companies cant yet.

  4. "Major" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The entire world loathes PayPal with a fiery passion. They won't be around for much longer.

    1. Re:"Major" by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      Well that's a nice thought but even with the technical breakup with Ebay, Ebay is still not allowing other payment methods so I figure paypal will be around for a while yet.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  5. My first criterion for a cloud provider: by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2
    Does the cloud provider have IPv6 support? If not, I look elsewhere. Not necessarily because I need IPv6 support now, but because i don't want to be using a cloud that is transitioning to supporting IPv6. That has the possibility of being very disruptive.

    .
    For that reason, I avoid Amazon's AWS. No IPv6 support, even though it's been "available soon" for years. Years!! That tells me that there is some fundamental issue with Amazon's AWS. Did it expand too rapidly, and now the infrastructure is not architected well-enough to provide for future feature enhancements?

    So what cloud providers support IPv6?

    1. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by NatasRevol · · Score: 1

      None of them.

      Now what?

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    2. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 2

      https://www.digitalocean.com/c...

    3. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by NatasRevol · · Score: 0

      What the fuck is a 'droplet'?

      And they only provide it in some datacenters. Basically, same as everyone else - not fully rolled out.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    4. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AWS S3 now supports IPv6.
      https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/08/internet-protocol-version-6-ipv6-support-for-amazon-s3/

    5. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by sithlord2 · · Score: 1

      Out of curiosity: why do you need it now? Which IPv4 limit is causing your issues at the moment? Are you a DNS provider or something?

      --
      ...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
    6. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by cdrudge · · Score: 1

      What the fuck is a 'droplet'?

      It's their name for a virtual server. They're a digital ocean. An ocean is made up of many droplets. Yeah, it's dumb.

    7. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by NatasRevol · · Score: 1

      It's also very weird that, in reading around their site, they only use the term sometimes even though most everything they talk about is a VM.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    8. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      https://www.linode.com/docs/networking/native-ipv6-networking

    9. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by gmack · · Score: 1

      The ISP I work for is running out of IPs and is looking at buying new IPv4 addresses on the open market. Google reports that 30% of all US traffic to their servers and 13% worldwide use IPv6. We are already at the point where on mobile networks IPv6 offers a faster page load time thanks to their use of CGNAT on the IPv4 network and that will only get worse as more ISPs roll out CGNAT.. IPv6 is not hard to setup and given how many web hosting/cloud/VPS/Server providers who support IPv6 there is no excuse for building new sites on providers that only manage to support IPv4.

    10. Re: My first criterion for a cloud provider: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Reference? AWS supports IPv6, at least for ELB. If you need 8-bytes of addressing behind a load-balancer, then, to paraphrase, "you DO have big plans."

    11. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My servers have been running ipv6 since 2008. There has never been a problem reaching it from other ipv6 hosts, or even ipv4 hosts (yay dual-stack.) In fact the only people who have problems are those who are using ipv6 capable equipment (eg Apple Time capsule) with ISP hardware (eg cable modems, VDSL2 modems) that provision ipv6 addresses that go nowhere. To those people I end up telling them that their ipv6 is broken and contact their ISP.

      My ISP late last year enabled IPv6 and I discovered it by accident because my servers have it and was debugging something and was like... wait "last logged in from ipv6..."

    12. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's just a VPS provider. I like digital ocean, I actually use them myself for personal stuff. But a cloud provider is hell of a lot more than a co-location to store your VMs.

    13. Re:My first criterion for a cloud provider: by speedplane · · Score: 1

      Does the cloud provider have IPv6 support? If not, I look elsewhere. Not necessarily because I need IPv6 support now, but because i don't want to be using a cloud that is transitioning to supporting IPv6. That has the possibility of being very disruptive.

      There are so many factors in determining a cloud provider, solely choosing one based on IPv6 is silly. Who cares if it'll be disruptive in the future if you can't get to where you want at all.

      --
      Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
  6. Sources isn't a name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you can't name your source, just write the headline and admit that it's an anonymous source in the text (but not in the headline, ffs).

    1. Re:Sources isn't a name by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 1

      >> can't name your source

      This only makes sense if it was sourced by Google's PR team, who might be trying to make as much noise about their offering now they're convinced that they won't win the PayPal account. (Normally, a customer name-dropped during a confidential evaluation process would be pissed off enough to drop the vendor who name-dropped. The vendors still in the game wouldn't normally dare publish the name of a customer considering them now.)

