At work we moved to GCE at the beginning of this year, from Linode after they were having stability issues over the christmas break. No complaints from us. So far have been very happy with it. We were considering moving to AWS, but to realize the same pricing as GCE we'd have to purchase reserved instances - the sustained usage discounts have been huge for us. Additional things we liked: - gcs is way more responsive…
GCP has locally attached SSDs on almost all machine types and up to 64 TiB of block storage, configurable. What features were you missing?
It's a shortcoming in the GCE salt-cloud driver not being able to specify those in a deployment configuration. Sorry if this was unclear!
The problem (I suffer from it as well), is that people naturally feel that the corporate offerings from Google will mirror the experience that they have with the consumer offerings from Google. And the big issue with Google's consumer offerings is that they seem to have limited to no support and that there is a very real chance that Google will just shut them down all of a sudden. This is the exact opposite of what y…
This is also my impression of Google compute offerings, but it's also my impression of AWS offerings. I mean, when people think of AWS services, do "service and stability" really come to mind? IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org, and Amazon itself tells customers that AWS services can go down at any time and it's up to the customer to architect the application to deal with i…
I can't comment on Google, but we pay for AWS business support ($100 per month currently) and we can raise as many support tickets as we like and get nearly instant access to an engineer. Also, the quality of the support has been amazing. They have often gone out of their way to solve problems that are not strictly AWS problems (e.g. MySQL tuning, network issues, VPN questions, etc) without ever questioning it. Our account manager is easy to reach and through him I can get access to solution architects who are happy to advise on pretty much anything. There are also frequent invitations to AWS events, where SAs and account managers are usually keen to meet up and discuss projects. I know this is enlightened self-interest on their part rather than altruism, but it's definitely to our mutual benefit.
When pushing to trial AWS I often encountered this view within my org (that is was large, faceless, and inhuman with poor support) but the experience we've had has dispelled that myth.
Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.
They've killed APIs/Products, but they've almost always given a very long amount of time to transition.
Also have killed APIs/Products that are extremely difficult to transition from with short notice. For example, they gave ~4 months for the Google Wallet for the web transition, and no data portability for businesses with users on subscriptions.
Stripe, for example, has a data portability clause that allows you to move card data to another payments processor that meets some compliance standards.
What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this. My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform. We (myself and another guy)…
Would you mind sharing with us what product you have shipped?
I just like to see what other people can achieve in 3 months of time, it's kind of a motivation for me :)
cost it not a problem and google wouldn't do it. I'm talking about stealing recommendation algorithms and models. Have a peek new features before release etc.
Recommendation algorithms and models don't do you any good if you don't have users.
If you like the App Engine model, but want a "full computer worth of horsepower", you might want to consider our "Managed VM" environment built on top of Compute Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.
Managed VM is still beta, I think only brave one could try beta for production.
We have been using Managed VMs in production for while now, integrated in a micro-services architecture, for non-essential, non-frontend services and are quite happy with it. Using custom VMs (Docker based) and work like a breeze.
For Google Cloud products that have made it to General Availability (GA), we have a one-year deprecation policy ( https://cloud.google.com/terms/ , Section 7.2). That is, if we're going to make some big change, we give you a 1 year heads up. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but I'm not a lawyer ;).
Promises to do something for a year which you can change or withdraw after 30 days are really promises for 30 days: "Google may make changes to this Agreement, including pricing (and any linked documents) from time to time. Unless otherwise noted by Google, material changes to the Agreement will become effective 30 days after they are posted, except if the changes apply to new functionality in which case they will be…
That's pretty eye opening. Curious if you have looked at AWS with a similar regard, are they any better?
One of the reasons I avoid Google is because they have taken lot of pain to make their customer care totally suck. I mean even IRS and Comcast support does better compared to Google. I published a very critical release to my Android app few weeks back and realized that it was not getting published at all. It took me a month to get the problem resolved. I don't want to buy a cloud service where the support might be no…
I've had problems with their customer support. It got to the point, I just gave up, and left my videos on YouTube. (My problem was that slick move they made when they bought YouTube, and messed with the login names.) I just try to forget they are up there. I got to one person at Google, and when they realized I didn't want to advertise, it was "Go to the help boards. I don't deal with that stuff." Do I still use thei…
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on YouTube)
There is a big difference between paying for one of the support offerings, versus being a free user. The status of free users is approximately: free access to the product but no support. If you want customer service then you need to open your wallet.
It's important to separate "I think the support was bad", which would be very interesting to a lot of people who work here, from "I didn't pay for the product so I didn't receive it". Did you pay for support?