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

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

#121

Post by towepluswater » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

pow_pp_-1_v wrote: post #63

Reading the comments here a persistent theme seems to be that the documentation is lacking. Something that might help is creating a "dog-fooding" team mostly filled with interns. This team will be responsible for creating samples with the public APIs. Why Interns? Because they will move on to better things around the time when their brains learn the patterns required to navigate the Google cloud API efficiently.

Both Azure and AWS have fantastic documentation. The bare-bones documentation and sparse tutorials of GCP are big reasons (other than market awareness) that larger enterprise customers are hesitant to adopt.

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

#122

Post by char_pointer » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

Can't stress enough how great Compute is compared to EC2. A lot of the (enterprise) companies I work with are weary of going all-in on a particular cloud and prefer to hand-roll open source solutions instead of consuming cloudy services; the most they'll use is VMs, basic networking and storage (although GKE seems quite popular as well nowadays). GCP nails this use case IMO. It's fast to provision, reliable, rarely if ever fails during setup, and you don't need a separate start-up company to predict your costs. It's very much quality over quantity though, so whilst this is great and manages to capture a particular market I do think they need put out way more (perhaps lesser quality) stuff to stay competitive with AWS and to a lesser extent Azure.

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

#123

Post by madrox » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:49 PM UTC

sipos wrote: post #117

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.

Cloud SQL itself is fine...it's just hosted SQL. That said, there is a lot of google-bespoke code for interfacing various parts of their cloud with it. Cloud SQL Proxy has a lot of gotchas and hard to debug. For example, the per-instance connection limit between app engine and cloudsql is 5, and it's impossible to know how you're bumping against that. Tuning is a frustrating process, and google support hasn't been too helpful.

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

#124

Post by neospice » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:05 AM UTC

4di wrote: post #89

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…

Have you migrated anything off of Firebase? Or still kept the “base” projects and upgraded around it? I’m interested specifically in how expensive Firebase is for popular products

I haven't migrated off of Firebase but this is something I've thought a lot about as I've selected Firebase for many of my client projects.

As far as I can tell there is no open-source alternative with feature parity that makes it easy to migrate away from Firebase. I'd be curious to hear about how people have done this.

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

#125

Post by Scarbutt » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:08 AM UTC

kjksf wrote: post #116

vibrunazo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

Only if you are pleased using a "NoSQL" solution.

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

#126

Post by smueller1234 » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:15 AM UTC

swozey wrote: post #119

Drdrdrq wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

Nit: There's actually an entire campus that was built for Google Cloud, not just a few buildings.

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

#127

Post by swozey » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

smueller1234 wrote: post #126

swozey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

Nit: There's actually an entire campus that was built for Google Cloud, not just a few buildings.

Ha, proof I don't work there! :)

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

#128

Post by Jedi72 » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:36 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #37

Although the author mentions they haven't had experience with AppEngine, it's the reason why I love Google Cloud SO much over anything else. If you're a startup running something on Elixir (or even Rails), AppEngine's experience is hard to beat. Not many people do know: * You can run multiple microservices on AppEngine under one application. * Each of these can have many versions serving different percentages of traf…

Would love to see Google embrace Elixir, the Erlang runtime doesnt play very nicely with Kubernetes but gives so many benefits. If they can get it so that you can set up a VPS of linked Erlang nodes, it would be everything I need

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

#129

Post by dfischer » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:43 AM UTC

+1 Loving Firebase + GCP

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

#130

Post by com2kid » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 12:59 AM 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…

> One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase.

Can confirm, I'm also building my startup off of Firebase.

Super easy to get up and running with. I was talking to a friend at Amazon about how I create serverless HTTP entpoints and he was impressed that getting started with it was a 10 minute affair from "never done backend programming" to "REST endpoint setup." Another half an hour got me full end to end auth working from my app to my endpoints through to Firebase DB. FWIW I haven't investigated what it'd take to do the same within Amazon's eco-system, but from what I've gathered I'd have to understand a few more concepts than the simple "npm run deploy" that is the heart of Firebase's serverless offering.

Firebase's serverless stuff is dead simple. Wish the emulator was better though, I can'd do encrypted endpoints on localhost, which means 90% of my API can't be tested locally. Having to deploy to the actual service seriously adds to my code-deploy-debug loop!