  7. Why can't the title just have said "Paypal" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    instead of "a major cloud client"? Sorry, even slasdot is becoming click-baity. Minor vent... offtopic I know, but come on.

    1. Re:Why can't the title just have said "Paypal" by acoustix · · Score: 1

      It's clickbait. Just like every f_cking article posted on Facebook and Twitter. Are you surprised?

      --
      "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
  8. And this isn't a story by tomhath · · Score: 1

    PayPal is evaluating the major cloud service providers but hasn't made a decision. Meh.

  9. Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great news. Competition is exactly what's needed in this segment, the more the merrier. Imagine the flipside, a world where the majority of cloud marketshare was owned by a company like Microsoft and run on proprietary software (and unknown number of zero days) like Windows Server. Not to mention the accompanying drive to achieve total lock-in to satisfy shareholders like they did with Windows.

    A Halloween docs scenario for all that cloud info out there...

    Shudder.

  10. Here comes HipsterCash. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Said the tight-pantsed brogrammer, before speeding off on his fixie and getting run over by a Google bus.

    Bitches keep running their mouths and yet Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop. Microsoft still lords over all others in marketshare. Apple's garden continues to build higher walls. Comcast continues to enslave municipality after municipality.

    A bunch of nerds whining about Paypal does not, and should not, make Paypal tremble in any sort of fear, to be sure.

  11. one-IP-per-instance by bwindle2 · · Score: 1

    the big problem I see with GCE is that you can only assign one IP to an instance; so if you need, for example, a load balancer, you can't run your own. There is no support for Brocade, F5, Netscalers, etc in GCE, you have to use their LB-as-a-service which doesn't meet my company's needs (i.e., we need iRules)

    1. Re:one-IP-per-instance by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      iRules is a highly customized, Tcl-based scripting language

      Tcl-based? /shudders

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  12. The utterly evil PayPal, by jenningsthecat · · Score: 1, Insightful

    teaming up with with the company that drove a spike through the heart of their own "Don't be evil" motto. How appropriate...

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    1. Re:The utterly evil PayPal, by bigpat · · Score: 1

      teaming up with with the company that drove a spike through the heart of their own "Don't be evil" motto. How appropriate...

      If you had to take out the evil measuring stick I still think Google is less evil and more honest about when they are evil than other big companies. The ethos of the company is still driven by innovation and use of cutting edge technology to make people's lives easier.

      Yes, they are still making boatloads of money on tracking people and targeting them with ads, but other companies are also tracking people and selling information about people and they aren't even telling you what they are collecting and how they are doing it.

  13. Gut check by U8MyData · · Score: 1, Informative

    As an IT person for over twenty years, I still pain at this cloud presence. Who owns your data? Google, Amazon, Microsoft? Might as well give all your keys to someone else. Wait, when the federal government gets into the cloud infrastructure will I feel any different? No. Sales, marketing, and the all too easy "it's what everyone else is doing" argument. Remember, easy is a four letter word. Lemmings....

    1. Re:Gut check by mlw4428 · · Score: 1

      You still own your data if you encrypt it...at least as far as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft would be concerned.

    2. Re:Gut check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Speaking of gut check...this article says that at some point in the future, one of the cloud providers may get another account. Shocking, I say, shocking!

      I may win the lottery, too, at some point in the future...of course I never buy a ticket, but someone could give one to me. Perhaps that should be a /. article.

    3. Re:Gut check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hate paypal all you want, but this is a struggle every company of any significant size faces..

      paypal is large enough to have their own infrastructure, and its business and data are sensitive enough to warrant having total control over servers and data. why the fuck do they give up both?

      service available at the whim of a third party? data controlled by a third party? who came up with this nonsense and thought it was a good idea? news flash: "clouds" fail. clouds aren't cheaper. clouds tend to lock you into that platform long term... you're totally fucked if you choose cloud.

    4. Re:Gut check by swillden · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As an IT person for over twenty years, I still pain at this cloud presence. Who owns your data? Google, Amazon, Microsoft?

      What, specifically, are you afraid will happen?

