The GCP LB is, honestly, one of the most impressive pieces of software ever written and unmatched by any other provider.
Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
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Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#12FWIW, I find the AWS UI much better than the GCP interface. AWS feels much faster to navigate, even though GCP has an SPA-like design, like its other B2B tools.
Since all of GCP is available with an API, I'm surprised there aren't third party dashboards. I'd happily pay a percent or two of my bill for an intuitive dashboard at a glance. Especially one that kinda fills the gap between monitoring, alerting, debugging, and manipulating resources.
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#13I think a lot of the issues with AWS mentioned here are mainly the result of 2 factors:
1. AWS having been around longer, and having been vastly bigger and more widely used than GCP for the entire lifespan of both products. AWS is just more expansive/evolved from having piled on more features for more customers over more time.
2. AWS virtually never makes backward-incompatible changes. Every feature of every service and every version of every API since its inception is still functional and presumably will remain that way forever (with a very minimal list of exceptions). So while it's certainly easy to imagine how the entire thing could be streamlined from a blank slate, it's just not how AWS operates.
Meanwhile, Google is absolutely notorious for wantonly EOLing products; see: https://killedbygoogle.com/. Besides the extensive list consumer products (RIP Reader), there are quite a few examples of APIs and cloud services that have been axed. I'm not very familiar with how/if GCP specifically has been impacted by this trigger-happy EOLing, but frankly I think you'd have to have a huge appetite for risk to trust that GCP is not going to pull the rug out from under your business on a whim.
The upside of the never-make-backwards-incompatible-changes approach is that as a customer, I don't have to worry about proactively monitoring for breaking changes to my applications/infrastructure and pre-emptively emergently refactoring/re-architecting them to avoid downtime. I have various little AWS CLI scripts that have been running untouched for years, and they still work. That's a tremendous timesaver and cost-saver whether you're just doing side projects for fun or running enterprise IT.
The downside to this approach is that the product as a whole is an ever-growing spiderweb-snowball of complexity, by design. While some new services/features get added as simplified alternatives to existing offerings (i.e. Amplify, Lightsail), they still exist in an ocean of cruft, and it takes some level of expertise just to be aware of their existence and tease out exactly what aspects they simplify and how they interface with the rest of the ecosystem. If and how AWS resolves this problem dynamic over time remains to be seen; it certainly is a pretty big Catch-22 from a high-level perspective.
So, in short, while GCP is inarguably a more streamlined and user-friendly platform today, it is a bit naïve to make a blanket comparison to AWS on this basis. There are good reasons why AWS is the way it is, and I wouldn't necessarily bet on GCP maintaining its comparative sleekness over time as it may eventually fall prey to the same problems. (Nor would I bet against them avoiding/solving these problems either - there are a lot of very smart people at Google.)
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
it does not. if you need live migration your software is poorly engineered. the only use case for this is a legacy app that you cannot move away from - but in that case i doubt you’re in the cloud
Imagine you running large database workload and AWS say you need reboot because underlying hardware start having issue. Live migration can help you in that case.
1. use RDS
2. if you want to run your own you’d better know how HA setups work and you can lose at least a machine at ANY point in time (not just when AWS warns you the hardware is failing)
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#15yeah no. aws excels at giving you the building blocks and making sure those building blocks work. unless you’re working at a small scale that’s what you want. for all the crap aws gets, the documentation is there, the tutorials are there, the services make sense. gcp is probably going to be around for a while, but i would not bet the farm on it. in the cloud, today, it’s either aws or azure
I agree with your general sentiment, but in terms of UX the article is spot on.
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#16yeah no. aws excels at giving you the building blocks and making sure those building blocks work. unless you’re working at a small scale that’s what you want. for all the crap aws gets, the documentation is there, the tutorials are there, the services make sense. gcp is probably going to be around for a while, but i would not bet the farm on it. in the cloud, today, it’s either aws or azure
I agree with your general sentiment, but in terms of UX the article is spot on.
sure. the AWS console has been very hard to use since forever. Some may even go as far as saying that it improved. The UX is not the selling point of a cloud provider.
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#17Both AWS and GCP excel over Azure. Many organizations are strong armed into using Azure as part of their Enterprise Agreements (EA) as part of Microsoft's predatory tactics (they haven't changed one bit) I couldn't imagine someone choosing to use Azure if given a choice.
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#18I think a lot of the issues with AWS mentioned here are mainly the result of 2 factors: 1. AWS having been around longer, and having been vastly bigger and more widely used than GCP for the entire lifespan of both products. AWS is just more expansive/evolved from having piled on more features for more customers over more time. 2. AWS virtually never makes backward-incompatible changes. Every feature of every service…
Has Google EOL any Cloud products? I don't remember any being shutdown recently at least. Since these are money-making products (unlike maybe other good customer-facing products), there's a lot less reasons to shut things down IMO
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your general sentiment, but in terms of UX the article is spot on.
sure. the AWS console has been very hard to use since forever. Some may even go as far as saying that it improved. The UX is not the selling point of a cloud provider.
disagree. I get the sentiment that in the long run an end-user absolutely "shouldn't care", because the infrastructure should be code, if the initial end user onramp sucks (bad UX) then it might give you a negative impression of the system. This impacts other end users, because if adoption has a negative first derivative, you could be in trouble in the long run.
but UX goes beyond just clicky bits on the web. It's also stuff like "does your service take JSON as input and output JSON or XML?". "are critical fields well-named?", "is documentation for your endpoints well-structured and easy to comprehend" which, if the UX is poor, makes your IAC much much harder to reason about when things go wrong.
Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS
#20Contrary to the claims of this article I'm very skeptical that the admin UI is much of a success factor when running large applications in public clouds.
Cloud administration is inherently complex. If you are doing anything interesting you'll be managing configuration through tools like Terraform and Ansible. Also, if you don't understand virtual networking on your particular cloud you are going to have problems even there. Any cloud service that gives you good control over networking is by definition going to require effort to configure properly.