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Ha! Founder here. Tell me why? Trying to make it easy, not be terrifying! I think the embed generation saves folks some steps.

It's terrifying in a hacker/cool way. Making the wrong query, creating millions of rows, and sending possibly millions of requests to the LLM provider sounds risky. But I like it :)

Founder and CEO here. Great question. Right now, since you are linking MySQL files that means that all the extenions need to be GLPv2 or compatible license. In the future, we are hoping to have a stable SDK that is indepedent of the MySQL files so that if you run it out of process, that would give more licensing options to folks. There is a proof of concept of an out-of-process mode for the extensions in the alpha, but we haven't spent much time on proving it out.

With Bring-Your-Own-Media (BYOM), customers supply their own installation media and bring their SQL Server licenses to Amazon’s RDS Custom managed cloud service. RDS Custom for SQL Server is a managed database service which provides administrative access to the OS and DB configuration.


Disclosure: I work on GCP

Thanks for the feedback. As the person that named both products, I can say we spent a ton of time debating this but we felt that the fact one is an enterprise file share and the other a document database service focused on mobile and web would mean very little conflict for customers. We will keep an eye on any customer confusion it might cause.


Please make sure you read this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17402427

It explains why this is linguistically bad. Basically, a billion people on this planet don't distinguish between the l and r sounds, so for 1/6 of the planet, these names are identical.


Native Chinese speaker here. That post is comically wrong. For one thing, you don't pronounce either "file" or "fire" like "filer" or "firer" -- isn't English amazing ;) -- so there's no L/R sound in the first place for us to supposedly confuse.


I mean all of the following in the best possible way:

Perhaps also worth looking at the screenshot in the blogpost.

You have in there:

---

Datastore

Storage

Filestore

---

So, datastore is not storage, nor is filestore. What is it storage storing if not data or files? Why are files not data? I have no idea what should go where.

> We know folks need to create, read and write large files with low latency. We also know that film studios and production shops are always looking to render movies and create CGI images faster and more efficiently. So alongside our LA region launch,

So I couldn't create, read or write before without low latency? I thought this was already a feature of your other products

> we’re pleased to enable these creative projects by bringing file storage capabilities to GCP for the first time with Cloud Filestore.

For the first time? I couldn't store files before?

I'm not trying to be an arse, but I really don't get from this what the key difference is from everything else you offer.


> What is it storage storing if not data or files?

Objects. Cloud Storage is the S3 competitor.

> Why are files not data?

“Data” as in rows in a database. Like Dynamo.

Everything on a computer is data. The thing you’ve got to understand is that the terms we use, “objects”, “files”, “data” — these don’t refer to types of data, but rather to access paradigms for data. The semantics of their storage, indexing, mutability, etc.

An object is a blob of data named by a key, that you can retrieve entirely, or overwrite entirely, and where usually you automatically get a version history of old versions that have been overwritten that you can retrieve, with a cutoff for automatic GC.

“Data” is a structured tuple that a database knows how to index into, and sort by the columns of. You insert rows, update columns of rows by a key, or delete rows by a key.

“Files” are seekable streams where you can index anywhere into a file by position and then read(2) or write(2) data at that position, and where other clients can see those updates as soon as you sync(2), without needing to close(2) the file first.

All could be used to implement the other (S3 is implemented in terms of Dynamo rows holding chunks of object data, for example.) But each access semantics has use-cases for which it is an impedance match or mismatch.


Thanks for the explanation, the file/object/data difference makes sense.

> An object is a blob of data named by a key, that you can retrieve entirely, or overwrite entirely, and where usually you automatically get a version history of old versions that have been overwritten that you can retrieve, with a cutoff for automatic GC.

And yet they refer to the objects inside as "Files" and support seeking

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/goog...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14248333/google-cloud-st...

I know this is just bikeshedding about names and terms but it feels confused.

I think some of the confusion in the list is because of the mix of generic and product naming.

Data can be stored in datastore. But also in "spanner" or "bigtable", which are not parts of "datastore", or in "SQL" which is a language. Object can be stored in the object store called "storage" which is also within an entire category itself called "storage". So there's "Storage" which is a group of all these kinds of stores, and "Storage" which is a very specific type of store.


This will be extremely confusing for Japanese and Korean speakers.


I think its worth adding some additional phonetic context around this remark (I made a similar remark and my coworkers thought I was making a racist joke).

The reason native Japanese speakers struggle with "R" and "L" sounds is because they just have one phoneme to work with, which sounds (to a native English speaker) like a combination of "R", "L", and "D". If you aren't exposed to phonemes at a young age, it is difficult to expand your set later in life.

An analogous difficulty might exist for English speakers if a Chinese company came up with two product names which used the exact same sequence of syllables, but had "tonal" differences in pronunciation.


Actually, not that much for Korean speakers, because "file" becomes "pa-il" and "fire" becomes "pa-i-eo". (Damn English triphthongs...)

Hopefully they won't launch Cloud Pyrestore any time soon...


Similarly for Japanese, "file" is pronounced/written as "fairu" and "fire" as "faiyaa". If the service docs are translated, then they would look like (and sound as) difference names.


By the heat of the fire, and play their songs from LyreStore.

Floating plastic would go in the GyreStore.

If you had a bunch muck it would go in MireStore.


This will be extremely confusing for anyone.


Disclosure: I work on GCP

Thanks for highlighting. We were aware of this and working with the local sales teams to make it as easy as possible.


