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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

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Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#21
post #5
post #2

Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to dedicated YC email".

This is also pretty specific about needing more free credits than GCP provides out of the box. If you just want to get started with GCP, you just sign in with your Google Account for $300 in credit. When you run out you can just start paying with a credit card.

Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked and tells me what things will cost upfront.

AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research effort where I have to dig through documents and cross reference tables between different services and I still probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#22
post #2

Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to dedicated YC email".

I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.

How!? I am a VC backed startup, just went through the same grief described in the original linked post.

I like Firebase, but the moment the utility runs out we're heading back to AWS.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#23
post #8

Google's business model is to have no customer service and have customers discard-able without notice when Google chooses. Why would a business want to do business to business with Google and actually pay them at this point? They do 'free' sort of well but they are a terrible option for dependable partner whether you pay them or not.

I was involved in a mid-sized software company migrating from AWS to GCP. My experience was that the GCP team was very hands on, and that enterprise support was very responsive. The support isn't perfect, nor is the product -- but I would say the level of customer service for GCP can't be compared to other Google products.

Why did the company choose to migrate from AWS to GCP? Just curious.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#24
> told rep about infrastructure we were thinking of using but they needed a dollar monthly amount since they were in sales and didn't have an understanding of the infrastructure

I am in computational genomics and this was exactly my experience with Google as well.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#25
It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer.

My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get a new GCP rep they just want to talk to us about "expanding our use of GCP offerings". The only thing they want to talk about is starting to use BigQuery - not my business at all.

I signed up for a Google Cloud Security summit, and afterwards a sales rep reached out me. It was obvious from the start they had no idea I was a gsuite or GCP customer. They then directed me to a NEW account manager (#4) even though I had been working with a different one. I had worked with the prior account rep going over our architecture to make sure everything was kosher (sustained use discounts etc). I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request. Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence.

It's really insulting, and to me obvious they don't care about my company at all. We're looking at other options.

I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this post leads to me getting an email from another rep "Wanting to start over and doing things right", which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#26

Google's business model is to have no customer service and have customers discard-able without notice when Google chooses. Why would a business want to do business to business with Google and actually pay them at this point? They do 'free' sort of well but they are a terrible option for dependable partner whether you pay them or not.

From GCP docs [0]:

  Effect of ToS violations
  
  Google-wide disabled account
  
  In some cases a Google-wide account (which covers access to a variety of Google products like Google Photos, Google Play, Google Drive, and GCP) will be disabled for violations of a Google ToS, egregious policy violations, or as required by law. Owners of disabled Google accounts will not be able to access their Google Cloud resources until the account is reinstated. If an account is disabled, a notification is sent to the secondary email address provided during the signup process, if available. If a phone number is available, the user is notified via text message. The notification includes a link for appeal and recovery, where applicable.
  
  In order to regain access to their GCP resources, owners of disabled Google accounts will need to contact Google support and have their account re-enabled.
  
  To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on Google Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than one owner to all resources. As long as there is at least one active owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the one of the owners being disabled.
Given the Google account horror stories that pop up every few months, seems risky if you're solo/only have one GCP owner.

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project-suspe...

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#28
post #2

Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to dedicated YC email".

I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.

I worked briefly for a startup that changed their name and then got an additional round of credits.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#30
I used to be a huge fan of GCP and bet on it to power my startup, and have come to greatly regret it.

Recently, I needed to increase a CPU-limit quota from a small number (like 16 vCPUs to 64 vCPUs) - nothing crazy. In the past, the quota increase system was more or less automated and would only take a few minutes to process.

This time, however, GCP denied my quota increase and forced me to schedule a call with a sales rep in order to process the quota increase. It was the biggest waste of time and kind of goes against the entire point of instant cloud resizing.

It also feels like the velocity of new features, instance types, etc has slowed down dramatically in the past year. Also, while I'm ranting, Google Cloud SQL is probably the worst cloud service I've ever used (and it costs an arm and a leg for the pleasure!)

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