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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

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Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#71

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 sta…

Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but the other options aren't much better. The reality is that unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to change.

I dunno, I spend $3 monthly with AWS, but when I click the support button I’m talking to a real person pretty much immediately.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#73
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but the other options aren't much better. The reality is that unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to change.

I dunno, I spend $3 monthly with AWS, but when I click the support button I’m talking to a real person pretty much immediately.

you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#74
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k. Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was with…

What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?

Moving clouds is hard if you use the cloud features. Giving credits to startups is a cheap way to get them locked in for the future.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#75

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 sta…

I'd say your experience isn't unique to google. I think at some point we are going to hit a place where people realize the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner.

the convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost of having a mostly predatory business partner

Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#76

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 sta…

Sigh, I remember a similar experience. It was a third-party rep they pushed us to, but we would be asking for ways to re-architect one thing we already had setup on AWS, and all they would do is just try and upsell us on random offerings that clearly did not resolve our specific needs.

Some European-based customer apparently had a requirement if we engaged with them, that our service be offered via an acceptable vendor such as GCP, for some reason AWS apparently wasn't, but it was such a nightmare to even prod about an architecture that would have feature-parity with AWS, it wasn't even worth it. Also as an fyi, I'm no AWS fanboy, I don't use it in any of my own projects to avoid vendor lock-in this company suffered from.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#77
I've used GCP to great success (with some speedbumps) at 3 companies I've worked for (small and large) over the last 5-6 years. I have a lot of learnings from the experiences to pass on, and one of the key ones is this: work with a reseller.

If you've lurked on HN over the past decade you'll have seen tons of stories about how bad Google's customer support is. I don't think GCP's support is anywhere near as terrible as it is for Google's consumer products, but it does have a lot of room for improvement. If you work with a reseller, you'll get much much better results.

There are several GCP resellers that are really good and knowledgeable, and often are staffed by former Googlers that worked on GCP. The very first thing you should do if you've chosen GCP is to find one.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#79

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 sta…

I've had the same experience with GCP account reps. They always go missing and someone new emails us about how they are taking over 6 months later. Every call we have had with them has not resulted in anything meaningful. Our biggest issue is how their "highly available" Cloud SQL goes down every couple months for maintenance, not how we can use BigQuery.
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