Hmm...I've never even thought to talk to a human at a cloud hosting company.
Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
111–120 of 394 posts
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We’re currently migrating to Spanner for a variety of reasons - but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres CloudSQL offering will be the part I miss the least. It’s insane that even with all of their HA and failover turned on they take the whole cluster down for as long as they like every few months!
WAIT. Be careful. That is a super expensive product with a high likelyhood of lockin. It doesn't support all SQL features. Also! I run hundreds of GCP databases and never ran into: "but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres CloudSQL", maybe it is only Postgres?
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh. It’s similar in AWS-land. Basic business hours support is $29/month or 3% of your service spend, whichever is greater. 24/7 is $100/mo or 10%, which also includes outage assistance. I’ve also worked for places with enterprise support ($15,000/mo or 10%) but of you’re bringing in millions per month it’s definitely worth it. The AWS personal health dashboard is also pretty reliable. The public status page is the so…
While you do pay for AWS support, I must say that in my experience AWS support is pretty top notch. I don't particularly like the (somewhat) recent changes where the priority of your ticket is based on your support plan but I'm guessing it's because everyone always chose "critical" when making small support ticket.
In my experience with AWS support, it's a major difference on whether you are asking EC 2 questions or some of the lesser used service questions.
For Media services, the supporter will almost always need to coordinate with an internal team, which there is no visibility over, and then it becomes a game of telephone to make the supporter relay the information in a way the internal team understands. I've had the same thing happen with peering/networking related questions.
For EC 2, VPC, DynamoDB kinda questions, they are indeed pretty good.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month
That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better. In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly. Our other experience…
Microsoft support is always useless in that way and the TAMs are pretty powerless. I hired an intern just to contest the hours to effectively cut our (large) premier bill 70-80%.
Their model was fault-based, and a “bug” gets billed to the support group. So the game was always for MS to avoid assignment for non Sev-A cases, and our game was to find a product defect for anything.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#115Startup idea for ex-googlers: backdoor access to GCP support (frozen accounts etc)
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#116Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#117I 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 sal…
CloudSQL was slow for us until we do the following: 1) Increase the disk size to 100GB as this increases the IOPs 2) Switch to using private IP addresses. Huge speed increase 3) get rid of cloudsql-proxy. Another huge speed increase These 3 things have kept our database instances very small and costs low.
3) get rid of cloudsql-proxy. Another huge speed increase
^ Do not use cloudsql-proxy ever. GCP docs are wrong. DO NOT proxy all your db requests through a single VM.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent?
You always can drive cost concessions from sales, especially for base workloads where you have time flexibility.
For a big company, cloud rarely saves money for many categories of expense. In a normal market, it is almost always faster time to market to rent, and always cheaper TCO to own.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
I think a number of factors add up over a 3-5 year timeline (obviously this will be more or less true for different organisations). There is the way the cost scales for a given instance in the cloud - in the old days, for example, doubling the memory or doubling the CPUs didn't double the cost of the kit, but it does for clouds VMs.
Another example is that the cloud bills you for everything, in the old days I could have a database server on a network and query it as much as I liked, the cost was fixed upfront for the lifetime of the hardware. Whereas it's very cheap to get started with a managed offering but e.g. BigQuery charges you for every query, Cloud Functions charge you per invocation, bandwidth is chargeable etc.
Speaking of hardware, in the old days you could look at your hardware and say, actually, it's fine, we don't need to upgrade/replace it this year after all, and it will just keep running. Whereas in the cloud the payment is continuous (perhaps offset by the fact that it's easier to "give back" excess capacity).
There will come a point at which the cost of DIY vs cloud will cross over, the question is whether you will reach that point, and if so, what you will do about it, since you may be well and truly locked in at that point.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#120I 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 sal…
CloudSQL was slow for us until we do the following: 1) Increase the disk size to 100GB as this increases the IOPs 2) Switch to using private IP addresses. Huge speed increase 3) get rid of cloudsql-proxy. Another huge speed increase These 3 things have kept our database instances very small and costs low.
Yeah, have hugely over provisioned disks for IOPS. Am still using public ip + cloudsql-proxy because the alternative didn't exist when I first deployed, but I'll try switching.