I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

https://nandovillalba.medium.com/why-i-think-gcp-is-better-than-aws-ea78f9975bda

by hui-zheng • 3 years ago

256 396 3 years ago

nandovillalba.medium.com

firebaze3• 3 years ago

a.k.a. Freedom of thought. Warning: extremely large wall of text waiting for you.

On a more serious note: I, and most of the business I work for, value stability over hype. Skip to the almost last paragraph "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google", if that is of interest to you :)

verdverm• 3 years ago

this is a rather inaccurate description of the article

not a wall of text, the abandoned part is in the middle, not the end

GCP has more uptime than AWS, and is stable, not sure what you are insinuating with "value stability over hype", the businesses I work with leave AWS for GCP for (1) cost savings (2) developer experience

it hits many of my points for choosing GCP over AWS

firebaze3• 3 years ago

You're obviously right. Have my upvote for the well founded, substantial answer.

esafak2• 3 years ago

Does anyone have recent experience with both? I'm in the market, for a startup, and I need to decide. My priorities are the data warehouse (BigQuery vs. Redshift) and ML (Vertex AI vs. SageMaker).

This article is three years old. Vertex did not even exist then.

js4ever• 3 years ago

One of the 2 never deprecate anything and ensure your workload will run untouched for 10y or more. The other one will force you every 6 months to update sdk, api endpoints or even kill a service you need in weeks. I let you guess who's who

MisterPea• 3 years ago

I've worked in AWS before and also in a company that uses GCP.

Funnily enough, I would recommend AWS over GCP in every single category except for the two that you mentioned.

Although Snowflake is my choice for DW and it is cloud agnostic

opjjf• 3 years ago

Don't know enough about Vertex AI, SageMaker is great though. But on BigQuery v Redshift: Having used both over many years, BigQuery is the clear winner. It's a much better, much more modern product.

BigQuery is also a central part of GCP, with almost all services having integrations to it (PubSub, CloudSQL, Bigtable, etc). It also seems to get a lot of resources and is continuously improved. That is not the case for Redshift, which is not as important to AWS.

mardifoufs• 3 years ago

Choose whoever gives you the biggest startup credits. The UX and UI experience is secondary to that imo, and the other technical differences aren't something you will care about as a smaller startup.

slotrans3• 3 years ago

I would choose Redshift over BigQuery but that's because I know how to use it. Actual skill at databases is increasingly rare, so BigQuery wins this one for most. Watch your bill.

craigmcnamara• 3 years ago

I find the GCP documentation to be lacking compared to AWS. Specifically while using GCP with Terraform I hit more frustrating nonsense error messages with little to no google hits or undocumented behavior around IAM config compared to my experience doing similar things on AWS.

shell0x• 3 years ago

100%. My experience has been the same. The docs have their shortcomings and I ended up reading through so many Github issues and random blog posts trying to resolve the issues.

From a documentation perspective, AWS is still the best.

s-xyz2• 3 years ago

Wow I would literally say the opposite. I even use GCP docs as an example for my engineers on how to write proper docs, and did several workshops using the GCP docs as reference. Happy to share the presentation if interested.

div_zero• 3 years ago

I'm a technical writing manager on GCP, and we are actively working on improving Terraform documentation. Thank you for bringing up two significant problems with using TF on GCP.

If you are willing (and of course have the time), we would love to hear other issues you - or anyone else who reads this thread - are having with TF documentation on GCP as we try and make things better.

mdaniel4• 3 years ago

Given: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3...

how would any reasonable person know what https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... to enable without (a) trying it and squinting at the error message (b) clicking on the API documentation <https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest/v2/projects...> then realizing it, also, does not mention run.googleapis.com, click on "supported service endpoints" <https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#rest_endpoi...> and only then learning about https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#service:-ru...

Repeat for https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... although in both cases I guess the astute reader may have spotted the run.googleapis.com in the forbidden service labels and cloudidentity.googleapis.com in the example

Since, to the best of my knowledge those bindings are auto generated <https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules#magic-m...>, I would hypothesize it is not insurmountable drop in the seemingly existing declaration of APIs required: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d... https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d...

robmsmt• 3 years ago

I am about to go through this so happy to give feedback

nknealk• 3 years ago

Can you please update the terraform docs for google batch? In [1] it’s really difficult to know what everything in the json configuration is under the base64encode() call. What levers can I pull? How do I run something more complex than hello world? Do I need my CICD to upload scripts to GCS and have the instance download them at runtime and hardcode that path into the batch script?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/create-run-job-using-ter...

clutchdude• 3 years ago

This is probably more a request at the compute team/gke teams but...spot management.

For example, managing a spot fleet in AWS via terraform is filled with features and levers I can pull. It's easy to manage basic scale-out/scale-in procedures and allows me to set thresholds.

In GCP, as I understand it, I can only manage a node pool at a basic level.

EDIT: Also, yell at the people who manage the python library.

https://cloud.google.com/python/docs/reference/container/lat...

Generated samples suck - take a look at the boto3 docs and see if they tell you to go look at code generated samples.

rendaw• 3 years ago

Rinse and repeat - someone complains about cloud provider, a cloud provider person shows up and makes a "we want to hear more about your problems" statement, people reply, they do nothing. How many times has this happened? I'm more disgusted by the farce than by the lack of action.

Don't you have feedback buttons on the docs? What happens to the feedback from those? Please prove you consider feedback before asking people for more of it.

dantiberian• 3 years ago

A general issue I have with GCP docs is that they are overly implicit. Often the interaction of two features is implied but not specified. Another issue I have is when implementation details are waved away rather than explained. It adds up to an experience where I am trying to read between the lines of the GCP docs for a feature to understand what is really happening.

AWS docs are the opposite. They are often very long and verbose, but once you read the whole manual, you can be guaranteed to have a good understanding of the service.

My advice for the Google team would be that if you are ever writing documentation and ask yourself “does the customer really need to know about this?”, the answer should always be yes.

aaarrm• 3 years ago

I've not used AWS but have been continuously curious if their docs are as scattered as GCP's, this is good to finally know.

adrr2• 3 years ago

Google's support is the worst. Have an issue like those random nonsense error messages, good luck getting it resolved. AWS is complete the opposite. I had an issue Aurora Postgres and got to chat with the product manager of the product.

Google could have the best products on the market but no one is going to use them if the support isn't there.

I was sad when Looker got bought by google. I remember having issues with setting up looker and using their chat functionality and having the CEO of Looker answer my question.

latchkey14• 3 years ago

Google's support is the worst.

5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.

gorjusborg• 3 years ago

I had the same gripe when I worked with GCP. Their stuff is exotic, and had weird behaviors in corners, but the docs didn't give you enough context to steer away from them.

However, over the last 5 years or so, AWS docs have gotten worse.

So I guess now that they are both bad I can't complain?

denvrede• 3 years ago

Did they? Do you have an example at hand? We ran into "weird" issues a lot of times with AWS services just to discover afterwards that almost all of them were covered by their documentation.

It was totally our fault and these were also no "hidden" docs.

slotrans3• 3 years ago

Every GCP product is poorly documented.

There are often no examples at all, and when there are they only cover the "hello world" case.

Last I tried, the documented examples for Cloud Functions v2 simply did not work.

notfried• 3 years ago

I don't buy the article's argument around the "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google". Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and/or reliability, unable to compete on price or features due to better economies of scale of the competitors.

Before Google kills products, they lose interest in them.

firebaze3• 3 years ago

It's not highly unlikely. Google has so much ad money at hand, anything else hardly matters.

esafak2• 3 years ago

Not going to happen; they kill consumer- not enterprise products. I searched https://killedbygoogle.com/ for "Google Cloud" and the only dead enterprise products that stood out were Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cloud Prediction API. But they replaced those with Firebase Cloud Messaging and the AI Platform Prediction API.

slimsag2• 3 years ago

And Enterprise Hangouts:

Workspace customers (the paid business version of Google apps) finally had Hangouts removed in March 2022

And Google Domains..

And Google Cloud IoT Core..

And Google Go Links..

And Google Maps Coordinate..

...

splix2• 3 years ago

It can create problems from a different angle, though. Google might lock your account for no reason for a week, without any explanation. If that happens, it's your problem if you lose your whole business after a week of downtime. Since it's Google, you can't even contact support.

This has happened to me a couple of times. Once, my account was locked for a day because their system flagged one of my servers for suspicious traffic. They locked all my servers, databases, and everything else, not just that one server. Another time, they locked a different project for a week. It actually took me a week to find a human who could unlock it; otherwise, it could have been even longer. I still don't know the reason for the lock.

So the main problem is that Google don't care about GCP at all, and threat paid customers in same way as free users (i.e., hostile to both)

apetresc• 3 years ago

GCP doesn't really have the Google problem of lacking support contacts. I've managed relationships with GCP for a couple of different companies now (from startup to mid-size enterprise), and in all cases I had multiple dedicated account reps that I could not only get on a phone, but frequently met with in person.

Maybe the story is different for very very small fish, but I had decent experiences with support even at the ~20-person company spending ~5k/month level.

vlastik3• 3 years ago

That's exactly why would I newer support opting for GCP.

