AWS had several major outages in the past, especially between 2009 and 2012. In some cases, it was not only downtime, but also data loss, which is the hardest part. 8,760 hours in a year, if you are down for a total of less than 8.7 hours, you're in the >99.9% uptime category (also called "three 9s").
Four 9s (99.99%) is considered a nice plus. Very few businesses really need that.
However, uptime is one thing. Data loss is another different beast.
AFAIK, this one for Google is only downtime. Being able to maintain GCE up for most of the year, except a few hours, means more than 99.9% availability, which is what most customers need.
Operational excellence, or the ability to have your cloud up and running, comes only with a large customer set; Google is now gaining a lot of significant customers (Spotify, Snapchat, Apple, etc), and therefore I expect them to learn what's needed over the coming months.
2016 will be ok. 2017, in my view, will be near perfect.
If Google wants to differentiate them from AWS, they should offer an SLA on data integrity (at a premium, obviously). Here's how you can get thousands of enterprise customers.
However, uptime is one thing. Data loss is another different beast.
AFAIK, this one for Google is only downtime. Being able to maintain GCE up for most of the year, except a few hours, means more than 99.9% availability, which is what most customers need.
Operational excellence, or the ability to have your cloud up and running, comes only with a large customer set; Google is now gaining a lot of significant customers (Spotify, Snapchat, Apple, etc), and therefore I expect them to learn what's needed over the coming months.
2016 will be ok. 2017, in my view, will be near perfect.
If Google wants to differentiate them from AWS, they should offer an SLA on data integrity (at a premium, obviously). Here's how you can get thousands of enterprise customers.
Shameless plug: I've also extensively written about AWS, Azure and GCE here: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/the-cloud-wars-of-2016-3f...