I personally like Google Cloud, but this blogpost feels a bit like a advertisement, it seems pretty clear that Google Cloud has offered a better pricing deal than Azure could and that is why the are moving.
> GCP offered the performance and consistency we needed. A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future
Azure does a lot of cool stuff as well, not really a valid reason why you would move (other than you got a better deal).
If they're investing in kubernetes it makes complete sense to switch to GKE over AKS. We used AKS and it gave us tons of trouble while GKE seemed a lot more polished.
Considering Brendan Burns works for Microsoft now...I have doubts that the differences are that staggering at this point. That being said, I generally avoid containers because they are overkill for most workloads, imo, so I can't speak from much experience on the topic.
Who is this "Brendan Burns" dude and why is everyone treating him like a deity? I've never heard of him even though I spent nearly a decade at Google, some of it in Google Cloud. Much of what Kubernetes is is basically a "lightweight" take on Borg. It even comes through in naming: borglet <-> kubelet, borgmaster <-> kubernetes master. The story of Kubernetes is very much about standing on the shoulders of the giants, and most of those giants (members of the Borg/Omega team) are still there, at Google.
I feel like that's like working at Microsoft and having never heard of Alex Kipman. The creators of Kubernetes are very open about it being based around Borg's structure. That's no secret.
Sure, but to say that just because Burns works at Microsoft now is a good reason to think that MS is a containerization leader is a total non-sequitur. Google, however, is _the_ containerization leader, having created CGroups and having run everything in containers for a decade before they became "cool".
FWIW, Google certainly led on cgroup development for a while, but the cgroupv2 maintainer works at Facebook, and we're active in upstream container development in both linux and systemd.
I don't necessarily think you're wrong; I just think your argument, as stated, is weak.
Microsoft is undoubtedly A containerization leader at this point, I never claimed they were THE containerization leader. The fact is that there is likely not a huge difference at this point between the big 4 (I'd include IBM since they bought RedHat.) Kubernetes is no longer that new and all 4 big cloud providers have had plenty of time to more or less be on par with each other. I'm sure Google has some other insight, but I doubt it's so much that many people are flocking to their service for it anymore.
> Microsoft is undoubtedly A containerization leader at this point
If that was remotely true then what product/service does Microsoft offer that is remotely comparable with Docker/Kubernetes and is neither Docker or Kubernetes?
Now, I happen to think Kubernetes is better, but you asked. Service Fabric was available to the public in 2016 but has been used internally since 2011.
The author of the first version of Kubernetes. Author as in the person who wrote the code and bootstrapped the project. If memory serves well. Haven’t been at Google for a while, but in early 2010s would have been unrealistic to attempt to externalize Borg/Omega. I still remember a high level architecture diagram of Borg covering a whole wall.
Why would it be "strange"? At the time I left Google it was 60K+ people. You'd need to be someone of Mike Burrows' or Jeff Dean's stature to even register on the radar.
I work at Google, I neither know Brendan Burns nor Mike Burrows. According to his LinkedIn Brendan was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, i.e. Level 7. That is not a particularly high position.
My previous manager was a Principle Engineer (Level 8). I am pretty sure no one here ever heard her name.
Most people who do follow the development of Kubernetes in the community do know him though. What matters is not whether people know him or not, just that Azure has done lot of cool things around k8s in the last few years and lot of top folks who are part of the community are working at Azure / Microsoft.
Mike Burrows keeps a very low profile but he was actively involved in the creation of Chubby along with the more... subtle... aspects of synchronization primitives. He also co-invented Burrows Wheeler encoding (bzip2 uses it). Google would not have been able to build its empire without his contributions.
I might agree that full on kubernetes infrastructure may be overkill... but there are a lot of smaller options for using containers. Simplest that I've used was 3 dokku servers behind a load balancer and all apps were deployed to all three servers in the same way. DB managed outside the containers.
I don't even do development in containers, but run services I'm not actively working on in them locally... this lets me have them nearly always on in the background and work on the piece I need to work on in the foreground. It's simply a matter of automation with a fast reset to zero.
The code that gets exercised the most is the code you can trust the most... by automating it once, you can repeat it. By automating with a container, you can isolate it. You can ensure the boundaries are proper, well defined and enough detail/documentation to repeat again and again. I do containerize the DB locally as well. I can reset and spin up the application stack I'm working on in under a minute total. Generally only resetting the db (around 18 seconds) or api (around 5) when those parts of the application are changed. I can work on the front end locally and just have the background in the background. I can tweak the background without touching shared environments. I can tear it all down and work on a different project without borking my host/local environment.
Yeah, orchestration setup and config in a cluster for hosting can be hard to learn (still learning current kubernetes myself) ... that doesn't mean that containers themselves are overkill.
Both Azure and AWS's managed Kubernetes offerings launched in mid-2018, while GCP has been running it since at least 2014. So there's no denying that Google has more experience, but that gap is only going to close as time goes on.
That discussion seems to indicate that 1) it was a console/UI issue (not a service outage), and 2) it was actually resolved within the day but the final incident update came 3 days later.
Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer', one thing struck me:
"This Pingdom graph shows the number of errors we saw per day, first in Azure and then in GCP. The average for the pre-migration period was 8.2 errors per day, while post-migration it’s down to just one error a day."
This was measured independently by pingdom, not by gitlab.
While I have absolutely no love for Azure, it's worth pointing out that doing a migration, any migration to a new environment can often be an opportunity to clean up and fix old junk that has not gotten attention, and that issues in a new environment often end up being treated as a problem caused by the migration and given attention and fixed, where the same issue might have been ignored in the old one because "it's always been there".