With AWS, we have our account manager, whom I can call and he actually has some powers and can fix and do stuff for us.

theshrike79• 3 years ago

With even a medium level investment in AWS, I can get actual human people from Amazon on my company Slack on a channel and I can talk to them directly. I can get them to fly to our office to train people or workshop on how to use the resources more effectively.

On GCP I get some AI bot that doesn't answer anything and if I anger it by accident, my account and my business is gone. Then my only option is getting on the HN front page to get some help.

dang• 3 years ago

Many ways where GCP excels over AWS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124350 - May 2020 (39 comments)

skadamat• 3 years ago

My biggest challenge with GCP is that I'm still not convinced Google cares that much about this division.

They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau.

Also, I'm still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren't linked to advertising. Google Search, Gmail (kinda), Maps, Android, and YouTube are their darlings.

Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure.

christkv• 3 years ago

Considering their earnings today being down in cloud I think I would rightfully worry about their long term commitment.

resolutebat2• 3 years ago

GCP revenue is up 28% YoY, and it went from a $440M quarterly loss in 2022 Q3 to a $266M profit 2023 Q3. Who'd shut down a business like that?

danielmarkbruce9• 3 years ago

I used to work in GCP. They are definitely committed to it. Search, Android, Google Cloud, YouTube - definitely committed.

It's the random little things they build too many of and hence close down. They never really understood branding. Slapping Google on everything doesn't help, it hurts. Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that.

idunno246• 3 years ago

i dont doubt gcp will continue existing. but individual services/products/apis/pricing break way too frequently, and the response from google is deal with it. small companies dont really notice it, and how anti-customer it is, but when once a month youre dealing with some firefight because gcp decided to change something its tiring, since at a big company it means tracking down ten different teams. ive not experienced anywhere near the churn in aws

mvdtnz6• 3 years ago

They are definitely committed to it.

Google on Stadia:

October 2019 - "It is a long term view that Google is taking"

November 2020 - "roadmap of about 400 games in development right now from 200 developers [...] 2023 is really kind of where we’re aiming our sights"

February 2021 - "building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business [...] remain committed to Stadia as a platform"

September 2021 - "gaming is an incredibly important vertical at Google"

November 2021 - "eager to continue working on bringing the best games and new features to our community of players so that we can help build a bright future for cloud gaming"

February 2022 - "we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022 [...] more feature goodness coming to Stadia too - stuff we can’t talk about just yet"

September 2022 - "You might have seen one last game arrive on Stadia today. It's a humble :heart: thanks :heart: for playing from our team."

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/30/23378757/google-stadia-co...

Bonus comment from Google regarding Inbox:

"With respect to the upcoming Gmail announcement, there are no changes to Inbox by Gmail. It remains a great product for users with specific workflows and one in which we test innovative features for email."

alphalima• 3 years ago

Yes, especially around Looker. It's so strange/non-cloud. The 0-users 0-usage price is $5,000 per month.

willsmith72• 3 years ago

I generally prefer AWS except for the good experience I've had with cloud run, but GCP getting shut down is not something I would worry about. These cloud services are highly profitable

latchkey14• 3 years ago

Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure.

AppEngine is going on, checks notes, 15 years now.

fhoffa5• 3 years ago

AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

Since you're checking notes, please check out all the AE service deprecation notes.

Disclosure: I worked for Google for ~10 years, and I fought internally many of those deprecation decisions. I did not succeed.

acdha2• 3 years ago

A better question is whether it’ll have improved or had price increases. GCP has had a bunch of increases lately, and you never know what will be next so you always have to guess at whether you’ll regret locking yourself more to a proprietary service.

s-xyz2• 3 years ago

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of what you are used to. However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling. And all of that should be as simple as possible. There is no need to overcomplicate. In this way I can focus on what makes my product unique, rather than spending my time on over-engineering repetitive features with zero value added.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services.

Confidence that it will continue to exist in the next 3-10 years?

Eridrus10• 3 years ago

What odds would you like to bet that GCP is going to be gone in 10 years?

nerdjon• 3 years ago

For a fairly simple setup AWS automates a lot of things. If I just want an EC2 instance and a database, the VPC already exists and there is now even a button on an RDS that says something like "connect to ec2" which sets up the security groups on both for you.

However the argument against using GCP has already been stated in this thread multiple times.

- Will it exist in 3-5 years. Google has a reputation for a reason.

- Will the cost increase in the next year. Google (including google cloud) has a reputation for a reason.

- Here we have seen time and time again problems reaching support with Google Cloud.

Meanwhile my personal AWS account that I spend maybe $5 a month on... I emailed support about a billing problem and got a response about a day later.

I would not risk my job by using Google Cloud and being at the whims of Google being Google. The last thing I want is to have to go to my leadership and explain why the cost is going up or why suddenly we need to spend a bunch of engineering effort because google is discontinuing something.

If I really didn't want to support AWS/Amazon (which is fair) I would go Azure long before going GCloud. Hell I might be convinced to go IBM but thankfully I don't have to make that decision with Azure.

kstrauser• 3 years ago

Nailed it. When we've had problems with AWS, I could drop our rep an email and be on a conference call with the engineers who run the service a day later. That not for a giant account, either.

They'd also periodically reach out to offer free consulting services that would cut our monthly bill. They were upfront about the motivation: they wanted us to integrate more of their services. The upside for us was that we could get better, cheaper service. If you're planning on sticking with them anyway, that's a very attractive offer.

Meanwhile, the support venue for our enterprise Google Workspace account was a mutual support web forum as far as I could tell.

Unless you've experienced both, it's hard to believe how radically differently the 2 companies handle customer support.

jsnell3• 3 years ago

The argument being stated multiple times doesn't mean it is valid.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all launched roughly as many products in the last couple of decades, and killed roughly as many of them unceremoniously after the products failed. (Amazon execs used to outright brag to the media about how many products they killed, since it showed that they were daring to take risks.)

AWS, Azure and GCP have also all launched roughly the same product portfolios, and each of them killed basically none of those products.

badrequest2• 3 years ago

I've been watching folks here on HN speculate that Google will kill GCP "any minute now" for at least the last 4 years, so ya'll can keep holding your breath, I will be having fun deploying things for 1/10th the price of AWS.

acdha2• 3 years ago

However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling.

You get that on AWS, too. The difference in my experience has been that once you’re out of a narrow range of features you’re more likely to hit something which is builtin on AWS but has a GCP ticket from 5 years ago with no progress. If you have any kind of security compliance requirements that gets brutal on GCP since you have to take on running an entire service to get that one missing feature.

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

I used to work in cloud security, mostly AWS but got to hear about experiences with GCP.

AWS IAM is much better than GCP, or was 3 years ago. If you are in an industry where fine-tuned RBAC per service is a thing you want, it's better to go AWS, all things equal.

Also, GCP reps suck compared to AWS in terms of responsiveness and general give-a-shits. Hearsay.

_cenw2• 3 years ago

Yeah, no. GCP actually allows you to give developers full permissions on their project. This sort of separation doesn't exist on AWS, at least not without making it very hard to impossible to share resources. So on AWS, you either have a really good platform team that handles permissions / terraform review / all infra setup (unlikely), a bad or understaffed team doing the same so everyone waits a week or two on specific things being set up (and everyone will hate them for killing their velocity), or you let everyone run wild with way too many permissions so they can actually use the console, hoping they'll stick to best practices (they wouldn't). At least developers doing unsafe things is contained in GCP.

But all that aside, AWS is better. It's much more predictable which things will work together from the documentation, the support is better and the IAM is better on paper, if you actually have that unicorn platform/infrastructure team.

zepolen• 3 years ago

GCP support is a joke compared to AWS.

pirsquare3• 3 years ago

Yep shutdown our production servers and take 1 whole week to get it resolved. Nothing fraudulent on our end. Just missing out on KYC form.

marcinzm• 3 years ago

GCP is overall a good product. Support is so atrocious and they break things often enough that it more than offsets that in any larger scale use case in my experience.

Ameo• 3 years ago

My two cents, GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:

- Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless/containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic).

- BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the details yourself. Billing can be either extremely cheap or rather expensive depending on what you're doing, though.

- GCS Archive Storage. 1/3 the cost of glacier for storage ($0.0012/GB/Month lol), but more for retrieval. Has none of the annoyances of Glacier (you can download your files instantly, upload using normal APIs). Perfect for extremely cheap backups.

- Cloud Spanner. I've not had a reason to use this yet myself, but there really aren't any comparable offerings that I know of.

JSavageOne• 3 years ago

Yes Google Cloud Run is my go-to for all my side projects, and AWS doesn't have anything equivalent. Never saw any reason to use AWS for that reason as Google has everything else I'd need. And if I just want a cheap VPS, would prefer to use something cheaper like Linode or Digital Ocean.

siquick• 3 years ago

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

Beijinger2• 3 years ago

Is google so cheap?

I am a small fish in the big sea but I use this for my personal projects:

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

latchkey14• 3 years ago

Cloud Functions, Cloud Tasks and Cloud SQL Postgres are fantastic too. Very low cost that scales with you and essentially zero lockin.

r3trohack3r2• 3 years ago

Has Cloud Functions solved their logging issues yet?

