Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

gcplogoAs a developer with fifteen years of experience in IT, I’ve dedicated the past five years to working with the cloud. I’ve been involved with cloud services from AWS cloud (since 2010) and Azure. A bit over nine months ago, I started working almost exclusively with Google Cloud (GCD) and Google Compute Engine as part of a consulting project I led. The project involved building a backend for a high performance web application. At first, the customer thought to use their own data center, which I discouraged. Then, Google approached them and offered a package that included free support and better pricing for their services, which the customer agreed to take.
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now and in many ways, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been great to work with. However, it’s the first time that I’ve seen such great challenges compared to my experience working with other clouds. It feels like these challenges stem from Google’s isolated development culture, with their “my way or the highway” approach. In this article I would like to address these thoughts and provide you with a few suggestions.
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Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem

While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”).

API First – The move to the cloud pushes the data center to re-invent itself within the new environment. It is a fact that, although the cloud is a pure revolution (at least in MHO), terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI are still valid in this new IT era. Thanks to industry leaders such as Salesforce.com that realize the notion of “API first”, vendors such Amazon cloud present new capabilities first through their APIs. In this way, the cloud operator platform enables development of its ecosystem.

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