As a result it's often really hard to tell if all the differences are down to differences in quality between the two providers vs. things done as part of the migration.
But of course this also does not mean the providers aren't different in terms of quality, just that it takes more than a graph like that to tell.
I feel like those posted uptime/reliability numbers are far lower than either GCP or azure is capable of providing. I suspect the majority of the errors/failed requests are probably code bugs or deployment issues in gitlab...
Perhaps they haven't been doing enough chaosmonkey testing?
Hi, GitLab employee from "marketing" here. I take a little offense to
> Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer'
A lot of us in marketing have technical backgrounds and are GitLab code contributors, that's what made us competitive for the positions we were hired for. We just write a lot of the blog posts so the product teams can focus on their own work. They're also usually very collaborative.
Sorry if you meant no offense, it's just a bit of a button-press issue for me!
I did not write anything about author having/not having technical skills. You're reading it between lines, and in my opinion it shows (again: for me) kind of insecurity. I suspect that emphasis of 'being competitive for the positions we were hired' also shows it. But it's my opinion.
What I wrote (and what I stand for) is that it is good to know that this article was written by 'content marketer' - meaning person with a SPECIFIC agenda for writing that article (by definition of 'content marketing' itself).
Thats always good to know. If anybody praises something I always prefer to know if there is something (e.g. salary?) which may created/influenced/PAID such opinion. We (hackernews) derided it on many ocassions. To give different example: I personally ask all bankers if they have commission on me (for specific recommended product), or not. And I consider it healthy to know and ask.
To make it clear, I think that there is a good content marketing, and that there is a a bad content marketing. The bad for example can be seen easily with searching google for "blog 10 best sleeeping bags" and similar.
Hi, the content marketer here. I'm just quoting the presentation we gave at Google Cloud Next '19 almost exactly. Instead of making you watch a 30+ minute video, I outlined the core points from the presentation so that you could still be in the loop.
While I don't take offense to your comment, I think you made it for a reason. It's an ad hominem fallacy. These are our staff engineer's words almost to the letter, if I had posted it in his name would you have taken it at face value? I think it's important for us to ask these questions of ourselves and analyze why we form certain opinions.
That said, I do appreciate the feedback, and thank you for your comments. I'll try to keep your opinions in mind with future posts as I certainly never want to come off as having an "agenda." We're not running some BuzzGitFeedLab mill here :) .
I thought Andrew gave a wonderful presentation, and yes, we do use Pingdom as a tool to measure these things.
Azure is currently experiencing DNS issues in all regions which is actively causing downtime for my GitLab repos[1]. Whether it feels like advertising or not, their numbers seem to support their claims that GCP is more reliable.
Unfortunately Azure AKS is quite hacky and shouldn’t be used in production (heard that from MS people). They will be releasing a more production like K8s distro in near future but it will have different caveats. On the other hand if you look at Google GKE - it has been production ready for multiple years with auto upgrades, self healing and just great ui/cli :) so yeah, if they use K8s then GKE makes total sense.
Hi! I cannot stress enough AKS is ready for production, we have many many MANY customers using it. I am EXTREMELY biased, but I do have some background as I was the first/lead PM on GKE for several years. :)
If there's something we can do to help, please let me know!
Disclosure: I work at Azure on Machine Learning (but not AKS)
I would expect that most companies that both a) are big enough for the cloud providers to bother talking to and b) have proven they have the ability to run their workloads on multiple clouds are getting discounts from whatever cloud provider they end up using. One condition of these discounts might be that they can't publish exactly the prices they are getting, or any information that would let you infer the price.
I don't see how Azure might be designed causing delays like that. A simple operation of deleting a VM should do an RPC from the API endpoint to a machine-manager type service, which in turn does an RPC to the actual machine.
I would expect all that to happen typically within 1 millisecond, and perhaps up to 100 milliseconds at the 99th percentile latency when the VM machine is overloaded/overheating/otherwise unhealthy.
So what design did Microsofts engineers pick that can ever take 10 minutes to do anything?
Adjusting your marketing in light of an industry-shaking acquisition like that is hardly growth hacking. You would be absolutely and completely insane not to execute it in exactly the way they did.
Growth hacking is a silly buzzword, it's just marketing. And good marketing involves reacting quickly to position your product when the competitive landscape changes. Sales is the most important thing in the success of a company so this was definitely the right call to make, and I doubt it really affected their product any.
GitLab marketing employee here, just popping in to say that a majority of us focus on both (and are encouraged to). While we aren't specifically on the "product" team, we're still code contributors like any other community member. That was one of the biggest perks for me joining a FOSS team.
To me gitlab already provides the absolute best CICD service. It's like they need work to provide a better service than any of their direct competitors.
I've just gone through the process of selecting a new CI/CD provider, and I think GitLab CI is being let down by its tie in to GitLab.
I've heard great things about GitLab CI, but we aren't looking to move our version control and there doesn't seem to be a way to have hosted CI from GitLab without it.
Can I ask where you're hosting your code today? We offer first-class support for external repositories stored on GitHub with GitLab CI/CD for GitHub [1]. In addition, you can do similar CI/CD integration with any git repository by URL as well [2]. We see both of these as "minimal" integrations and we're hoping to add more first-class support for external repositories this yeah - but would love to know what you'd focus on first if you were Product Manager for a day :smile:
> GCP offered the performance and consistency we needed. A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future
Azure does a lot of cool stuff as well, not really a valid reason why you would move (other than you got a better deal).