Last I checked, the lifetime of the function was bound to the lifetime of the request. So you have to fully flush your logs to their log ingress service before you respond to a request, otherwise GCP will suspend the function and eat your logs.

Originally, this resulted in me having - to my surprise - very few logs coming from my functions.

Once I discovered what was going on, it resulted in me having to increase the latency of responding to the request while I waited for logging to flush to GCP's log ingress service.

sz4kerto• 3 years ago

Cloud Postgres had some issues last year though -- when some UK datacenters stopped because of HVAC failure then HA PSQL instances got stuck during failover and there was no manual way of resolving this .

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/fmEL9i2fArADKawkZA...

"Customers experienced downtime on Tuesday, 19 July 2022 starting at 09:25 US/Pacific. 36% of zonal (non-HA) instances in europe-west2-a were affected. Additionally, 31% of regional (HA) instances whose primaries were located in europe-west2-a experienced extended downtime because they were unable to successfully fail over to another zone. Finally, customers experienced some failures during the incident for backup, instance creation, update, delete, restart, export, and Database Migration Service operations. The total impact duration was 17 hours, 30 minutes."

(This hit us hard.)

n_e• 3 years ago

Cloud SQL Postgres

Although it works and is solid, I wouldn’t say it’s fantastic. My impression is that Google makes limited investment in it to steer customers towards their own services such as Cloud Spanner.

- Major versions are 6 months late - Small instances are horribly slow - Integration with other services is poor (e.g. the Cloud Run integration doesn’t work with a database private IP, so you have to fallback to configuring a VPC and connecting the standard way) - IAM authentication, although great when it works, is complicated and poorly documented - The UI has very few features, for example it isn’t possible to query the database from it - Although I’ve never seen any provider have it, automatic upgrades between major versions would have been nice.

code_runner• 3 years ago

bigquery is a joy to use! I really don't hate the editor in the browser either.

gnarlouse• 3 years ago

Honestly Cloud Run is so well designed, it really puts AWS Lambda & Fargate to shame.

datadrivenangel• 3 years ago

BigQuery is very pleasant. It just works serverlessly.

Apparently some of the key people behind BQ are now working on MotherDuck, which is a cloud data warehouse version of DuckDB.

ramraj072• 3 years ago

I’ll have to try this just for the name!

vgt• 3 years ago

MotherDuck head of Produck and co-founder checking in. Happy to answer any questions :)

derefr2• 3 years ago

GCS Archive Storage

Have you considered Backblaze B2? (It has free egress!)

I think GCS is pretty good as a coherent offering that includes the various storage tiers + auto-classing + lifecycle notifications to pub/sub to feed Cloud Dataflow, etc. But if you're storing data purely for retention or disaster recovery, you should consider a service architected as a backup provider that happens to present an object-store abstraction, rather than an object-storage provider that happens to support your backup software — often you'll find very different that the provider themselves have made very different CapEx trade-offs, resulting in very different pricing models, that can favor your use-case heavily.

(I say this as someone who uses GCP for elastic load, but has non-IaaS bare-metal for base load; and where the DB instances living on that bare metal do their pgbackrest backups + WAL streaming against a B2 bucket.)

But, of course, if your data-to-be-archived is originating in GCP, it may well cost you more to send it over an external provider like Backblaze, than it costs to just keep it in GCS. That is, as they say, "where they get ya."

user3939382• 3 years ago

Or Wasabi

nh2• 3 years ago

What is the current story regarding replication between B2 and GCS Archive Storage?

B2 currently costs 6 $/TB/month, GCS Archive Storage costs 5x less at 1.2 $/TB/month.

Do both of these guarantee that if a single data center location catches fire, your backups will not be lost?

aravindajju• 3 years ago

Cloud Run is the only reason to use GCP for me. I haven't seen any product/service that simple to use. It even offers mapping domain names. All my projects run on Cloud Run.

jillesvangurp2• 3 years ago

We used cloud run for a while and it's great. It does not allow for background threads though and that caused us to upgrade the setup eventually.

Upgrading from cloud run to use proper vms was very easy because vms can be booted with a docker container as one of the arguments. It will just go off and run that with a default OS. Running docker containers in gcloud is super easy.

And scaling that is easy too. Basically you define an instance template that defines vm details; including the docker container url. And then you update your instance group with that template and all the instances are replaced one by one. You use the instance group as a service for your load balancer and with the right health checks configured this basically gives you zero down time deployments, auto scaling, etc. If there's an issue starting the container, it just aborts the restart and continues running the old containers.

The closest thing in AWS would be ECS but it's a lot more hassle to setup.

One great feature in gcloud is "copy this screen/dialog/whatever as a gcloud command". That made scripting the above super easy. We use github actions for all this. For each service, we use 1 command to update the template and 1 command to deploy it.

QasimK• 3 years ago

I’ve used Cloud Run and it does allow for background threads.

Beijinger2• 3 years ago

$0.0012/GB/Month

That is interesting. How to you access this API? Can you do SFTP?

This has about the same pricing:

https://www.opendrive.com/pricing

(Yes, it says unlimited, but they told me, they significantly slow it down after 10 TB)

ramoz2• 3 years ago

Asset Inventory is slept on.

gigatexal• 3 years ago

As a consultant (side gig) I have to use both based on what the company that I’m assigned to is using.

AWS S3 and GCP GCS are basically the same in my head.

Where things fall apart are actually the cost estimator. GCP’s is far simpler. AWS’s makes me wish I had Corey Quinn on speed dial.

Redshift is far too complicated and has too many knobs. Give me BigQuery all day long even with its quirks.

steren• 3 years ago

Cloud Run product lead here. Your comment and its replies warm my heart. On behalf of the whole Cloud Run team: Thank you!

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

I did a shootout of a number of cloud visual recognition APIs. All of them took less then 20 minutes to have a demo running except for GCP which rudely required me to install special software to log in which trashed the Python installation on my machine and overall took an order of magnitude more time than all the others... No thanks.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Python inside and outside of Google is a disaster. They broke their own API last year with a release of their own project.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/2uFuNdeK9xXSwY9w7c...

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Technology isn't a weakness with Google... never was. Most of their stuff is top-notch technology-wise. The problems are from a business-angle and being their customer.

Meaning, even if you're a F500 company you are an insignificant gnat on the windshield of the gigantic G-machine that makes its money elsewhere.

Now, I don't believe think they'd actually shut GCP down. Cloud is just too damn strategic in a post Y2k world.

Complain about Amazon if you wish, and there are many reasons to. They are not as tech-oriented and the task-master culture of Bezos is well-known by now. But at the very least they are sales and customer focused, and retail and cloud is where they make their money. So incentives are better aligned with them. Even if their customer service is not amazing, the fact that it actually exists is a large factor in their favor.

ctvo• 3 years ago

Technology isn't a weakness with Google... never was. Most of their stuff is top-notch technology-wise. The problems are from a business-angle and being their customer.

There's very little technologically impressive with GCP. It's the same products from all three vendors with few exceptions.

What's a clear weakness with GCP is Google's lack of seriousness as operators. Regions in the same data center, outages that take down a whole region for 3+ days. It's not good.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

I remember early on G was doing several second billing, while AWS was on minutes. There are other things like better performance, authoring K8s and http2/3 etc that gave them the edge. AWS was earlier and had greater breadth of course.

simonebrunozzi2• 3 years ago

See Google/Alphabet's latest quarterly earnings.

There's a decent chance that in a few years GCP will be no more.

I had an argument with one of the biggest investors in Google a few years ago, in which I was predicting exactly this scenario. He didn't believe me.

Perhaps I was right after all.

GCP lost a ton of money since its inception. Its leadership is so far away from being able to run this business properly, that I would never recommend anyone to put all their eggs on GCP.

Plus, as your company scales, you should REDUCE, not increase, your cloud usage, in favor of a properly optimized on-prem.

Well, just my 0.02. What do I know, right?

VirusNewbie2• 3 years ago

Wait, so a few years ago you predicted that they'd deprecate cloud, and now, when GCP is making a profit and growing revenue substantially, you're more inclined to think your prediction is coming true?

Plus, as your company scales, you should REDUCE, not increase, your cloud usage, in favor of a properly optimized on-prem.

Yes if you get to dropbox size it might make sense to go to on prem, but most F500 companies save money going to the cloud for a multitude of reasons.

throwaway29903• 3 years ago

What do I know, right?
you should REDUCE, not increase, your cloud usage, in favor of a properly optimized on-prem.

Based on this. Not much. Unless all you need is a single location and a couple of load balancer servers. No you should not move to on-Prem. It has no benefit and isn’t magically cheaper.

heybrendan• 3 years ago

While I appreciate you've disclosed your affiliations in your profile, can you claim complete objectivity on this topic?

Would your stake in VMware and AWS not be {threatened,weakened}, perhaps severely, should Google succeed in Cloud?

simonebrunozzi2• 3 years ago

I haven't had any stake in VMW or AWS (AMZN) for a few years now (~6 as of now). I was AWS 2008-2014, and VMware 2014-2016.

zoomzoom• 3 years ago

My view is that there are areas where GCP is better and areas where AWS is better. AWS has a much bigger community, and better business continuity story. GCP has a better developer experience and more uniquely-amazing best-in-class products (e.g. Spanner, Cloud Run, BigQuery). In the end, I don't believe Google will shut down GCP.

