Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#111

Post by nvarsj » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

This is a great article!

I've used AWS extensively, and GCP moderately.

If you take the thoughtworks style approach, I would classify AWS as "Adopt", GCP as "Trial".

Google is investing very heavily in GCP, both internally and in sales and marketing. But, it still feels very much like patchwork. At least when you compare to AWS - which, while complex, is very consistent, very well documented, very stable, and performs very well. GCP is also, I believe, a combination of acquisitions, and this bleeds through with differently skinned UIs and URLs.

I'd say the big exception to this is GKE. If you're happy with a managed K8S, there is no comparison to GKE right now. GLB+GKE and you're pretty much set to handle anything with little ops work, and probably more affordable than AWS+Kops. Although, I'm not sure what the support story is like.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#112

Post by jdoss » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

fredliu wrote: post #68

I see lots of evaluation of GCP, or comparison between GCP vs AWS recently. But I don't see as many for the Azure platform, although Azure being the 2nd in the cloud provider market, and even closing on AWS in market share. Anybody has any insights on this?

My hunch on why it is considered to be the 2nd in the cloud provider market is due to the most Enterprise size companies already being in bed with Microsoft with a lot of other products and there are a lot of incentives being thrown around to commit to using Azure. Also, there is the "Azure is not Amazon." or "Azure is not Google." Some Enterprise size companies simply won't do business with AWS because they are Amazon. That doesn't meant Azure is a good technical product and this maybe why you are seeing GCP vs AWS more often in technical comparisons.

For example, Azure was a consideration for our "not AWS" cloud provider until we tried to use custom Linux images with at rest encryption on the root volume. It's simply not supported and there was no viable work around. There was also no ETA for adding in support for this non-negotiable customer requirement. This is why we moved onto evaluating GCP. So far it has been pretty great and it is checking a lot of our requirements that Azure either fell short with or flat out didn't support.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#113

Post by nvarsj » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #29

I think the GCP LB is way better than anything you can get on AWS.

It's also more limited in some ways. People like integrating with Akamai/Cloudflare for instance, in which case there is little point to GLBs.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#114

Post by ssambros » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 10:56 PM UTC

ex1710_01 wrote: post #91

ssambros wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP Google Cloud recently released public beta for Memorystore Redis ( https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ ) which is a hosted opensource Redis on GCP. It is availabe in europe-west1 region so it might suit your needs. disclaimer: I am an engineer on Memorystore Redis team.

I apologize for bringing up something that is offtopic here but I am really glad to have read your comment. Last I read in the docs, Memorystore was not accessible through the AppEngine Standard Environment, which was rather disappointing to me. I was wondering if just providing the App Engine Standard Environment with the Redis instances address and credentials, along with a service account or IP whitelist for acces…

Unfortunately that is not possible at this moment. Without going into details: Flex is running on the same cloud infrastructure as Memorystore that it why it is possible to establish networking between them. This is not true for the regular AppEngine.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#115

Post by digaozao » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #87

sethvargo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to reproduce the Cloud SQL Proxy in Cloud Shell that both you and the OP have mentioned, but I've been unable to reproduce (and thus file a bug). I'm sure I'm missing a step. If you're willing, I would love if you could drop me a quick note (sethvargo at google dot com) with the steps you're taking, commands you're running, and output you're seeing. This will help me escalate it to the right team. I'm also…

Just to clarify with some more detail (for the HN record), the issue with Cloud SQL is that while you can whitelist an individual internal IP, you can't whitelist an internal network (like 10/8). This means you need a sidecar service of some sort to add the whitelist rules when a new instance/pod comes up that should be able to access the DB. In AWS for a simple app I'd just whitelist 10/8 and have the DB open to all…

Better yet. In AWS I can whitelist a security group and all ec2 instances with that security group would get access to RDS.

This would be handy with tags in gcp.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#116

Post by kjksf » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:17 PM UTC

vibrunazo wrote: post #104

magsafe wrote: post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

Since you were already at Amazon, I assume you compared Firebase to AWS Lambda? Could you tell us why did you end up prefering Firebase?

I'm not him but to me the big thing that Firebase has and AWS Lambda doesn't is Firebase - a database.

Firebase Functions === AWS Lambda but it's only one of 17 components that is Firebase.

Also, Authentication component is nice (easy way to implement accounts/login with Google/Facebook/Twitter/email).

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#117

Post by sipos » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:17 PM UTC

madrox wrote: post #108

I've been running a production project in Google App Engine for three years with six figure active users and can mostly agree with this. A few comments: 1. Stackdriver gets a bad rap. Maybe there are better solutions out there, but it hasn't been our weakest link. It's gotten very expensive, though. 2. Google recently deployed a new HTTP load balancer that is way better than the old one. 3. Instance usage on app engi…

Can you elaborate on what is wrong with Cloud SQL? I have next to no experience with it GCP Cloud SQL, but use AWS RDS a lot.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#118

Post by sethrin » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

ciguy wrote: post #33

The article mentions Terraform workspaces and their limitations (Not Google Cloud related at all). The way we get around this is to have separate variable files for each environment. The master file contains sensible defaults and then those get overridden by the environment specific files. This is the only sane way to manage variables in terraform right now IMO. It does require that you specify a file when you run it…

Why should one not run Terraform locally?

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#119

Post by swozey » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

Drdrdrq wrote: post #96

gingerlime wrote: post #75

This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience. Specifically, support and billing. We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would…

I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.

I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years.

It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings.

Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great.

I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible).

This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc).

I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#120

Post by dudus » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:37 PM UTC

magsafe wrote: post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

Yes. Firebase is so awesome! It really mis fun to work with and works so well with Angular. This guy has some awesome tutorials to get started.

https://angularfirebase.com/