Google Domains shutdown was an own-goal. They should have just ran it at a loss forever if that is what it took, the optics were and are just awful.
I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare. But anything related to DNS is going to make infra folk very wary of what else you might be willing to kill or neuter. It's just at that level of fundamental things that make operators skittish.
> I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the
> business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare.
Ironically, I moved all my Google Domains domains to Cloudflare. Their revenue from being a domain registrar is likely a rounding error compared to their other products, but (1) now they have my credit card on file for value-add services, and (2) sometimes people with corporate spending authority ask me for advice about who they should buy cloud services from.
Grocery stores don't make their money from selling bread and milk, but a store that doesn't sell bread and milk is run by fools.
Google Domains was a service where no new features could be added, so nobody would get promoted for working on it, so nobody wanted to maintain it. Classic Google.
The funny thing is it wasn't even a true shutdown - Cloud Domains continues to be a reasonable registrar with proper IAM management so actually much nicer than Google Domains for larger projects. There were plenty of docs on migrating which was a one command thing (don't think there was a UI). Non-"consumers" had a reasonable out, which they could then drop for another provider if they felt a need, but there was definitely no requirement to end up at Squarespace.
But they never marketed it, among all the backlash over turning down Google Domains there was never any true call-out to this. To this day I suspect many people don't know about Cloud Domains (which still exists and accepts new domains). I can't fathom any user-related reason for this - the contract in selling to Squarespace must have forced Google to be unable to properly market Cloud Domains as a transition option. If not, the Google Domains PM truly didn't know the existence of Cloud Domains?
Squarespace's domain panel crashed with a nondescript error when I tried to update nameservers prior to transferring out, and they shut off the Google nameservers as soon as the transfer went through on their side. To add insult to injury, Squarespace makes you wait 5 days for a transfer, with no way to expedite -- and in my case, they waited 6 days, taking me offline on a Friday night. This was the worst experience I've ever had using a domain service.
I believe the reason for divesting from the registrar business had to do more with ICANN rules that require Google not both be a registry operator and a registrar. Google does have a large registry business with 60+ TLDs so they could not also be a registrar (even if not for the same TLDs). It wasn’t really a money thing AFAIK.
Google's problem has always been customer support. Not just the process but the idea that your customers deserve to be supported when using your product.
You shouldn't ask people to migrate before having a documented, tested, tool-assisted, clear and intuitive migration flow that takes very little time.
I would say that Googlers are painfully aware of this. But the real problem is leadership. It starts with the CEO and various execs. Their employees are still living in the "growth hacking" and highly academic world (at least their engineers) and their execs are drunken with arrogance, convinced their Titanic will never sink. And they may be partially right, it may not sink but it will never regain its former glory. It will rot on the shelf, besides IBM,AT&T, HP and many more.
At its core, alphabet is a services company, it does not sell goods (to the most part). Their board needs to decide if the company should focus on business services or consumer services and replace the executives with people who have experience in that area.
The actual quality of GCP is superb in my opinion. They have a flair for architecting excellent solutions. I prefer GCP over any cloud from a purely technical perspective. Their leaders just don't get that it isn't enough. They're not operating a toy or a museum of technical marvels. Actual people need to use it.
I'm surprised to find all comments so strongly against Google. I do not like their customer support nor their surprise product closure acts... but I do find their cloud interface easy to use, pricing is solid, and (K8s/Cloud Run) I have barely been affected by any significant outage in some 8 years of use.
Contrast to Azure who despite their SLA had significant outages every few months that were very noticeable, sometimes even requiring us setting up an entire new K8s project from scratch. AWS is better in terms of reliability. Their UX is not great though, I often feel like I'm a wizard waving my wand with permissions and connecting things like audit trails. Many actions are a bit delayed in their effect. I've also had to contact support at times to raise arbitrary limits in the platform.
In balance I would recommend GCP. Their product closures have not affected me enough to scare me away. I guess experiences vary depending on which product we are using.
You can't even set spending limits on Google Cloud and have to use some obscure script that deactivates billing if you want to imitate it. The whole product is incredibly buggy and complicated.