At Coherence (withcoherence.com) - I'm a cofounder - we deliver a developer platform that lets use use either cloud in a developer-friendly way. It also gives you some protection against lock-in to either cloud.

mdaniel4• 3 years ago

non-slimey link: https://nandovillalba.scribe.rip/why-i-think-gcp-is-better-t...

and, as an AWS-er having to now support GCP, I violently and emphatically disagree with this:

The experience of GCP on the other hand is more like collecting the car keys and driving off from the parking lot, with the option of dismantling and customising the car if you wish, but the default is a fully built functioning car with cohesive parts so you can quickly achieve your objectives, which is driving around, not assemble the car.

Oh, really? I invite the GCP newcomer to click on https://console.cloud.google.com/ create a new Project, and then run $(gcloud functions list) or, as the sibling comment pointed out, $(gcloud run jobs list) and watch it cheerfully tell you that you must turn on those services for each and every Project. And not just cloudfunctions.googleapis.com or run.googleapis.com, it's for damn near everything a sane person would want to use cloud computing for

I reiterate: you cannot turn on those APIs for your GCP "account," you must do it for each and every Project you create

Oh, you're the Super Admin for your Google account? Well, be sure you grant yourself the resourcemanager.projectCreator Role because as super admin you don't automatically have it

A reasonable person may retort that these are "secure by design" by opt-ing-in to surface area and permissions that one wishes to have, but as compared to "create AWS Account, start using ELB like it ain't no thing and I have AdministratorAccess granting me * permissions" -- let's not start talking about collecting car keys and driving off the lot

nologic01• 3 years ago

would GCP (or AWS for that matter) survive on their own? What does the relation with the parent company provide and what does it demand in return?

From a business model perspective both these two entities are an aberration in how far they are from their corporate umbrella.

Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc are more natural players in this domain but DigitalOcean shows you don't need to be bigtech to carve a niche.

ajross4• 3 years ago

GCP, AWS and Azure are all, for sure, 100%, big revenue centers for their corporate overlords. Cloud is where you go to make money, not lose it. It's the "enterprise" of the modern world. The only problem with it from a business perspective is that it's increasingly commoditized and so everyone can only compete on price these days. So margins will trend to zero over the decades, but these will always be profitable.

akulbe• 3 years ago

All of the smack talk about AWS rings true in my experience. The documentation is terrible and incomplete.

That said… there's one MASSIVE reason I trust AWS over GCP.

Google has a knack for killing products/services. Even when they seem to be popular. You don't know if a service will exist next week. But you took the time to invest in the ecosystem and get to know the offering…

But Google does what Google does, and off to the pile it goes.

xyzelement• 3 years ago

Has Google killed Cloud services people relied on? I am asking in good faith as I don't know.

Whether Google kills random small-traction consumer products is kind of orthogonal to the Cloud question. If Amazon retail discontinues some Amazon Basics product, we don't read into that for AWS.

jcrben• 3 years ago

They recently sold Google Domains to Squarespace which is messy given how it was integrated with Cloud Domains https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/faq

redditor986543• 3 years ago

Google Cloud IOT.

vasili111• 3 years ago

How GCP support compares to AWS support? What is your personal experience with support?

pyrophane3• 3 years ago

Having had experience with both at the level of companies spending $50-100k/mo I can say both were pretty equally bad.

throwaway29903• 3 years ago

I doubt you were experiencing bad support with aws. You’re just bias.

pirsquare3• 3 years ago

Amazon is A-tier.

GCP is F-tier

GCP - Shutdown our production servers and took 1 whole week to get it resolved. Nothing fraudulent on our end. Just for missing out on KYC form.

preommr• 3 years ago

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google.

At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers.

Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million.

Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use quite a few google services from youtube, to google workspaces (a paid service) - I have never talked to a Google representative. I have talked to AWS service reps multiple times, I have talked to Amazon reps multiple times. Amazon as a company has real people you can talk to.

I don't trust google to not shut down my gcp account because my gmail was connected to some project where I accidentally sent a bunch of spam emails to a test account. And if that did I happen, I feel like I would just get an automated message and a bunch of hoops to jump through before I could talk to a real person.

ajross4• 3 years ago

No interest on engaging on the core issues of trust, except to say my standard bit: HN is a site predicated on the whole idea of embracing risk. Except with this one particular vendor who everyone loves to distrust. Maybe... it's not about risk at all?

DoctorOW• 3 years ago

Generally the phrase is "High risk, high reward." This would be considered a relatively low reward.

inopinatus• 3 years ago

There’s a stark difference between risk that is predicated on your own wits and risk that is mediated entirely through a capricious and aloof supplier with a bit of a reputation for the rug-pull.

rfrey• 3 years ago

This is a deeply weird take IMO. Nobody "embraces risk" because they have a risk fetish. You take on risk because you believe you can be paid for it, and perhaps you are better equipped to mitigate the risk than the people paying you to take it.

There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors, so a rational person would not accept the risk that Google pulls the plug on a product, or some contractor gets banned by Google and gets your whole account frozen, etc. There's no upside. It's not even gambling because there's no "win" possible - it's more like shooting an arrow straight up into the air and hoping it doesn't land on your head.

mef• 3 years ago

it does seem like any of Google's support options for paid services have the primary goal of reducing support load on Google, not to solve problems for paying customers

lima• 3 years ago

I have talked to Google representatives when I had an issue with my personal gmail.com account through Google One. It was fine and they fixed it.

Likewise, as a GCP customer, I've always had a real account rep and support I could talk to.

fooster2• 3 years ago

Yeah we’ve had one too. Actually no two. Wait three. Actually I’ve lost count. In the 6 years I’ve been using GCP we’ve had a new rep practically every quarter. It’s ridiculous.

bastardoperator• 3 years ago

I concur. Google doesn't seem to believe in a tangible customer service methodology at all. They go out of their way to remove human interaction at seemingly every level. I don't know if it's a legal strategy or what, but it gives me bad vibes too.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP.

All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled.

But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut down without recourse unless you really are being abusive, and Google's not cancelling the services companies are paying for. (The same goes for the paid tier of Google Workspace.) It's a normal paid B2B relationship with all that usually entails.

It's unfortunate that people take their experiences and the stories they hear about the free consumer side, and extrapolate them to assume they're also true about the paid business side. It's understandable, but it's just not the case.

And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely, or use that as a justification for choosing one or the other.

gustavus• 3 years ago

And neither GCP nor AWS is getting shut down. Even using the numbers you give, the answer is that the risk of either shutting down is zero for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to split hairs over which of two infinitesimally unlikely events is more likely.

That's what I thought for a long time about google domains. Yet here we are.

yaseer• 3 years ago

Google have shut down plenty of paid, and non consumer products.

Ones I have personal experience with include Stadia (paid), and app maker (business).

https://killedbygoogle.com/ doesn't struggle to find content.

pknomad• 3 years ago

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc.

I would also say that this is a byproduct of how google treats its customers, even on paid platforms. I used to manage Google Workspace few years ago (2016 -> 2020) and GCP (2018-2019) and I remember the difficulty I faced when attempting to reach a human. Even if I were to able to reach someone, I got someone who clearly was a tier 1 support, who wanted me to troubleshoot things by "turnings things off and back on again".

I've also seen blog posts (some even on hacker news) mirroring my experiences, so I know it's not just a "me thing".

Google is reaping what it sowed.

gbrindisi• 3 years ago

I did mostly agree with you that GCP is not Google etc etc until a couple weeks ago when they suddenly announced that they will move most of Policy Intelligence under Security Command Center Premium, throwing most of their customers security teams under the bus.

22c• 3 years ago

none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily

I'm curious how recent your experience was with GCP support? Sadly several contacts of mine were not long ago laid off from working there. Many of them had 10+ years industry experience. Presumably their roles were off-shored but from my experiences with other companies who have off-shored technical support, I don't imagine you'd get the same customer experience as you did before.

omginternets• 3 years ago

All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled.

Dunno, they've still taken the time to implement all this crazy auto-management software for their free tier, so I'm fairly confident they'll deploy it from time to time on their paid stuff.

slotrans3• 3 years ago

The customer service is awful and it is very difficult to reach real people. Even when spending a million dollars a month.

joedevon2• 3 years ago

I remember losing an argument with my company (that I cofounded) about using Google's awesome recruiting app that was part of GSuite. I said I don't trust Google not to kill it if there are less than a billion users on it. Everyone, and I mean everyone else said, nah. They'd be crazy to kill it. It's part of GSuite. They offer that to businesses and it's too core of a suite for them to kill it.

One year later, Google Graveyard.

patwolf• 3 years ago

I used to share that sentiment about GCP until they shut down a service I was using (Cloud IoT). Now I try to avoid GCP even though I really do like a lot of their products more than AWS.

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP.

Parent did point to Workspace where they also didn't get customer service.

To lay it first: GCP has excelent support if you're in the right bucket. For instance startup support programs will have dedicated engineers, sometimes on site, ready to meet and answer questions.

You'll also get that at the higher tiers (around where you start to negociate rebates in echange for usage volumes) with recurring slots with a support engineer to discuss your issues and growth inside the services.