Even if the products are for different types of customers all of them will still need to click the right one.


I mean.. I get it, there isn't a lot to work with, it is a thing that _stores files_ after all, and it most closely resembles a normal filesystem.

But it does make GCP's storage product naming even more confusing overall (after "Cloud Storage" vs "Cloud Datastore" mentioned above).


What about when the names are spoken, especially by non-native English speakers? They're close homonyms.


I'm non native English speaker and I didn't notice the difference.

Please, use useful names that do tell what is it about.


Not only is it confusingly similar to other storage products, but the abbreviations collide among all of them. GCF means how many different things now? (I always considered it to mean Google Cloud Functions - kind of an important product.) Don't underestimate the importance of these things. I can't even talk to my colleagues about your products without us all misunderstanding each other.


What was so special about the name that it was even worth the debate? Why not avoid the problem?


You made the wrong choice.


Update the chooser flowchart [1] when it's out of beta or when appropriate. This page also has brief descriptions and comparison tables.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/storage-options/


> I can say we spent a ton of time debating this but we felt that the fact one is an enterprise file share and the other a document database service focused on mobile and web would mean very little conflict for customers.

How about naming one as Cloud FileStore and other as Cloud DbStore?


Maybe you could give them pokemon/ikea-like nicknames? Stupid idea, but it might really help people searching for stuff.


Oh oh, it's already causing a lot of confusion. Just check the 70+ comments in this thread alone hating on the naming and professing their confusion and it's been out less than 12 hours... and that is from a self selecting very tech savvy audience. I think you've got a problem.


Spent a ton of time and still decided to stick to names that differ by a single "r vs l" letter.

Wow. Don't mean to be rude but go for a walk outside and speak to 3 people outside the bubble.


Disclosure: I work on GCP

Thanks for the feedback. We spoke to number of existing GCP customers for feedback, but it's fair to say we can always talk to more non-customers.


To be fair, I think “Filestore” in itself is a pretty descriptive name, and the real problem is the name “Firestore”. I can imagine the internal discussion when a bit like that as well, and here we have the result.


You don't see the irony in that statement, as you toss in your low-effort criticism just to stoke the HN feeding frenzy?


> low-effort criticism

It's a clear blunt suggestion to get out of their bubble.

No one outside Google would hear that explanation and say "Yeah totally makes sense one of them is an enterprise file share and the other a document database service focused on mobile and web, crystal clear and very little confusion.".

What more do you want out of my comment for it to not be low effort? Write a 3 page essay about it carefully making a case based on peer reviewed scientific evidence?


You misunderstand, the comment provided no value at all; it’s not that I wanted peer review studies.


Disclaimer: I work on GCP

Can you point me to the complaints? I will take a look.



Disclosure: I work on GCP

To understand, what services got pulled? we have a very long deprecation policy and I can't think of anything that has been removed in the last couple of years.


Quick question. Which version of MySQL were you running? 5.6 is single thread on the slave and falls behind more easily. 5.7 gives you multiple threads and does a better job of keeping up.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and Cloud SQL


Whichever the highest version offered in the second generation Google Cloud SQL offering as of November/December 2016. If 5.7 was available, I would have chosen that. I don't specifically recall though.


Two things:

1) Google Cloud Storage can host static websites:

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website

2) Google Cloud Platform has a 1 year deprecation policy, which would never happen with a product that so many companies and customer rely on (Google Reader had a small but passionate base)

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud Platform


To clarify on #2, are you saying that Google Cloud Platform in its entirety has a 1 year deprecation policy? Or that individual products within the platform have a 1 year deprecation policy? I'm not worried about Google deprecating the Storage service but that they could kill off the entire platform.

Also just wanted to say that I've been extremely happy with GCP thus far and all the services I've tried thus far have more features than RS. I really hope GCP is here for the long haul.


Sorry, for any product on GCP, there is a 1 year deprecation policy. GCP isn't going anywhere. See the comment about Snap and Diane Greene's involvement (she is an Alphabet board member).

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud Platform


For what it's worth, a fairly large 5 year contract between Google Cloud and Snap Inc was recently made public.


There is real work to migrate you application to use Cloud Spanner. Your schemas and queries will work with some tweaking but we don't have ORM support at beta.

We are going to produce some additional collateral on migrating from popular RDBMS, but the Quizlet post is the best reference right now for migrating from MySQL.

https://quizlet.com/blog/quizlet-cloud-spanner

We have released client libraries for Java, Go, Node and Python on Github, but we haven't used those clients to implement support for popular ORMs.

Basically, the open-source ecosystem will need to add support for these ORMs but we will contribute wherever we can to push these initiatives. If we get lots of demand for a specific ORM, we will look into doing something special for that.

Hope that helps.

(disclaimer: I work on Cloud Spanner)


Yes, it's something we have on the roadmap. We will adjust priority based on the level of demand so thanks for your vote ;-)

(disclaimer: I work on Cloud Spanner)


Dumb question: Since strings are supported, couldn't you just store some JSON as a string? Or are you talking about supporting queries that involve parsing the JSON on the "server"?


Yeah, parent probably meant queryable JSON types, a la Postgres[1].

1: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/datatype-json.htm...


Not dumb, I was being inexact. I was talking about Spanner understanding the semantics of JSON, similar to Postgre's JSONB or MYSQL's JSON.


I think the OP was saying "dumb question" as in "I have a dumb question" rather than "this is a dumb question". At least that's the context I inferred.


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