My impression from a small project needing a OAuth scope was that the UI of GCP was sluggish, and although the other providers have sometimes sluggish UIs Google's was uniquely so. Anyone else feel this way?
Example is a sidebar that opens for adding an email during OAuth flow, after adding it clicking "Add" once did nothing, there was no feedback. Had to click it at least 5 times for it to go away and save correctly. In fact this is even specified in the documentation for the third-party tool (Google Drive downloader[1] step 18) that you have to click it multiple times. I don't think this is normal.
And also I should mention, depending on hardware specs the GCP portal was nearly unusable. So hopefully one will not need to rely on creating OAuth resources for a CLI program on the same computer. Although to be fair, I wasn't benchmarking against AWS/Azure on that hardware (since I needed to use GCP Google APIs).
i would say that smaller, independent enterprises/solo shops tend to not hate GCP.
Large shops - aka, a shop where you're not part of the controlling entity - tend to prefer either AWS, or Azure depending on how hard the CIO got wined and dined previously (and existing inertia - older shops that used AWS as an early adopter seems to stay with AWS).
> Their UX is not great though
i agree, but nobody really cares enough. On the other hand, i'd not pay more for better UX. Judging by the current state, i say a lot of customers fall into this category.
AWS is the best provider for tech people, the product is high level but versatile too. Price is somehow high, but the service is here.
azure is microsoft, so this explains that
gcp has "a vision": if you do not share it, it's a pain. Also, gcp has some sick design for core products : checkout load balancers if you want a "good" laugh. It's a stack of hack, put one on top of the others
I would not recommand against GCP, it's the average player: not the best, definitely not the worst.
"More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed."
> Never forget what happened to Australian UniSuper
I don't know if media or the readers are at fault. The article doesn't even make sense.
> More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access
If Google really caused such a huge loss there would be no joint statement. The buyer i.e. UniSuper would be trying to sue them. The fact that it is a joint statement implies the two parties are sharing the responsibility. Now complaining about UniSuper is boring and so spinning it on Google Cloud gets clicks.
A couple of months I was evaluating Dialogueflow for a chatgpt like ReAct agent I was working on. They have this blue "contact sales" button where you can chat with the sales team. Easy enough I thought, jumping right into it to ask my questions. I am greeted by a virtual guide that doesn't help. Then I ask for a human "Live chat with sales". Again another bot. How did I find out? The bot didn't bat an eye when I informed them I have 6 Billion customers on Mars, Venus, and Pluto. I ended up using streamlit.
Google lost the rest of my trust with the ongoing fiasco with google play dev verification where many developers are not able to confirm their phone numbers for months and are at risk of losing their accounts. I can totally see myself being banned from GC for some nebulous reason or being locked out of account with no recourse. Their support bots are useless
That worries me in general about Google. You will trip some wire in some garbage code somewhere and that’s it, you’re locked out and banned for life with effectively no recourse and no hope.
It’s true. Two weeks ago, I did a bit of light consulting for a data engineering project involving an IoT device and half way through designing the GCP architecture of the pipeline, I realized that Google was shutting down their IoT service… I ended up having to recommend AWS.
Matthew 7:27 “And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on Google’s ever-shifting infrastructure.”
They definitely lost my trust with Google Domains, somehow I thought that such a foundational infrastructure layer will not be axed as easily, oh boy was I wrong..
AWS has been feeling like the least terrible of the big 3 lately. Domain registration is the canary for me. Only AWS does it right. Azure has some approach but they force you into a lock in service and rely on GoDaddy for the actual registration.
These vendors underestimate the impact of having something so fundamental managed by a weird 3rd party. Route53 gives me a lot of confidence that I'm not going to be jerked around with domains and DNS. This factors heavily into my purchasing decisions.
They're a trash company, and anything you get from them, even when you pay for the storage, is at best accidentally delivered to you and they could roll over in their sleep at any moment and snuff it all out.