But outside of the blessed situations, if you're just a mere paying user/business there will probably close to nothing for you.

And yes, education/corporate targeted products also get killed. Last month Jamboard's name was etched into its tombstone, along with Google Domains and so many others.

Even within GCP many products will get merged with more or less changes to adapt to. Stardriver becoming a different service with an unsearchable name comes to mind. Or the GA4 transition with the breaking changes.

poink2• 3 years ago

It's not just "free" customer products. See: Pixel Pass being canceled right before it was supposed to pay off with a phone upgrade. Those people paid significant amounts of money.

I don't think GCP is going to shut down as a whole, but that doesn't mean I'd trust Google to keep any specific service I might depend on up and running.

cameronh90• 3 years ago

conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP.

* Google Domains

* Google Cloud IoT Core

* Jamboard

Also they increased Google Maps pricing by like 10x at one point, and they increased Cloud Storage prices pretty substantially last year too. Price increases can be just as impactful as killing a product. I don't think AWS has ever increased any prices or shut down any service (though quite a few are essentially zombies - SimpleDB, OpsWorks).

Then on the consumer side, Google have killed quite a few paid products. One that bit me was they shut down Google Cloud Print which killed the ability for me to print to my (cheap) printer from my phone. Besides that, there was Nest Secure, Stadia, etc. etc.

Google's reputation problem isn't just coming from their free consumer apps.

havaloc• 3 years ago

I had a Google Workspace account and a bizarre issue with my account thinking I was on a Caribbean island. I was a paying customer, and could talk to a human, but it was an awful experience.

numbsafari• 3 years ago

Having spent the past week dealing with GCP support, which I pay for, I can assure you, it sucks. It’s miserable and my least favorite part of GCP by far.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

unless you really are being abusive

That doesn't put my mind at ease. Under who's definition? Do I even get told what I did wrong? You try to draw a distinction between the free and paid products but that doesn't address the perception people have of the company in general. If I was a small startup I wouldn't want to risk it.

mythz• 3 years ago

Getting rid of https://domains.google is a good indication that nothing is off-limits and everything is a bean counter report away from being abandoned.

What's worse is that their loss-leading free products kill competing products before they finally abandon it themselves, leaving the space much worse than if they had ever entered it.

No chance I'll ever vender lock myself to GCP.

jb_gericke• 3 years ago

We had our main GCP account suspended because we were running a Lightning node, and some Google automata flagged us as mining.

We couldn’t get hold of any actual person at Google, and were told by our Google reseller to buy a fairly expensive support package to have our issue expedited after raising multiple appeals/objections. Suffice it to say, we run out of AWS now. I’ve heard GCP support (in terms of reaching an actual human support person/engineer has only gotten worse since then, and our experience occurred a good few years back).

jknoepfler• 3 years ago

GCP starter earning a bad reputation for reliability, transparency, and support on day one. Maybe that's changed? I feel like a see a "GCK is hosed, google support is AWOL, our production environment has been down for 48 hours with no ETA" post on HN once a year.

Again, I'm willing to be wrong about recent reality, but GCP does not have a good reputation with its customers.

nucleardog• 3 years ago

I worked at an ad agency for a time. We were spending millions a year with Google on AdWords.

We onboarded a new client who had many different locations serving different brands. We set up these accounts, set up Google accounts for the locations to own/access the AdWords accounts, etc.

Out of about a dozen accounts, one got suspended.

There is no general Google Support for that. So I contacted AdWords support. They put in a ticket for me with the accounts team. They also told me it's unlikely I'd ever hear back about it and advised me that my best course of action was just to register a new account and hope that wasn't suspended too.

Three years later when I left that company, I was still getting occasional emails to remind me that my ticket was still open but there were no updates to provide.

Meanwhile, in AWS land...

With my personal AWS account (~$3k/yr spend) I've never had an issue getting in touch with support that can resolve any issue I raise. I accidentally bought a bunch of reservations under the wrong account and put a ticket in and they swapped them to the intended account right away. I raised a ticket about trying to use a new product and running into some issues that appeared to be on their end and a day later got an email from the lead engineer for the product.

At a company spending ~$250k/yr, not only could I access _the exact same support_, but we also had an account rep that would swing by the office once a month just to check in. We had his direct email and phone. He was actually empowered to do things. We had an AWS key leak and ran up over $100k in additional costs before we caught it and our payment didn't go through. Sent him an email and almost immediately got back to not worry about it--he'd put a note on the account that no action was to be taken without his approval. Shot off a ticket to support about the spend due to a security breach, and they asked us some basic questions to demonstrate that we knew how to prevent this happening again and then cancelled over $100k in charges. (Current company I'm at spends ~$360k/yr on GCP and we have no contact at Google.)

This isn't "conflating google's free product support with their B2B support". This is "google's culture does not leave room for providing proper product support".

cedws• 3 years ago

GCP has people you can talk to, you just need to bring enough money to the table for them to bother. In other words, the fat cats get support, the rest can suck it.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

You trust AWS? Seriously? Amazon?

What gets me is that AWS must have insane turnover with the Amazon stack ranking. The stability of that platform long term concerns me.

AWS is a utility at this point. Utilities are boring, conservative, and have people that know their systems and stay there for decades.

irrational• 3 years ago

I work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.

rossjudson2• 3 years ago

That speaks volumes about the quality of decision-making at your fortune 100 company, and about their ability to do due diligence.

gerash2• 3 years ago

I was expecting rigorous analysis in terms of cost of services and the complexity/simplicity of offering, reliability figures, etc. but this fortune 100 company went with feelings

next_xibalba2• 3 years ago

The group [Pichai, Page, and Porat] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said. [1]

That they’ve actually discussed shutting it down in the recent past lends plausibility to this risk. In 2019, they set 2023 as a deadline for moving into the #2 spot ahead of Azure. Obviously, they’ve not gotten anywhere near that.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

foobarian• 3 years ago

Wow. Imagine top level execs at Ford discussing, but eventually dismissing--the idea of leaving the automobile market entirely. Their hearts really aren't in it as much as with AWS.

dlubarov• 3 years ago

That doesn't sound plausible; this "person with direct knowledge" must have somehow received bad information or not been honest.

In 2019 GCP was generating $9b/yr revenue, making it second largest revenue source, and the fastest growing one.

steveBK1232• 3 years ago

Isn't one of the foundational problems of GCP that it's not really core to Google themselves?

AWS is basically the same infra Amazon runs their own business on, opened up for the world to use.

Azure is the backbone that Microsoft sells you all their cloudified Office/Outlook/etc suite of tools.

GCP is neither of those things to Google.

campers• 3 years ago

A good part of GCP is part of Core google infrastructure.

Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos. ... Spanner on the other hand processes 3 billion queries per second at peak, which is more than 20x higher [than DynamoDB], and has more than 12 exabytes of data under management. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-...

Google Colossus file system underpins all storage across Google services and GCP Cloud Storage. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database, provides metrics for Google's own services and GCP Operation suite. https://research.google/pubs/pub50652/

Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System - underpins access control across Google's product and GCP IAM. https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/google-is-moving-parts-of-yo...

sthuck• 3 years ago

GCP shutting down might be one in a million, but "Google cloud niche product X" is a lot more likely.

With GCP I feel like you should stick to the core services to avoid any risks.

jeremyjh• 3 years ago

I would put the odds quite a lot closer to 1 in 5 than 1 in a million. Google exec shuts down lackluster business ? It would not even be news outside tech/business circles.

wg02• 3 years ago

AWS is stable. In that, the DX is predictable. I'm using AWS for over a decade and had huge gaps in between but coming back never was shocked or surprised by things totally reshuffled.

On GCP, not the same. The GCP console of around 2012 if memory serves me well, is barely recognizable. That just the UX and I'm sure APIs would have changed as well in the meantime.

The hip product management culture of Google is beyond me. Today's cloud console would be something else tomorrow and I'm sure some hip and smart PM is chalking that out on their Chromebook or something. Sorry for the stereotyping.

As of speaking to customers, I bet AWS (real people) directly, routinely reach out to even 2 person startups. I have experienced it myself. They really do care. Even I had multiple hour long calls with Azure representative for an account who's monthly spend was a joke.

On the other hand, good luck with getting anyone from Google on email let alone phone.

andrewmutz• 3 years ago

I've never had a problem getting meetings with GCP reps for both big company spend and tiny startup spend.

If anything, they have been too eager to talk when I had nothing to discuss with them.

cco• 3 years ago

I'm a bit surprised they haven't spun GCP out of Google and into Alphabet.

Even if it's just to assuage fears.

abrookewood• 3 years ago

Agree 100%. They have done untold damage to their cloud business with their behaviour in the consumer space.

eximius• 3 years ago

While I never spent a lot of time in GCP, it seemed like it was harder to understand GCP itself as a platform compared to AWS.

That is to say that Google APIs and services seem fine, but figuring out project management and infrastructure management feel incredibly weird. Not necessarily bad, but arcane and awkward where in AWS I can just hit the ground running.

