{"id":4351,"date":"2017-03-17T17:09:26","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T17:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=4351"},"modified":"2017-03-28T14:42:52","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T14:42:52","slug":"breaking-the-glass-a-way-forward-for-google-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/breaking-the-glass-a-way-forward-for-google-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking the glass – a way forward for Google Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"googlers\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Google had no shortage of significant feature function announcements at Cloud Next 2017<\/a> in San Francisco last week but is still looking for a clean narrative to sum up why it should be a preferred enterprise cloud provider.<\/p>\n

Cloud is far from \u201cdone\u201d in terms of enterprise spend and adoption. The great majority of enterprise workloads are still running on prem, and there are hundreds of billions of dollars of spend that are still there for the taking. Digital transformation efforts at Fortune 500 companies make for good magazine copy, but it is, as they say in English football, “early doors<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

So Google needs to position itself as a platform for what comes next, rather what just happened. With a focus on platform level services, maching learning and AI, and an increasingly broad and deep commitment to open source, it\u2019s getting there. Most of all though Google needs to be seen as open for business, open to collaboration, more humble, more ready to teach to learn. Enterprises place great stock on having partners that have an opinion, but also want partners that don\u2019t seem too clever by half. Google needs to smash the glass separating it from the outside world to be more engaging. <\/p>\n

A good example of the kind of leapfrog win Google needs is HSBC, a recent customer win. The massive \u201csystemically important\u201d bank,\u00a0having unsuccessfully spent years and tens of millions of dollars working on Hadoop on prem for anti money laundering (they didn\u2019t say this in the keynote), finally decided to try a new approach, and it choose Google to load and analyse financial data as part of its antifraud efforts. After its well publicised problems with a Mexican subsidiary the firm needs to be more careful than ever. Also note HSBC is using AWS for dev\/test<\/a>, a standard pattern for new platform adoption<\/a>, but chose Google for a data intensive compliance workload that is literally existential to the company – it is still under the terms of a deferred prosecution from the DoJ.<\/p>\n

A spanner in the works<\/h1>\n

Google\u2019s data chops are undeniably solid. The company announced Cloud Spanner<\/a>, a globally distributed, fully consistent SQL-compliant database a couple of weeks before the conference. Two Phase Commit is back! Spanner is particularly noteworthy in that it goes against the grain of CAP Theorem<\/a> (in distributed systems design you need to make tradeoffs between consistency, availability and partitionability), a seminal piece of work by Eric Brewer, who is now VP of Infrastructure at Google. Scaling databases horizontally is really hard, scaling them geographically even more so. At NEXT the company talked up running atomic clocks at every data center location to enable data consistency, but according to Brewer\u2019s paper on Spanner and CAP<\/a>, consistency achieved through locking, supported by the availability and performance of Google\u2019s wide area network. Google\u2019s TrueTime does however play a crucial role in data snapshotting and synchronisation which obviously has implications for consistency.<\/p>\n

It will be be interesting to track Spanner\u2019s progress. While NoSQL has been essentially nibbling at the edges of the Oracle and IBM mainframe data franchises, Google is going directly after the high scale transactional database. Spanner won\u2019t be cheap, but then neither is Oracle. From a timing perspective Spanner is on point \u2013 Oracle\u2019s dominance was assured by being the database of choice not just of the customer, but also the ISV. Today however ISVs are moving into the cloud, and Oracle acquired its own application stack to compete directly with them. I assume that Google put in a call to Salesforce to rehosting on Spanner. Enterprises are showing a solid appetite for building rather than buying their apps again after a long winter of purchasing-first IT. It may be time for a major disruption in the market for transactional databases. Spanner, by its nature, can\u2019t or won\u2019t be open sourced, though, and will by necessity involved lock in.<\/p>\n

Falling in love with open source<\/h1>\n

When it comes to open source there has been a quiet revolution at Google over the past couple of years. I wrote about this\u00a0last March<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut by 2015 Google realised that open sourcing the code itself, rather than just publishing papers about its approaches, made sense. Why watch somebody else create another Hadoop or Mesos when Google could build a community around stuff it actually built \u2013 and so Kubernetes was born. Things got really interesting when Google\u2019s engineers met engineers at Red Hat they deeply respected. When we write the history of Google this will be seen as a seminal moment, when the appliance of science became properly a community-based activity. The decision to open source some of Google\u2019s core machine learning technology \u2013 TensorFlow \u2013 followed naturally on the obvious and growing success of a better, more collaborative model for applied science.\u201d <\/p>\n

TensorFlow is a runaway success – effectively the defacto standard open source library toolkit for machine learning – with more than 50k stars on Github and more than 23.5k forks (when GitHub published its State of the Octoverse in September 2016 TensorFlow was at about 14k forks). <\/p>\n

Kubernetes meanwhile is trailing along with a mere 25k stars. It\u2019s a project on a roll, adopted by everyone that matters in cloud. <\/p>\n