Their end-users are advertisizers spending millions. For them Google is probably very responsive. The rest of us are users of pet projects at best and product at worst
Google just does not have enterprise DNA which requires providing long-term support for legacy systems. AWS on the other hand was able to achieve this through their customer obsession. But the absolute king in this still remains Microsoft which is why enterprises will adopt Azure with their eyes closed.
I guess people will rant about any cloud provider the same way. The tech needs to mature. Wait till someone starts an azure thread, God I wish i never have to touch azure anymore in my life.
Smaller cloud providers cannot (and do not want to) afford the costs of constant product churn. So you get a smoother, long term relationship with a smaller company that's more likely aligned with your goals.
Disclosure: I work for a European second tier cloud provider.
In 2019 when working for a cloud consultancy they paid us to certify for Google cloud with the promise of many new customers. In reality since then the consultancy fired all pure Google cloud consultants. I myself have had about three Google cloud only focused projects. A lot of promises but nothing came out of it.
It doesn't help that the platform has stagnated and customers are afraid of committing due to loss of features. In comparison AWS doesn't remove features for customers or always provide alternative ways to migrate to. SimpleDb is the prime example here.
I wrestled with GCP a month ago. Never again. Hundreds of internal permissions issues, a thing Google invented for no reason. APIS needing to be turned on. A feature I didn’t ask for and don’t want. Service accounts that don’t have permissions to do what those service accounts are for.
I used to think any cloud is as good as another. Not anymore.
It’s not hard to recommend Google cloud. It’s impossible.
[+] [-] jpgvm|1 year ago|reply
I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare. But anything related to DNS is going to make infra folk very wary of what else you might be willing to kill or neuter. It's just at that level of fundamental things that make operators skittish.
[+] [-] jmillikin|1 year ago|reply
Grocery stores don't make their money from selling bread and milk, but a store that doesn't sell bread and milk is run by fools.
[+] [-] Kwpolska|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] googlewillgoog|1 year ago|reply
But they never marketed it, among all the backlash over turning down Google Domains there was never any true call-out to this. To this day I suspect many people don't know about Cloud Domains (which still exists and accepts new domains). I can't fathom any user-related reason for this - the contract in selling to Squarespace must have forced Google to be unable to properly market Cloud Domains as a transition option. If not, the Google Domains PM truly didn't know the existence of Cloud Domains?
[+] [-] chromakode|1 year ago|reply
Squarespace's domain panel crashed with a nondescript error when I tried to update nameservers prior to transferring out, and they shut off the Google nameservers as soon as the transfer went through on their side. To add insult to injury, Squarespace makes you wait 5 days for a transfer, with no way to expedite -- and in my case, they waited 6 days, taking me offline on a Friday night. This was the worst experience I've ever had using a domain service.
[+] [-] oldnewthing|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] underdeserver|1 year ago|reply
You shouldn't ask people to migrate before having a documented, tested, tool-assisted, clear and intuitive migration flow that takes very little time.
[+] [-] notepad0x90|1 year ago|reply
At its core, alphabet is a services company, it does not sell goods (to the most part). Their board needs to decide if the company should focus on business services or consumer services and replace the executives with people who have experience in that area.
The actual quality of GCP is superb in my opinion. They have a flair for architecting excellent solutions. I prefer GCP over any cloud from a purely technical perspective. Their leaders just don't get that it isn't enough. They're not operating a toy or a museum of technical marvels. Actual people need to use it.
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jodiug|1 year ago|reply
Contrast to Azure who despite their SLA had significant outages every few months that were very noticeable, sometimes even requiring us setting up an entire new K8s project from scratch. AWS is better in terms of reliability. Their UX is not great though, I often feel like I'm a wizard waving my wand with permissions and connecting things like audit trails. Many actions are a bit delayed in their effect. I've also had to contact support at times to raise arbitrary limits in the platform.
In balance I would recommend GCP. Their product closures have not affected me enough to scare me away. I guess experiences vary depending on which product we are using.