Arguably, debatably, GCP might have the "more correct" model with resources scoped to projects and such, but it does make the learning curve harder.

mdaniel4• 3 years ago

figuring out project management and infrastructure management feel incredibly weird

It's not just you, and the situation is worse than if they had no configuration management offering because, as Google is wont to do, they have several of them in various states of disrepair

- they cite terraform as their go-to deployment solution in damn near every blog post, but if you're trying to create something for (new users | deployment into _someone else's project_) the instructions start with "well, open a Terminal and ..."

- they now have some kind of "hosted terraform runner + state" whose name escapes me but is hiding somewhere in this list of a bazillion similarly named Cloud Somethings https://cloud.google.com/products?hl=en#section-14 ("Infrastructure Manager" is the one I was trying to think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548639 and is, ha ha, not on that products page which is why I could not find it)

- they started to have a CloudFormation replacement with Deployment Manager <https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/configurati...> but, again, I cannot stress enough how GODDAMN STUPID this is: one must enable deployment manager to use it, and the way one does that is via gcloud, click ops <https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library/deploymentmana...>, or terraform -- then, ha ha, you went through all that trouble but you can't create an IAM Role with it <https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/configurati...> partially because it's not a supported resource type and partially because MUTATING ROLE BINDINGS IS A RACE-CONDITION EVENT

And speaking of, there is, of course, no way to enable project services via Deployment Manager, so pound sand if your Project was not already carefully configured in advance of Deployment Manager

- cloud shell tutorials, which is basically the union of all of those: https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/cloud-shell-tutorials/ov... although in that case they do actually go out of their way to allow one to create a Project, with the activated service APIs, during the tutorial: https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/cloud-shell-tutorials/di...

Shakahs• 3 years ago

GCP has some nice things but AWS is simply more reliable.

The GCP outage [1] in April is a great example. A fire in europe-west9-a "zone" took down the entire europe-west9 "region" (because this entire "region" is actually housed in a single datacenter), which then caused a global GCP console/API outage because GCP's single global control plane couldn't reach europe-west9.

The fact that a zonal issue escalated to a regional and then global outage shows that GCP is not serious about limiting blast radius and all their talk of independent regional/zonal infrastructure is marketing fluff.

In comparison, AWS AZs can be up to 60 miles apart, share no physical infrastructure, and every region hosts its own API/console/control plane.

Also, Nitro. AWS has essentially eliminated the performance overhead of virtualization with Nitro, and years later GCP still has no equivalent so GCP customers still have to pay for that overhead.

1: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/dS9ps52MUnxQfyDGPf...

esprehn• 3 years ago

That Incident Report is phrased awkwardly.

GCP does not have a single global control plane. Each product has a separate control plane, and many/most of those are regional. GCE (Compute) does have a global control plane today.

The GCP Console, unlike other cloud providers, displays an aggregated view over all the regions. That means calling the control plane for a particular service which then in turn will do fan-out to all regions and merge the results.

For example a page might call the GCE global control plane:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1/inst...

Or a different page might call this with - as the location to globally fan-out instead of talking to a particular region's control plane:

https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/reference/rest/v2/pr...

(Specifying the location would call that particular region though)

During the incident the small (but critical) subset of Console pages which needed aggregated data from GCE's global control plane failed to load.

I agree it's unacceptable that the Console doesn't handle regional failures more gracefully, and it's very much been a priority to improve region down handling.

Source: I work on the GCP Console.

rwiggins• 3 years ago

because this entire "region" is actually housed in a single datacenter

From the incident report you linked:

"a cooling system water pipe leak occurred in one of the data centers in the europe-west9 region [...] Europe-west9 contains three buildings with independent cooling, power, and networking"

Also,

a global GCP console/API outage because GCP's single global control plane couldn't reach europe-west9.

again, from that page,

"A small number of methods within the GCE control plane API must collect information from multiple regions or zones by making requests to each regional control plane (called fanout requests). Google Cloud services including Cloud Console depend on these methods. When the GCE control plane for the europe-west9 region and zones went offline, some of these fanout methods did not operate correctly. During the outage, this led to global unavailability for some pages and control plane operations within Cloud Console"

It's certainly not great that a regional problem had global impact, but there is some nuance. For example, that paragraph talks about "each" regional control plane, in addition to a global control plane.

I don't mean to belittle the importance of the incident. Suffice it to say lessons were learned and follow-up changes were made.

As for Nitro - take a look at C3. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/introducing-c...

Disclosure: I work on GCE.

retinaros• 3 years ago

bigquery or table was down for a week

deadmutex• 3 years ago

Nitro. AWS has essentially eliminated the performance overhead of virtualization with Nitro, and years later GCP still has no equivalent

FYI, per https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/introducing-c...

The Compute Engine C3 machine series, now available in Private Preview, is the first VM in the public cloud with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and with Google’s custom Intel IPU. C3 machine instances use offload hardware for more predictable and efficient compute, high-performance storage, and a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated, secure networking

Disclosure: I work for GCP

pyrophane3• 3 years ago

We use GCP at my current company and I've used AWS a lot in the past.

Managing IAM users and roles on GCP is much more pleasant than AWS, and if you happen to use Google Workspace for you org, it approaches (as an infra engineer) the sublime.

GCP projects are a really intuitive way to isolate resources that you don't want to be able to talk to each other by default.

GKE has been very reliable.

BigQuery got expensive faster than I was expecting, but it works and integrates well with GCP IAM and makes managing access to datasets easy.

On the less positive side, support is lackluster, and GA doesn't necessarily mean what you want it to mean.

Edit: Almost forgot! Again, if you use Google Workspace, then IAP is fantastic.

lantry• 3 years ago

This matches my experience. Google workspace + GCP IAM almost makes it a joy to manage permissions

te_chris2• 3 years ago

I miss the glory days a few years ago when getting someone on the phone across your org as $400. From what I've read the Oracle boys flooded in and "sorted" that "problem"...

ramoz2• 3 years ago

IAM / Asset Inventory was always very useful as well.

TNWin• 3 years ago

We unfortunately have three vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure) at my company because of acquisitions and the cost involved to consolidate.

I am part of the central team that manages the provisioning users and accounts and billing.

AWS is miles ahead of how we can express what we want in accounting.

AWS reps are much much more knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with when it comes to billing.

flowingfocus• 3 years ago

Shameless plug: At the company I work for (meshcloud) we have developed a freely available model that describes the capabilities your central team is building up: https://cloudfoundation.org/maturity-model/

Disclaimer: meshcloud sells a product for teams in that space

Jgrubb2• 3 years ago

Could you elaborate on the accounting part? I'm deeply involved with billing on all three and while AWS seems to have all the data you're looking for in the CUR, it can be a multi-quarter job to build up the expertise to understand that fact.

GCP has different notions, like multiple credits applying to any given charge but again once you build up the expertise you can work with it. Azure seems by far the simplest to deal with and require the least wrangling.

balls187• 3 years ago

GCP lost me when I had to enable API errors from the console in order to see actual error in the console rather than a user hostile “Something went wrong” type message.

There is probably a rational reason for this behavior, but I don’t care. Just tell me the error.

pyrophane3• 3 years ago

One fundamental difference between GCP and AWS is that AWS puts zones in different buildings in the same, well, "region," whereas GCP just isolated them in the same building.

Not the end of the world, but you shouldn't assume that by deploying things regionally with GCP you will be protected against, idk, a fire or water issue that has building-wide impact.

negus3• 3 years ago

Who told you that GCP AZs typically coexist in the same building? Can you provide the source of this information?

If you open for example one site of us-central1 region ( 41.17425599375981, -95.80193009453644 ) you will see that just this one site has several buildings.

nathants4• 3 years ago

i’ve built bespoke automation at the api level for azure, gcp, and aws.

using azure makes you want to watch the world burn.

using gcp makes you want to give alcoholism a fair try.

using aws makes you wonder why we can’t have nice things.

ime those who prefer gcp tend to use a web interface. those who don’t have a preference tend to use iac. you want to work directly with the api, for innumerable reasons.

aws is the canonical example of use boring tech. nobody cares which database you use, not even a little. if you’re talking about your stack choices, your product likely has negative value.

of all the projects i pull into my rss reader, github commits on the aws-go-sdk-v1 are the most consistent and unsurprising. ive been following aws api and service changes since boto1.

there’s a lot i wish was different about aws, but nothing that’s urgent.

someday we’ll get better providers. it won’t be azure or gcp. it will be a new player.

by 2030 i’d expect to see someone disrupting aws by offering api compatible clones of the core services without egress fees. r53, dynamo, ec2, ec2 spot, lambda, s3, apigateway, sqs.

catlover762• 3 years ago

I defer to your expertise, esp when it comes to actually using these different services at scale, but as someone who used to deploy only to Heroku and wanted to learn real cloud deployment, AWS was pretty unapproachable. I almost laughed out loud at how unnecessarily arcane and difficult they made things when all I wanted to do was set up a simple Python app on EC2.

Google Cloud felt easier and intuitive to get started with, so that's what I use now.

nathants4• 3 years ago

too much maybe? yelling at clouds just feels so good sometimes. apologies. i do actually wish we could have nice things.

this is how aws became easy and fun for me[1]. a similar interface could exist for any provider.

heroku is right about picking the good parts and exposing only that as an interface.

