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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

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Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#161

Post by temp667 »

NathanKP wrote: post #49
random5634 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said elsewhere, the $29 and $99 support plans for AWS have to lose AWS money. At least a (fairly long) while ago the support was nuts through these. Total expert level / out of scope. Frankly I'd encourage them to hold scope a bit more but its obviously working for them.

AWS employee here. When I was an AWS customer I was also often surprised by the quality of the support answers. Now from the other side I can explain why: even on the cheaper support plans it isn't uncommon for difficult questions to make their way back to the relevant team and the answer you are getting was often written by an engineering manager or engineer on the team that built and operates the thing you were ask…

Very interesting.

This would explain the response I got (backstory - I am a contributor to a number of open source packages / not totally clueless, but was coming in from a micro personal account). I was like, how the heck do they afford this response for $99! (or whatever it cost back then - this was a long time ago).

I kept my support plan active for a year as a courtesy though I never had another question aside from the first two I put in.

That said, as a programmer I like time to focus so being asked customer questions would drive me nuts, hopefully they filter out the idiots who just can't setup things right (80% of issues are not bugs but customer setup issues).

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#162

Post by duckfang »

NathanKP wrote: post #49
random5634 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said elsewhere, the $29 and $99 support plans for AWS have to lose AWS money. At least a (fairly long) while ago the support was nuts through these. Total expert level / out of scope. Frankly I'd encourage them to hold scope a bit more but its obviously working for them.

AWS employee here. When I was an AWS customer I was also often surprised by the quality of the support answers. Now from the other side I can explain why: even on the cheaper support plans it isn't uncommon for difficult questions to make their way back to the relevant team and the answer you are getting was often written by an engineering manager or engineer on the team that built and operates the thing you were ask…

Agreed. AWS technical support is exactly that. It's been a pleasure every time, that when I open a ticket, I actually have a real technically minded human behind it.

As a converse, I've also had the extreme displeasure in dealing with Oracle and Tenable/Nessus support...

With Oracle, its either a continual feature-push to go to professional for only starting $50k/yr more (NO), or troubleshooting ends up asking 100 questions for your question.. And if you answer them, they give you 100 more. Effectively its a technical DOS in the hopes you abandon the ticket.

Nessus/Tenable is similar. They want you to use their terrible tenable.io (which isn't fedramped), and will badger you incessantly. And service tickets demand enhanced logs be turned on and provided to them. Their tool can censor some passwords, but have caught passwords in there along with services, addresses, and exploit data about them. And even if you censor the logs prior to shipping to them, they will put their foot down and demand unedited logs.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#163

Post by klohto »

pluc wrote: post #92

I've been working for startups for 20 years and I was never able to get an AWS Account Manager, much less a "Startup Rep". They must only care about spending, your email domain, the fact that you're an ex employee or likely to write about the experience. Cause it's always been "you're on your own" for me.

Then I would advise you try again. Our AWS bill is between 4 and 5 figures and we got dedicated startup account manager while on development within a week of asking. No internal contacts, literally pinged support team and got it.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#164

Post by dastbe »

numbsafari wrote: post #122
smithcoin wrote: post #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 sta…

This has also been my experience. When we first launched on GCP, there was no question that it was the way to go (frankly, because of BigQuery). Working with AWS, when we launched, was going to cost us significantly more up-front, before we had even brought on our first customer. Fast forward 5 years... AWS has closed the gap in every way that matters. I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but…

(I work at AWS)

> I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's

If you have the time, could you expand on this? While I'm not directly involved in security at AWS, I'd be down to forward your thoughts to people who do.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#165

Post by 300bps »

cougarcan wrote: post #78

Where is Azure here?

Azure has amazing free benefits for startup. I formerly went through their Bizspark program which gave me a huge credit that let me have multiple VMs, relational database servers, etc for free FOR THREE YEARS.

I'm pretty tied to AWS at this point because that's who my employer uses but Azure was really great and their startup benefits were very generous.

https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#166

Post by sa46 »

stevencorona wrote: post #136
eyal_c wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just started using Google Cloud SQL – the allure of a managed Postgres service was strong. Can you share some of your experiences with it?

Sure. - No way to upgrade major postgres version without full export and import into new cluster. - Incredible delay between postgres versions. IIRC, it took nearly 2 years for them to add postgres 11 after it was released. - HA is basically useless. Costs double, still has 4-5 minute window of downtime as it fails over, doesn't avoid maintenance window downtime (both primary/standby have same maintenance window) and…

> Incredible delay between postgres versions

To be fair, it looks like GCP supported Postgres 13 (Nov 5, 2020) before AWS did (Nov 27, 2020) and AWS currently marks Postgres 13 as a preview. Maybe GCP had a large initial engineer-cost to support multiple versions of Postgres and now the incremental cost to add new versions is small?

> It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated version of Postgres.

Have you looked at other options? I'm evaluating GCP SQL and the comments in this thread are scary. Seems like Aiven might be a good way to go. I've also briefly looked at CrunchyData's Postgres Operator [1] for Kubernetes but it's a lot of complexity I don't really want.

[1]: https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#167

Post by marcinzm »

woodgrainz wrote: post #91

"AWS: reach out to dedicated YC email" How is this an apples-to-apples comparison at all? Very disingenuous. You have a special support tier for your YC company.

Nothing is stopping GCP from doing likewise but they don't. Thus for a YC startup AWS is ahead in terms of customer service.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#168

Post by sa46 »

cbushko wrote: post #62
stevencorona wrote: post #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 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.

> Switch to using private IP addresses. Huge speed increase.

Interesting. I'm looking Cloud SQL right now and the advice seems to lean in the opposite direction: use public IPs for ease of connecting. Can you quantify the decrease in latency? All I can find is bits about reduced network hops.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#169

Post by Aperocky »

stevencorona wrote: post #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 sal…

Wait what, it's not available through an API? That's ridiculous.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#170

Post by stevencorona »

cakoose wrote: post #151
stevencorona wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. - No way to upgrade major postgres version without full export and import into new cluster. - Incredible delay between postgres versions. IIRC, it took nearly 2 years for them to add postgres 11 after it was released. - HA is basically useless. Costs double, still has 4-5 minute window of downtime as it fails over, doesn't avoid maintenance window downtime (both primary/standby have same maintenance window) and…

I need to run Postgres in production soon. I've used AWS RDS (MySQL) in the past, but am also considering Google Cloud SQL. Things that seem similar in AWS: - For major version upgrades, you need to bring up a new instance from a snapshot and catch it up with replication. - HA failover results in a few minutes of downtime. (They claim using their SQL proxy will reduce this.) - Lag in providing the latest Postgres ver…

To clarify, it’s a lot more work than bringing up a snapshot. You need to do a full export as SQL and reimport as SQL. Super annoying, slow, and requires hard downtime.

Am using SQL proxy but doesn’t do much re: HA.

I don’t know, I’ll probably just run my own Postgres at some point. The only peace of mind that I get from Cloud SQL is the automatic backups.

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