[+] [-] zacmps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sunaookami|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 8490109481|1 year ago|reply
Example is a sidebar that opens for adding an email during OAuth flow, after adding it clicking "Add" once did nothing, there was no feedback. Had to click it at least 5 times for it to go away and save correctly. In fact this is even specified in the documentation for the third-party tool (Google Drive downloader[1] step 18) that you have to click it multiple times. I don't think this is normal.
And also I should mention, depending on hardware specs the GCP portal was nearly unusable. So hopefully one will not need to rely on creating OAuth resources for a CLI program on the same computer. Although to be fair, I wasn't benchmarking against AWS/Azure on that hardware (since I needed to use GCP Google APIs).
[1] https://github.com/glotlabs/gdrive/blob/main/docs/create_goo...
[+] [-] chii|1 year ago|reply
Large shops - aka, a shop where you're not part of the controlling entity - tend to prefer either AWS, or Azure depending on how hard the CIO got wined and dined previously (and existing inertia - older shops that used AWS as an early adopter seems to stay with AWS).
> Their UX is not great though
i agree, but nobody really cares enough. On the other hand, i'd not pay more for better UX. Judging by the current state, i say a lot of customers fall into this category.
[+] [-] JackSlateur|1 year ago|reply
azure is microsoft, so this explains that
gcp has "a vision": if you do not share it, it's a pain. Also, gcp has some sick design for core products : checkout load balancers if you want a "good" laugh. It's a stack of hack, put one on top of the others
I would not recommand against GCP, it's the average player: not the best, definitely not the worst.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peterbmarks|1 year ago|reply
"More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed."
[+] [-] slyall|1 year ago|reply
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...
[+] [-] politelemon|1 year ago|reply
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/02/retrospective-and-technica...
[+] [-] re-thc|1 year ago|reply
I don't know if media or the readers are at fault. The article doesn't even make sense.
> More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access
If Google really caused such a huge loss there would be no joint statement. The buyer i.e. UniSuper would be trying to sue them. The fact that it is a joint statement implies the two parties are sharing the responsibility. Now complaining about UniSuper is boring and so spinning it on Google Cloud gets clicks.
[+] [-] throwawaygoog31|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rurban|1 year ago|reply
That reminds me in their interview process with me. So you are hinting they also use bots for hiring developers. Would explain everything.
[+] [-] postsantum|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] arresin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] richardw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iTokio|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ErneX|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|1 year ago|reply
These vendors underestimate the impact of having something so fundamental managed by a weird 3rd party. Route53 gives me a lot of confidence that I'm not going to be jerked around with domains and DNS. This factors heavily into my purchasing decisions.
[+] [-] remram|1 year ago|reply
Azure I can't use at all. Impossible to find the products I want in the UI.
[+] [-] chews|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jclulow|1 year ago|reply
They're a trash company, and anything you get from them, even when you pay for the storage, is at best accidentally delivered to you and they could roll over in their sleep at any moment and snuff it all out.
[+] [-] fsflover|1 year ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146082
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705122
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799
[+] [-] darby_nine|1 year ago|reply
Unfortunately, they're also notoriously unreliable as a dumb pipe.
[+] [-] postsantum|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abrbhat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asah|1 year ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+cloud+profitable
[+] [-] re-thc|1 year ago|reply
Is this "hate" coming from the actual buyers though? Often the 1s commenting are the actual "users" just not the 1 that's paying the bill.
[+] [-] PunchTornado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aabhay|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffrallen|1 year ago|reply
Smaller cloud providers cannot (and do not want to) afford the costs of constant product churn. So you get a smoother, long term relationship with a smaller company that's more likely aligned with your goals.
Disclosure: I work for a European second tier cloud provider.
[+] [-] unkoman|1 year ago|reply
It doesn't help that the platform has stagnated and customers are afraid of committing due to loss of features. In comparison AWS doesn't remove features for customers or always provide alternative ways to migrate to. SimpleDb is the prime example here.
[+] [-] xyproto|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] more_corn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pvtmert|1 year ago|reply
> "had to migrate my domain after Google decided to shut down Google Domains decided to shut down."
[+] [-] ashishb|1 year ago|reply