1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

lowbloodsugar• 3 years ago

I mean, the author makes the arbitrary decision to equate AWS accounts with GCP projects, and then from there determines that this is unsatisfactory. This is not my experience at all, and it wasn't until I joined a Fortune 500 company that I ever came across the idea of separate accounts - and they were split along corporate accounting divisions.

pirsquare3• 3 years ago

GCP will shutdown your production servers and take one whole week to get it back. All for missing out on a KYC form.

Our story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917

Forget about the initial shutdown, how can you take 1 whole week to resolve something critical like this.

Even if Google is offering me $1mil cloud credits today I wouldn't risk my business with them anymore.

negus3• 3 years ago

Confirm. I like GCP and I'm going to use it for the new projects as well, but the situation with their antifraud checks is really troublesome

QuinnyPig2• 3 years ago

They shut down Google Cloud IoT Core. Y’know, the thing you need to update all of your field devices to be aware of?

bjord• 3 years ago

To me, GCP does seem easier to use, but I've recently had some instances where I had externally-hosted services (Zaps) make calls to my cloud functions there and inexplicably fail, with no logs whatsoever. While I was trying to figure out what went wrong, I found some other people online who said that their Google rep had mentioned "service instability" or something of the sort to them. Thinking that must've been the case, I went to reach out to GCP support (as nothing was mentioned on their outages page), only to find that it costs $30 / month to get help with anything other than issues with billing (and their pricing page threatens to ban you from support access entirely if you are caught buying it and canceling it after use).

sovnade• 3 years ago

To everyone saying GCP will be gone - it generates over $8 billion in revenue per year and $400 million in profit. There's no chance they kill it any time soon.

Yes it posted heavy losses in the past, but any major infrastructure does, and obviously there is a major amount of potential - and they have around 10% of the total cloud market share, not insignificant by any means.

hncommenter13• 3 years ago

One correction. It's not $8B per year, it's $8.4B in the last quarter--which is over $32B annualized, especially considering the last quarter's revenue grew over 20% from the same time last year. GCP's profit margins are low (for now) but positive. [1]

Moreover, per its filings, Google had almost $65B of contracted backlog representing customer commitments for future purchases (over multiple years), primarily related to Google Cloud. That is not to say those can't ever be unwound or delayed, but it's a pretty meaningful amount, even to a company the size of Google. [2]

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

edit: formatting

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

What are people's thoughts on DigitalOcean compared to AWS and/or GCP?

bloppe• 3 years ago

A lot of people (understandably) complain about longevity of various Google products. One thing that's nice about their overall cloud strategy is their focus on interoperability.

As the incumbents, AWS and Azure strive for lock-in. As the relative upstart, GCP aims to grease the wheels of switching to their platform. To that end, they've pioneered technologies like Kubernetes and the golang CDK to enable people implement their services in a vendor-agnostic way so they can easily switch around. GCP encourages that, which is nice, especially in the worst cases.

grahamgooch• 3 years ago

Perhaps from a technology standpoint (debateable).

But from the perspective of a CEO, we want

1. Talent hiring should be easy, so we can plan growth

2. There should be a good self service support for developers

3. Need good sales support in architecture and tech selection (when needed)

4. Need to be able to get through to support engineer in 5 mins or less (we use aws premium support)

5. Need single vendor (as much as possible).

We consume a lot if what aws has to offer - we use their workspaces, mac cloud, device farm, code commit etc

We did a proper shoot out. While aws has its idiosyncrasies- it’s light years ahead of Google and Microsoft

Ps. We use Gsuite (for the last decade) - teaching a live human used to a challenge - now it’s a major pain.

If we find a better alternative to Gmail, Gdocs (etc). I’d switch in a heartbeat.

ianpenney• 3 years ago

Tell me what your company’s existing IAM strategy is and I’ll tell you what cloud you should go all in on.

raxxorraxor• 3 years ago

What about the "I am the admin of everything and I grant specific users admin rights until they stop nagging"-strategy?

Medium sized company with low fluctuation of engineers.

DEDLINE• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate here? I think I agree with you but I want to know why.

0xbadcafebee• 3 years ago

I use both. GCP sucks, AWS rocks.

GCP is theoretically superior because it has more features and integrations built in. But in practice it's a big mess, and if you want to do anything the "not GCP way", you're better off just not using it at all. People talk about GCP "getting X right", which might be true, except to actually use the thing that they "got right" you have to use everything else they have, and good luck figuring out how to do that with their insanely bad/missing docs. Let's not even get into how they overload the same concept in multiple places, have tons of arbitrary limitations of naming conventions for different components, navigating the console is a pain (and again arbitrarily limiting), and services are weirdly implemented so the SDK is inconsistent. They tried really hard to pretend they had some unified, Enterprise-ready, perfect system/design, and of course failed at implementation, because perfect systems don't exist. Their support is crap and their services are down a lot, and very slow to orchestrate.

AWS is less feature-filled by default, but everything that is there works, isn't complicated, can be used a-la-carte, and docs are easy to find. Support is insanely reliable. They take a one-useful-piece-at-a-time approach rather than making you use the kitchen sink, and it's not hard to get things working (well, not any harder than for any other cloud provider). Pretty much everything they do is simpler and more reliable.

negus3• 3 years ago

Can you be more specific? I experience no problems navigating the GCP Console UI. Though I mostly do not do it -- I have stuctured bookmarklets for everything I use and it works really great. And also I use gcloud and Terraform a lot.

GCP support also provides the answers I need.

bng5• 3 years ago

I have very little experience with GCP as not much of an infra person. However, for me the most annoying bit is how the profiler is using its welcome screen as a loading indicator as well as 'there is no data' page. Makes it very hard to browse data.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

I've had nearly the opposite experience, except for support where I've had good and bad experiences with both AWS and GCP. I never understood why people love AWS support so much, it seemed pretty "meh" and I've heard from friends who have had truly awful experiences with paid support for security issues.

In my experience, GCP has a solid, easy, happy-path, and reasonable options for the more esoteric use-cases. AWS typically had a happy path that was clearly poor engineering/dev-ops practice, and more esoteric use-cases required gross hacks and either worked or threw weird errors that suggested it was a pile of shell scripts under the hood.

Everyone will have different experiences with this of course, but product excellence is not an advantage of AWS that I hear from people, it's always support, or pricing, or contracts.

VincentEvans• 3 years ago

Ah, the time has come for me to do another rant about Amazon

- Open amazon app on your phone

- Type in “craftsman firepit spark screen” into search and get results

- Is the top result a craftsman product? No. Why? Who knows. But it’s ok, it’s like the third one down, though this is already hinting on the things to come.

- Open up product details for the Craftsman one. It’s called, and make a mental note here “CRAFTSMAN 19.5 Spark Screen for Smokeless Fire Pit Stainless Steel Mesh Lid Outdoor Fire Safety for Backyard Bonfires“.

- Oh no, it’s not quite the right size for the model I have. But there’s a helpful link to “Visit the Craftsman Store” at the top, which is I suppose a little section of Amazon that is all things Craftsman. Let’s click it to find the right size model.

- It takes me to a page with a nice big Craftsman Logo and a search bar inviting me “Search all Craftsman”.

- I enter “spark screen”. That’s the name of the product from the listing after all.

- I get 5 results. They are: screwdriver socket, 46 inch lawnmower blades, screwdriver set, pressure washer, and an electric lawnmover.

- The end.

This is the company on the forefront of machine learning.

PS: As a bonus story - I was recently trying to find “Wonderpets” cartoon for my daughter, using Amazon Prime Video apple tv app - and not quite remembering the name, I typed in “wonder pets” into the search box, and as you might have guessed, the cartoon I was searching for wasn’t in the results.

Makes you wonder how many more resources of time, money and people does Amazon need so that my simple interactions with their consumer products are not such a subpar experience.

cjbgkagh• 3 years ago

They’re optimizing on revenue not helping you find what you’re looking for

mitaphane• 3 years ago

I think YRMV depending on what you're trying to do, but I think the DX & web console experience is much more pleasant on GCP.

On GCP, their services are cleanly organized and have distinct icons that tell me what it does with minimal reading. On AWS, often I'm left scratching my head (see https://awsiconquiz.com/)

The web console design on AWS is catching up (for a long time the UI just looked like an offshoot of the e-commerce site design and wasn't very clean) to GCP, but occasionally you still find elements of the old AWS console design.

Often, it seems like AWS has more leaky abstractions that require you to be more aware of all the other connecting components of their infra services.

For example, trying running managed Airflow on AWS/GCP. Both services require some VPC & storage infra setup to get your Airflow container services running. On GCP, you can spin up Cloud Composer without specifying your VPC or storage bucket details and they'll default them for you.

AWS however, you'll need to have your VPC/S3 already setup ahead and if you've not configured your private/public subnets or S3 IAM policy, you can put your Airflow environment into a non-workable state.

Overall, I think GCP has some advantages of not being saddled with legacy baggage that AWS has with making sure their services are interoperable.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

I agree - Kubernetes on AWS was a bit of a shock after using it on GCP (yay) and Azure (meh). I think it makes sense if you've used AWS for a while, and know the security groups etc dance, but it was a bit jarring.

slantedview• 3 years ago

Is there any good data comparing cloud provider uptimes? I know GCP had an outage recently that impacted me.

ggm• 3 years ago

AWS: there is a specific option to fix your specific problem, but it's buried in a menu with 258 choices in

  CamelCaseButWhichOne?

