Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily.

Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split between AWS and Rackspace; this was several years ago during an interview, so maybe its changed). Sure, start in Google, or AWS, but at some point you will either need to use multiple compute/storage providers (redundancy) or go to your own gear (redundancy and cost).

Example: "In 2014, Moz CEO Sarah Bird said that it was spending “$6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on [its] own data centers.” Simply put, the cloud killed its margins." [6]

EDIT:

simonebrunozzi: Forgive me, but when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, "easy" is relative. It is much easier when you're not relying on underlying primitives that are difficult to reproduce on your own at another provider (witness how terrible Open Stack is; no one wants to do that if they don't have to).

Am I minimizing the effort involved for this discussion? For sure. But the money involved...it solves most problems you would have migrating between providers.

> It seems to me that you have no serious experience in the real world.

You are entitled to your opinion. I have seen the pain, and it is relative. Its easier when someone says, "Here is the budget, just fix the problem", and your vendor's (AWS/Google) margins are 20-40% (these are real margins pulled from earnings reports); that's a lot of money you can put back in your own (or your shareholders') pockets.

If you we're spending $2 billion dollars, and I told you I could save you $400 million by spending $100 million, wouldn't you take that deal? Even at $200 million, its a bargain!

For less than what Snap is spending on Google cloud infrastructure, SpaceX built a rocket that can take a payload to orbit and return the first stage successfully (SpaceX has taken on ~$1.2 billion in funding over the last 14 years). Moving out of a cloud provider is comparatively hard?

EDIT: Maybe this is a roundabout way to kick back to Google in order to get preferential treatment on the Ad network. It sure isn't a logical decision.

EDIT 2: @ashayh: I'm not saying go back to good ol' bare metal. For $2 billion, you could build your own cloud provider out as an internal operation. The amount that's being spent on Google Cloud is egregious, and worse yet, common shares have no voting rights to push back against poor decisions like this.

EDIT 3: @hueving: HN throttles my posting; editing this comment is my only way to respond. Sorry about that!

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

[1a] http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/cloud-storage/how-dropb...

[2] https://blog.twitter.com/2016/overview-of-the-twitter-cloud-...

[3] https://code.facebook.com/hardware/ | http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/facebooks-data-centers-worldwi...

[4] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/

[5] https://code.mixpanel.com/2011/10/27/why-we-moved-off-the-cl...

[6] http://www.thewhir.com/blog/moving-away-from-aws-cloud-dropb...