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Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

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191–200 of 202 posts

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

#191
Having multiple accounts as best practice has nothing to do with IAM being complex, it’s about organization and security.

Would you run all your workloads in a single account? A bit messy if you have tons of resources and people collaborating.

And what if this single account gets compromised?

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The generous free tier in App Engine is also very nice - lets you run a lot of personal / experimental stuff for free.

What happens if the free quotas are reached? Will the app terminate until the free quotas are available again, or will the user be billed?

[deleted]

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We use terraform to create our new projects, but with them not supporting kubernetes deployments it would be very difficult for us to continue to use them after standup. (I then script kubectl commands to create our deployments, etc.) Their own github repo issue list said they wouldn't support deployments when it was in beta (hashicorp won't do anything that is in beta, another problem with google cloud and its long,…

When I was first looking into choosing between CloudFormation and TF not knowing either, I was actually leaning toward TF because of my positive experience using Hashicorps other products.

The two things that swayed me toward CF was reading that TF is usually slightly behind CF with adding support for new features when they were introduced by AWS and my rule of always choose the platform providers preferred solution.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, if you're on AWS, then why not just use CloudFormation? CloudFormation is a lot more powerful on AWS than TF.

While CloudFormation is lovely, it has a couple of real downsides: - very often something new is introduced on AWS without any CloudFormation support, so you will either need to write custom resources with lambda functions, or be prepared to wait a long time. From the few times I checked TF is actually faster to support new services / features. - CloudFormation has extensive documentation, but very often you end up h…

For context, I’m both relatively new with CF and the CF “expert” at my company - in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

occasionally CloudFormation can get stuck and leave you in a state you can not recover from. Luckily AWS support tends to be very responsive and can help you here, and it hasn't been happening as much as 1-2 years ago

I had just the opposite experience with AWS support. CloudFormation was stuck because I had a syntax error in my Node based custom resource so of course it waited for a response from the lambda that it wasn’t getting and then when I tried to cancel the stack creation, it again called the same broken lambda to delete the resource and hilarity ensued. This was after I corrected the lambda and ran it successful to create another stack.

I did a live chat with AWS support and all they did was quote the user documentation - after trying to explain that I am not trying to create a lambda resource and it’s not trying to delete an ENI.

I finally just gave up and waited 4-5 hours for the rollback to time out.

Just like Zope there is a bit of a Z-shaped learning curve: there is a pretty steep learning curve to start, after which a lot of things become easy.

I’m very much at the second valley on the Z. I spent quite awhile getting the hang of CF just to make my code deployments easier (creating parameters, autoscaling groups, launch configurations, lambdas, etc.) but I haven’t had to do anything especially complicated.

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

#195
post #119
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…

Thank you! This is interesting to know, and I'm sure the people there are really bright, capable and motivated to bring us the best solution possible. However this is not what concerns me. Willingly or not, they are part of a bigger ecosystem named Google, and the decisions from higher-ups inevitably influence the platform. The culture itself is probably engineer-centric and not customer-centric, which can be seen in differences in support responses.

I must stress out however that these are just my thoughts based on information from Internet, because I don't have extensive experience with either, so I might be wrong.

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

#196

One other thing I believe is worth mentioning -- and to be honest I was a bit surprised with -- is the ecosystem around GCP vs AWS. For example, we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP, but quite a few with AWS. I'm pretty sure there are other similar examples with other services.

> 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.

Yes, I'm aware of it. BUT, it's beta, and it's not persisted. For our use case, we wanted a persisted redis store. There are lots of providers, RedisLabs, RedisGreen, Redistogo and probably a half dozen more, but none of them provide service to Google Cloud in EU.

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

#198
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?

I worked in a bank in Europe and the management did not consider any other option for cloud than Azure. Microsoft does a good job selling it to Enterprise Microsoft shops. Most of them want to continue their relationship with Microsoft who they consider cheaper and better than IBM/Oracle.

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

#199
post #128
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

Elixir on GCP https://cloud.google.com/elixir/

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

#200

Hey 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/a…

Small nitpick, this tutorial https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/firebase-web... mentions firebase-cli 3.3.0, which was deprecated for firebase-tools (current version is 3.19.3). Might be worth updating the docs to reflect latest packages.
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