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Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

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Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#31

Post by not_kurt_godel »

robbyt wrote: post #26
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #13

I 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…

Google's free consumer-facing products with no SLA being shut down... HN loves to complain about this. Any time there's a thread about Google, someone has to complain about the time when they shut down Reader.

There are plenty of APIs and cloud-type products listed in the site I referenced. I don't know what the story with their SLAs or lack thereof was, but it's not like Reader was a one-off thing. (IIRC, there have been some seeming SLA-violation-esque deprecations of Maps APIs...) Google clearly has a culture that is OK with killing off services when it's convenient. Like I said, I don't know if/how this applies or will apply to GCP, but they have enough of a track record that it's perfectly reasonable to be wary.

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#32

Post by CraftThatBlock »

kapilvt wrote: post #27
CraftThatBlock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes... albeit its an odd one.. a few months after the switch out from Diane to Thomas on lead exec.. they shutdown google hire which was in the gcp portfolio https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20837004/google-hire-next... afaics its called cloud talent in the console now

Ah true, although like you said Hire was more a tangent product to G Suite, so not exactly Cloud related, but still business-facing. Thanks for reminding me

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#33

Post by not_kurt_godel »

kapilvt wrote: post #27
CraftThatBlock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes... albeit its an odd one.. a few months after the switch out from Diane to Thomas on lead exec.. they shutdown google hire which was in the gcp portfolio https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20837004/google-hire-next... afaics its called cloud talent in the console now

Even a small thing like that is a great example of how Google and AWS treat backwards compatibility fundamentally differently. AWS really doesn't EOL things, no matter how 'minor' the impact would be. Look at SimpleDB - it was launched in 2007 and has very clearly been deprecated in favor of DynamoDB[0]. It's not even in the console(!). Yet, it's still operational and usable with the AWS CLI. Everything about it screams "could have been EOL'd years ago", yet AWS dogs on in supporting it and everything else it's ever released until the end of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB#Relationship_t...

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#34

Post by rantwasp »

tbrock wrote: post #30
rantwasp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

RDS is a joke unless you use aurora. Necessary downtime for a database upgrade? Try again Amazon.

what engine are you using? is it in an multi-AZ setup?

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#35

Post by eropple »

SgtBastard wrote: post #24
mcdermott wrote: post #17

Both 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.

Then you’re rather unimaginative - .NET/SqlServer shops are still 2nd class citizens on both GCP and AWS. Azure App Services and SQL database arrives a 1-2 punch for enterprises moving their apps to a PaaS that just works.

"Just works", unless you want a working audit log that tells you who rebooted a service.

Azure is fractally off-kilter.

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#36

Post by 0xy »

blueblisters wrote: post #2

FWIW, 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.

I was once the recipient of a sales pitch for some GCP Apigee products and during the demonstration the control panel glitched at least three different times with loading screens of death and was very slow.

That kind of stuff sticks with you and you know that during an emergency or outage you're going to be battling the UI as well as the underlying problem.

Needless to say we didn't proceed.

AWS might feel a little 2010, but at least I know the control panel is responsive and works. No fluff.

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#37

Post by mcdermott »

SgtBastard wrote: post #24
mcdermott wrote: post #17

Both 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.

Then you’re rather unimaginative - .NET/SqlServer shops are still 2nd class citizens on both GCP and AWS. Azure App Services and SQL database arrives a 1-2 punch for enterprises moving their apps to a PaaS that just works.

Yes, Azure is an OK choice if you are unfortunate enough to need to run that legacy tech stack.

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#39

Post by user5994461 »

londons_explore wrote: post #12
blueblisters wrote: post #2

FWIW, 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.

What you're looking for is datadog. A metrics/monitoring/alerting/debugging/dashboard solution. https://www.datadoghq.com/.

Try a google image search and you will see some examples. There are lots of menus and visualization so you obviously want to try the tool for yourself.

Re: Many ways where GCP excels over AWS

#40

Post by hodgesrm »

kapilvt wrote: post #28
harryparkdotio wrote: post #4

As someone that works solely in a GCP environment for work, I couldn't agree more. GCP products do "just work", but if I had to nitpick, it's that some of their services don't have complete terraform modules (looking at you IAP), but outside of that, their pricing is reasonable, documentation is solid, and we're really happy we ended up going the GCP route.

As someone who just dealt with the questionable state of the gcp docs, I couldn't disagree more, afaics there's really no qa on this stuff. to wit, the official docs for turning on storage bucket uniform access are a missing a parameter, that we only found after turning on http tracing on gsutil. The docs themselves are very spread out, and frequently have errors or inconsistencies (ie use beta v1 of this, v1 of that…

I've also had some bad encounters with the GCP docs, particularly around object storage. That was a while ago and may have been fixed. Early on they were not consistent with the actual APIs and poorly organized to boot. It was complicated by the fact that the APIs seem to have shifted.

Amazon overall has done an excellent job on documentation. It's made easier by the fact that they rarely change API behavior once it's deployed.

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