Replay - GCP’s Many Profundities with Miles Ward

·40 min·3 clips

Miles Ward, the CTO at SADA, explains why Google Cloud's future is secured by billion-dollar commitments from major enterprises.

Corey Quinn hosts Miles Ward, CTO at Google Cloud partner SADA, for a replay episode discussing Google Cloud Next 2021 announcements. Miles begins by highlighting Google's increased focus on live demos and packaging benefits for developers, operators, and data scientists. He points to the GME Group moving its futures exchange to Google Cloud as evidence dispelling fears about Google shutting down cloud services. The conversation turns to Thomas Kurian's leadership at Google Cloud, with Miles noting internal criticism from engineers about Kurian bringing 'too much Oracle' into Google's culture, but defending these changes as necessary for enterprise focus. They examine Google's product strategy, including the global distributed cloud (GDC) initiative and Cortex, which combines consultancies, ISVs, and Google products into pre-configured solutions. Corey critiques AWS's emphasis on primitives over solutions, using Lego as an analogy for why customers often prefer ready-made options. Miles details Google's technical launches, particularly a Postgres compatibility layer for Spanner that could enable global scale without software rewrites. They discuss database trends, with Postgres emerging as a dominant compatibility standard and MongoDB improving reliability. The hosts compare cloud provider approaches to outages, noting AWS's regional isolation versus Google's global control plane, and debate the rationality of multi-cloud deployments. Miles calls multi-cloud 'dumb' for most companies but acknowledges its value for high-margin businesses, predicting gradual adoption over time. They explore Google's BigQuery Omni for cross-cloud data analysis and the economics of data transfer fees. The episode concludes with Miles sharing contact information and reflections on cloud industry predictions.

As heard by us

A salty case for buying the solved problem, not just the stack.

Corey Quinn and Miles Ward turn a cloud discussion into a plain lesson: many customers would rather buy a solved outcome than assemble every primitive themselves.

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Why you'd press play

When you want the cloud buy-vs-build argument with real-world examples.

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