      I can see being worried about handing your business data to a service provider who may be a competitor, but are you actually competing with any of these? And would they really get enough value from looking at your data to justify the immense damage to their business if they were caught spying on customers in violation of contractual obligations? Not likely. I suppose I could see Wal-mart refusing to host their data on AWS because there's a clear competitive conflict, and Wal-mart is big enough that Amazon might want to spy on them, but those cases are pretty rare, I think.

      If your concern is about data loss if the provider goes belly up or has severe problems (e.g. a data center burns to the ground) then (a) your fears are pretty misplaced with respect to AWS, Azure or GCE, and (b) you should be keeping backups regardless of whether you're running your own systems or using a provider. If your concern is about downtime, your fears are really misplaced. The big cloud providers are much better at that than you are.

      I know a number of small and mid-size companies that have never operated their own data centers, or even had colos, and are extremely happy with the way that works. It makes them able to respond to changes in business much more quickly and keeps their overhead low, especially during the early phases. Sign up a huge new client and need to double your capacity? Log on and fire it up (assuming you've architected for scalability). No need to worry about floor space or purchase orders or installation schedules. Lose a huge client or find an optimization and need to cut capacity by 30%? Log on and shut it down. No need to figure out what to do about the idled equipment or floor space. These companies find it's much better to stay focused on what they do well, writing software and selling services, rather than staff up big organizations to manage data center operations.

      One significant (~600-person) and quite profitable SaaS company I know doesn't own *any* computing hardware. Their computing equipment is completely BYOD, employees use their own laptops, tablets and phones (with reimbursement, so I suppose their accountants might argue they own some stuff, technically). When they had to move buildings recently (due to growth), they simply leased a new building and told everyone (those who don't telecommute) to show up at the new location the next week. The new building had cubicles and wired and wireless Internet in place (w/redundant providers), all part of the lease. They did contract some movers to haul boxes of personal items from the old building to the new one, including developers' large monitors. The CEO likes to joke that he could move the entire company to a beach-side resort in Belize and they could all continue working without the slightest interruption, as long as the resort had good Wifi.

      That's a bit extreme, and there's no doubt that that level of flexibility isn't free, but it's not as expensive as you might think. Moreover, if your workload is very static, and your IT department is solid and smooth-functioning, and labor costs in your area are low, it will cost more to pay a cloud provider than to do it yourself. Or if you have particularly-sensitive data to manage (and actually know how to manage it... something that is *rarely* true in my 15 years' experience as an IT security consultant), you may need to have your own hardware. But for many, many companies, the cloud is cheaper, faster, more flexible and more secure.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    5. Re:Gut check by U8MyData · · Score: 1

      I stand by my comment. In an archive of Slashdot 5 years from now, my perspective might be clear. Name calling is adolescent sir/ma'am. ToS, is nothing more than a statement and separate from actuality. One might claim they are PCI compliant, for example, when in reality it sis a smoke screen. Been there, seen that too many times. I will not comment further....

    6. Re:Gut check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As an IT person for over twenty years, I still pain at this cloud presence. Who owns your data? Google, Amazon, Microsoft? Might as well give all your keys to someone else. Wait, when the federal government gets into the cloud infrastructure will I feel any different? No. Sales, marketing, and the all too easy "it's what everyone else is doing" argument. Remember, easy is a four letter word. Lemmings....

      My favorite phrase about that is "There is no cloud; it's just someone else's computer."

      https://www.chriswatterston.com/blog/my-there-no-cloud-sticker

    7. Re:Gut check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And would they really get enough value from looking at your data to justify the immense damage to their business if they were caught spying on customers in violation of contractual obligations?

      Spying is not a violation of contractual obligations. They don't have to get caught. You knew (or should have known) before you signed up that they would have access to all your network traffic. It is obvious that they will know how much bandwidth you use, how many unique visitors you have, what URLs are most popular on your site, and oodles more "metadata" about the site they host for you. Everybody knows they have all this information about you.

      I'm reminded of the Salt Lake City Olympic bribery scandal, when SLC was outed many months after giving a Korean IOC official a custom shotgun as a present before they voted. It was shocking, blatant bribery. But the shotgun was presented at a public press conference and reported on the 5:00 News the day it happened. The "outing" disclosed no new information to the public. It just labelled the event as as bribe and shocked the world. All of the other bribes? Everyone knew that stuff, or stuff like it, was happening. It was expected. Most of it didn't happen under the table. It was happily televized live. And exposing the scandal hasn't changed any behavior. Every Olympic bid committee since has continued to wine and dine voting committee members.

