Google inflates infrastructure cloud

Google's cloud needs some work.

I like most of Google's offerings but Google Drive Sync is absolutely not ready for market and should still be in beta. It works OK for the free offering where only a small amount of files are synced but for everything else it's useless.

I bought 400GB space and uploaded around 200B of user files, pictures etc. I then bought a new PC, even though I already had a copy of the files offline, Google Sync client cannot use a folder that already has files in it and insists on downloading everything again. Just to compound the issue, it can't be left to go and get everything overnight or it will use too much RAM and crash (I have 16GB RAM on this machine). I had to select 3-4 folders for download and let it complete them before selecting more.

I eventually had the 200GB downloaded and synced up again. Shortly after this, I bought a larger SSD to use as my Windows drive. I cloned the original drive (after closing the sync client) but on the new drive the database is corrupt. Google's answer: disconnect the account and download everything again.

Next bubble -- public clouds?

Wow, another vendor jumping into public IaaS. Amazon, Microsoft, VMWare, Rackspace, IBM buying its way in, now Google... I wonder if we're going to have a public cloud bubble on our hands.

With all these vendors spinning up huge amounts of compute capacity, and turning it into a commodity, there's going to be an interesting race to the bottom on pricing. I can't wait until one vendor starts going below their own costs to "make it up in volume" the same way the dotcom people did in the 90s.

Actually, the way out for these guys is to get out of truly public cloud and get back into the old-fashioned hosting business. After all, they have massive data centers now, all they would have to do is carve them up into private instances the way they did before the cloud became the new marketing hype. I think that if customers could be reasonably assured that their data was separate from others' data, and there was an SLA beyond "oops, sorry about that." they might begin trusting the cloud vendors to host their workloads.

So yeah, just like the dotcom boom was good for expanding the Internet massively, the public cloud boom is going to leave us with lots and lots of cheap compute, storage and network capacity for some time to come.