Other Google open source infrastructure projects include Apache Beam<\/a> – for defining batch and streaming data-parallel processing pipelines, based on its work with Cloud Data Flow. Google\u2019s Go language has quickly become a favourite of systems programmers. One of the company\u2019s most recent open source contribution is gRPC<\/a>, a high performance RPC framework for HTTP\/2 has been well received by the microservices crowd.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Google has found that not only does it enjoy making open source contributions, but these contributions are generally well received, and open up new potential market dynamics – see for example Kubernetes and the Anyone but Amazon Club<\/a><\/p>\n

Talking of Amazon – there is some clear differentiation here. Amazon Web Services has definitely not taken the open source pill. It is not a major contributor to open source projects, nor has it taken a lead in open sourcing its own code. In many respects the company\u2019s culture feels more akin to Microsoft in an earlier era. Unlike almost any other modern tech company AWS holds its IP very close to its chest. And while AWS made it incredible easy for commercial open source vendors to go to market, it now increasingly competes with them – by offering for example managed hosting for open source databases. <\/p>\n

As Stephen explains here to commercial open source the biggest competitor is Amazon<\/a>. Open Source remains something of a chink in Amazon\u2019s amour, although the company is doing such a great job of packaging it for now that is is a runaway economic winner. <\/p>\n

Being different<\/h1>\n

So how does Google need to be different? Its commitment needs to go beyond consuming open source software. It needs to contribute code, support outside projects, and find a business model than balances its own offerings based on open source code and platforms but also a level playing field for third parties. Sam Ramji,VP Product Management for Google Cloud Platform\u00a0 has the job of managing that transition. He has been at Google just over 100 days. He spent years at Microsoft working on open source and standards, before working at Apigee, and latterly running the Cloud Foundry Foundation. He is thoughtful, smart, ambitious, ethical, and perhaps I should add for full disclosure reasons a personal friend of mine.<\/p>\n

Current Status<\/h1>\n

Amazon Web Services dominated, and dominates the Infrastructure as a Service cloud build out, but all tech markets have natural inflection points, and the trick is to catch the next wave as it comes in. <\/p>\n

Microsoft has done a great job of getting back in the game with Azure. The platform is solid, and Microsoft\u2019s go to market partnering is strong, particularly in open source. In conversations over the last 18 months Microsoft has regularly come up as the easiest company to do business with for commercial open source vendors.\u00a0 The Microsoft enterprise sales machine is heavily skewed to Azure in terms of compensation, and is selling capacity accordingly. Now it\u2019s a question of driving workloads to the platform. <\/p>\n

IBM acquired SoftLayer, but IaaS was always going to be an awkward fit for a firm that was on a path to divest low margin businesses (Thinkpad, x86 servers, etc). So IBM has been focusing its attention on platform level services through Bluemix, and Watson for machine learning and artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n

Rackspace was unable to invest enough capital to keep up as an infrastructure player and is now essentially a third party services company, supporting other company\u2019s clouds. One of the announcements at Next is that Rackspace will become a Google cloud partner.<\/p>\n

Engineer to Engineer<\/h1>\n

One of Google\u2019s greatest strengths is engineering. But that strength has also been a weakness because of perceived arrogance in dealing with outsiders \u2013 those outsiders often being customers and developers. Google can certainly be high-handed in dealing with customers \u2013 \u201coh, you\u2019re doing it wrong! RTFM!\u201d \u2013 and that\u2019s one of the sharp edges the company certainly needs to smooth off.\u00a0 Google\u2019s founding culture is to focus on the platform, rather than the customer. This is the stuff that folks like Diane Greene, Sam Ramji and Brian Stevens have been brought in to fix. <\/p>\n

One of the interesting moves for Google is turning the engineering chops into the asset it will be is a program it calls Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), a spin on the company\u2019s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture. Google is crazy good at ops. I had an interesting chat with Alexis Richardson of Weaveworks when I got home from NEXT and he made a really interesting point about two of his engineers \u2013 Tom Wilkie and Jonathan Lange \u2013 both ex-Googlers. When the company\u2019s services go down, Tom and Jonno fall naturally into a fix it rhythm, where they don\u2019t say much, but get their heads down and work together seamlessly at their own command lines to solve the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Pokemon Go launched the traffic spike was literally crazy. While there were some complaints about downtime, they were actually pretty minor in the scheme of the services that were being delivered to tens, then hundreds, of millions of customers. Within weeks it was 500m. And Niantic had 16 people working on the team at that point. 16! Google provided SRE services, working alongside the Niantic folks to scale the service, which is where the CRE program comes from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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met phil keslin, niantic CTO yesterday. ludicrous tech story. 500m+ downloads, all the users, team of just 16 people. java, obvs #gcpnext<\/a><\/p>\n

— Grumble Bundle (@monkchips) October 20, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n