      If you think Google or Amazon or MS are not collecting data on the sites they host, your view of the industry can safely be ignored.

  14. Google Acquires Fortune 500 Customer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I guess Microsoft should be worried that someone else may also have a Fortune 500 customer... Never count Google out! /s

    Where is the indicator this ad was sponsored? Is this shitpost puff piece news?

  15. Where is IBM's cloud offering? by jodokast98 · · Score: 1

    I take it Softlayer is last on that list ...

  16. Cloud == yet another consumer failure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It seems that lots of people missed the memo that cloud was supposed to commoditize computing. Shouldn't it be trivial to move all or part of whatever service you happen to offer between cloud providers? Shouldn't everyone who needs more than a few VMs just use all of them in case one goes down? Shouldn't we be moving back and forth all the time based on price and regional performance characteristics that we measure ourselves with in-browser telemetry?

    Of course, attempted vendor lock-in is easy to find in all sorts of industries. When the big players are really profitable and the small player sell at a loss in an attempt to gain market share on their platform designed for lock-in, we've have to conclude that either heavy anti-monopoly regulation is a vital part of capitalism or that we don't really live in a capitalist economy.

  17. the cloud by Ice+Station+Zebra · · Score: 1

    What gets me about "the cloud", is that at least for Amazon it appears that there are multiple clouds. You can still have outages. Doesn't sound like Amazon is doing "the cloud" right to me. Anybody else have any thoughts on this?

  18. Who is "Sources"? by real+gumby · · Score: 1

    Presumably the mysterious "sources" ("people familiar with the matter") are Google trying to hype up their cloud business which is either #2 or #3 depending on whom you talk to. There's no reason for anyone else to "spill the beans".

    I use all those scare quotes because the whole thing is rediculous. Reporters used to care about being played; now they can't be bothered worrying about it.

    There are plenty of reasons to choose Google over Amazon and to choose Amazon over Google. Hype is not one of them.

    1. Re:Who is "Sources"? by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 1

      Are they even that high? For #3 I had 5-6 potential names in my mind before Google... aside from just hosted email.

    2. Re:Who is "Sources"? by real+gumby · · Score: 1

      It's hard to get good info since the term is so mushy. I was thinking specifically of a combination of running code customer code, storing data, and providing related services. I.e. not just storage (dropbox or box) or vendor provided service (gmail, fastmail, openDNS) or just VMs (maybe i should consider that but I don't use VMs/VPSes).

      So in my perhaps artificially restricted definition AWS is the clear #1. I hear anecdotally that microsoft is doing pretty well but their offerings, afaict, aren't of any use to me (not flame bait, I just aren't interested in that stack) and may be beating google. But it feels like both of them (MS and goog) are far behind amazon.

  19. aggressive push, attention by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Last time a made an aggressive push something exited more than just gas.

  20. You do, you moron by mveloso · · Score: 1

    Don't you read the ToS?

  21. The dance continues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    PayPal and Google are ultimately competitors. I doubt this will go much beyond a minor dependency for PayPal. They would be putting themselves too much at risk of a stab in the back (it's just biz....no hard feelings).

  22. Yep by dohzer · · Score: 0

    Trump would make a good president: Sources.

    1. Re:Yep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Protip: The Anonymous Coward checkbox is located just above the "Comment Subject" text field.

  23. Super Annoying Headlines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The new Slashdot headline format of placing the source after a colon has bothered me from the beginning. But it keeps getting deeper and deeper under my skin. The source should go before the colon (e.g., Me: Slashdot Editors Should Take an English Class).

    As annoying as those headlines are, this particular one has driven me over the edge into a rant. ": Sources"???? Really? If you space is so limited that you can't use two more characters to type "Sources say Google's..." then just leave off the ": Sources" all together. It provides absolutely no value, clarification, or meaning to the headline. It just demonstrates that you aren't smart enough to place it first ("Sources: ") and that you aren't smart enough to realize that it's a stupid addition to the headline.