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Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
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Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#22I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings.
AWS is "infrastructure as a service". Hosts, network switches, load balancers - things that historically cost an arm and a leg, but they could virtualize. Add some elasticity and auto scaling, and you've got the foundation to build anything else on top.
The hyper-specificity of SQS vs Kinesis, for example, comes out of the same philosophy: Provide the infrastructure, and let customers figure out what to build on top of it.
Google, meanwhile, started with AppEngine - run your apps in the cloud without concern for the hardware. AWS's equivalent is Elastic Bean Stalk - more than one layer of abstraction higher than the default offerings.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#23This is a very good evaluation. We were running on AWS for 3 years before moving to GCP and have the same experience. To make up for some of the shortages we replaced some parts with the following:
- Monitoring with Datadog
- Container build and deployment with Cloud 66 Skycap and Habitus
- Support: well, I simply wish if Google Support was better or at least they had a more proactive status page update policy.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#24article needs a date
Thanks, I've updated this.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#25I've been jumping between AWS and Google Cloud ( with a bit of Digital Ocean sprinkled in ) for the last several years. I chose Google as our cloud platform when we founded our company last August. I could War and Peace a bunch of things but that article does a very nice job in the details. Instead, I'll give a one liner:
AWS is to Linux as Google Cloud is to FreeBSD. "Rock solid performance and everything is exactly where you think it should be"
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#26I keep hearing how great Terraform is because it allows you to treat infrastructure as code in a cloud agnostic manner. But every time I see a Terraform script, it's tied tightly to AWS's infrastructure -- including Hashicorp's own examples.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#27Hey there! Seth from Google here. Thank you for writing up this article and providing this valuable feedback - we really appreciate it.
I’m personally taking this feedback and making sure it’s shared with the relevant teams (both positive and negative).
On the DevRel team at Google, we often write friction logs (my colleague just authored a post about friction logs in detail: https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-f...) to help our product and engineering teams identify and fix any rough or unexpected edges in our offerings. This feedback will be valuable to our teams the same way a friction log is valuable.
Thank you again for taking the time to write this up!
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#28I keep hearing how great Terraform is because it allows you to treat infrastructure as code in a cloud agnostic manner. But every time I see a Terraform script, it's tied tightly to AWS's infrastructure -- including Hashicorp's own examples.
Hey there - Seth from Google here. We have a dedicated team of Google engineers who contribute to Terraform as their full time job. We are constantly looking for ways to improve. We added a lot of examples to our Google provider documentation, and we are working on a project that will enable us to add support for new GCP features in Terraform faster.
I can’t speak for HashiCorp’s own examples (I mean, I could, I used to work there), but we have a lot of documentation and examples in the Google bits. If there’s a specific thing you think is missing, I’d be happy to help address it.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#29I think the GCP LB is way better than anything you can get on AWS.
Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
#30well written. Things I would add to the Good side. - ability to commit to multi year cpu/ram without upfront costs - they can live migrate your vm to new physical hardware, so no need to have random reboots of your instances - https load balancers allow traffic around the world to enter google network closest to user, this reduces handshakes and reduces comcast like outages to affect users. the above greatly decrease…
> they can live migrate your vm to new physical hardware, so no need to have random reboots of your instances
Having supported VMWare at multiple locations, and having worked for a smaller cloud host, it shocks me that AWS don't support live migrations. VMWare can live-migrate VMs between datacenters in different geographic regions, while maintaining active sessions!