GCP:

  gcloud --butwhichone --orIsitThisOne --No-Dammit-Its-In-YAML=./yaml-file

deanCommie• 3 years ago

GCP has done well integrating their different services together. GCP provides a smaller set of core primitives that are global and work well for lots of use cases. Pub/Sub is probably the best example I have for this. GCP has Pub/Sub. Pub/Sub seems flexible enough to replace most (all?) of AWS’ various queues.

I feel like if you're going to spend this much time writing something in this much detail, the least you can do is try to understand some of the things you're criticizing and not say things so wildly incorrect.

In AWS you have SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, DynamoDB Streams, and maybe another queueing service by the time you read this post.

The most accurate criticism would be that Pub/Sub combines AWS's SQS and SNS. AWS had SQS first for 1-to-1 async queuing integrations. Then they added SNS for fan-out. GCP just started with fan-out from the start and said "well if you don't want to fan out, and just have one subscription, it's basically fine.

That's actually also true with AWS too - nobody is stopping you from using SNS this way. SQS was the first AWS service (S3 went "GA" first, though), and AWS doesn't deprecate things that are popular with customers.

Amazon MQ is Amazon's managed Apache MQ. You can criticize Amazon for hosting managed open source software, but there is a reason why it exists for customers that want to use an industry standard queueing service but not worry about operating it.

GCP's competitor to Kinesis isn't Pub/Sub, it's Dataflow -> https://cloud.google.com/dataflow Both are described as for the same use case - streaming, analytics, batch processing.

Kinesis Data Firehose may be another valid criticism. It can be thought of a "Simplified Kinesis that can push data instead of pulling it". It is clearly coupled tightly with Kinesis Data Streams itself, so in another company that cared less about not breaking backwards compatibility maybe they would've bolted those features on top of Kinesis.

DynamoDB Streams is also not a separate service. It's a feature of DynamoDB - streams data capture streams from a database. Exactly like... https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/change-streams-overvi...

2019 Update: Amazon has now released another streaming service: Amazon Managed Streaming Kafka.

GCP also has a Managed Kafka service only theirs is a collaboration with Confluent: https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-apache-kafka

"Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud provides fully managed Apache Kafka as a service so you can focus on building apps and not managing clusters."

kristianpaul• 3 years ago

Their kms offering is cheaper and that alway free tier for a small vm still helps.

thiht• 3 years ago

As much as I don’t like using a Google product, I have to admit GCP is wonderful. I really think GCP is the best UX Google has to offer. My favorite feature is that whatever you do on the web console, GCP will show you the equivalent gcloud CLI command. It can also give you the Terraform plan for some already created resources (maybe it’s even everywhere? Not sure)

The configuration and naming of the services is also wayyy more sane than AWS overall, you actually know what they do from the name only most of the time.

kitallis• 3 years ago

GCP allows editing memory and CPU on VMs, which is super handy.

bullen2• 3 years ago

The only real reason is GCP has a central US region.

How AWS is still stuck at the coasts is beyond me.

Jgrubb2• 3 years ago

Us East 2 is in Ohio. Not sure which GCP region is central US, they have VA and SC in the East.

Edit: looks Iowa and Texas and Ohio as well for GCP

bullen2• 3 years ago

Not bad but still east.

GCP is Omaha in Iowa.

So again what is AWS doing for multiplayer gaming?

donatj• 3 years ago

We still use AWS but it's been a couple years since I've really needed to dig into it because we have very competent people who'se job that is now.

My memories of having to find the right form, paste the right ID of the right server/bucket/lambda into are pretty traumatic. A TON of guesswork. Lot of what felt like duct taping things together.

If you don't have a full mental model of how everything works, they're certainly not going to help you get one without reading documentation. Their documentation is for the most part top tier, but the UX makes it more important than it arguably should be.

There's a difference between not handholding and just being obtuse, and I feel like so much of AWS's UI/general design philosophy falls into the latter camp.

te_chris2• 3 years ago

Most of that stuff is far better managed with Terraform or similar as you have a record of which values go where that's mostly pretty easy to consume later. Using the console for anything beyond trivial admin is definitely an anti-pattern given how complicated the major cloud platforms are.

h1fra• 3 years ago

I personally enjoy GCP much more because it's easier. You can do almost everything from the UI and products are named the way you expect them to be named (except for a few exceptions).

When you are doing devops on the side not as your main job, it's really a game changer compared to the cryptic AWS UI. The only part lacking imo is the log/monitoring which is definitely subpar, just logging proper json is a mess.

Decabytes2• 3 years ago

In my opinion all of GCPs advantages are eliminated by the fact that it is a Google product and I wouldn’t want to trust my business/livelihood to google. And this is not just an opinion I share, it’s the opinion of the large company I work for

akoboldfrying2• 3 years ago

Do you (ETA: and your company) feel that way about Google, but not about Amazon or Microsoft? Genuinely curious.

Decabytes2• 3 years ago

We are a Microsoft shop now but used to be an Amazon shop. We don't feel the same way about Amazon and Microsoft as Google. I've seen plenty of people post on here or Twitter about how they've been locked out of a Google account. When exploring LLM solutions Google wasn't even on the table and killedbygoogle was referenced in that company meeting. Sure there is a killed by Microsoft website but if you look at the Microsoft one it spans 34 years and 158 products, while Google's spans 17 years and includes 293.

That timeline alone gives me more confidence in Microsoft over Google. Personally there are only two products of Googles I feel comfortable relying on. Google Chrome and Go.

begueradj• 3 years ago

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You:

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

tamarlikesdata• 3 years ago

BigQuery is probably the strongest aspect

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

A few years ago I worked at a company that lacked any form of CI/DF. I set up TeamCity in a few hours and it was up and running, but it did not see much adoption.

Then they had a super long internal project on how to improve their development processes.

The code base was more than 90% .Net code on the back end.

The company decided they wanted to avoid vendor lock and thus, they would not use Azure, and decided that AWS was the best candidate.

My team was assigned to configure and set up the CI/CD pipeline. After quite a lot of time, months, we had to admit that we had failed.

The company hired an AWS expert who didn't get much done. That person was soon gone.

At least a quarter has passed since it began.

The company hired 2 "elite", "top of the line" AWS experts. They got it done, but it took them well over a month.

Afterwards it mostly worked. I dont want to know the total cost but it was enormous.

Since they were a Microsoft shop, going with Azure would have saved them a s*load of money, as well as time.

Since Azure integrates pretty with Visual Studio configurations and solutions we would have it done in less than a month without external help.

I set it up at a different shop and I spent a lot less than a month.

I can't make a judgement that Azure is technically better, perhaps when it gets up and running it is a superior solution, but for a .Net shop I would choose Azure again the next time around.

autotune• 3 years ago

Microsoft programming language works better on a Microsoft IaaS. Makes sense. Use the right tool for the job is a big part of the job.

welzel• 3 years ago

I don´t want to hate on the opinion of people, but "X is better then Y" is a pretty useless type of article.

I have used AWS, GCP and Azure + some more that offer AWS style of services. In the end the question is "what is best for my organisation?" It really really really does not matter if a developer finds GCP more easy to use or if AWS is way better at feature X.

The service has to fit the requirements.

And even worse, sometimes the requirements do not care for usability, cost or features.

Shorel• 3 years ago

I would be very afraid of automatic blocking of our entire infrastructure if some developer gets his Google account banned. No one (human) to provide support either, just automated responses.

Then the risk of some product being discontinued on Google is very real. The article just sidesteps it in the most unsatisfactory way, with a pinky promise that it won't happen.

So the technology itself is not bad, but Google's customer management is so terrible that I would never risk a company's life on it.

shantnutiwari• 3 years ago

GCP has much better UI than AWS. GCP is easy and fun to use, while AWS looks like fighting 90s Windows 3.11 app

(No comments on the poor behaviour towrds customers by both and Azure as well)

Edit: And after fully reading the article, I agree with the author. Yes, GCP is very easy to use compared to the monster AWS is. Its Googles poor reputation, esp amongst the HN types, that I suspect is the reason not many people use it

sfmike• 3 years ago

Unfortunately it's all for nothing when your account is randomly deactivated for a TOS violation that can't be precisely named

teitoklien2• 3 years ago

Google recently killed an important firebase feature around cross platform in-app links, not raise prices, no KILL IT. It’s a feature depended on by tons and tons of customers, that was a far bigger shock for me than google domains, atleast domain infra is designed with migration in mind usually (dns not included) But google killing of a vital feature[1] of firebase (with no google alternative provided) made me shit scared on if I should integrate with more of their products. They also randomly jacked up prices of sms authentication exponentially in a day without any major notice and caused a ton of people to get thousands of dollars in bill increase suddenly [2]. Staying away from google is a good idea unless playing russian roulette at work is your hobby. Every product there, is one manager’s ambition for promotion away from being killed and re-invented

- [1] (https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links)

- [2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Firebase/comments/14cj7au/firebase_...)

I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

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