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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

201–210 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're planning on building your business on the cloud, the availability of free credits seems like the worst way to evaluate a cloud provider. Generous "free" credits might even be a warning that they have to pay people to use the platform.

If you truly need cloud hosting then that is $130k of free money no? That's more than many pre-seed rounds. If you use that for a bunch of Linux machines running some kinda containers and a non-proprietary database then I don't see any downsides.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#202

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…

It's interesting that you've had that experience - it mirrors mine in dealing with Oracle reps: no engagement, no interest, very high turnover, always under pressure to sell, sell, sell. I wonder if appointing someone ex-Oracle to head GCP has carried that culture over.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not too bad if you use the firebase store. But yeah using the firebase realtime db for anything that requires relationships/indexing can be kinda cumbersome.

> It's not too bad if you use the firebase store I've built a prototype on top of it and it's fairly rudimentary but you can make it work. My biggest concern is that there are no case studies I can find of people using it past the prototype stage and how the pricing/scalability works out at that point.

We've spent a lot of time working around the limitations of FireStore, but it does work reliably. Pricing is VERY hard to extrapolate from early use; all it takes is one feature request and your assumptions are blown.

Love to hear from anyone who has gone beyond the prototype phase.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#204
post #56

Hi Kevin ;-) I am founder of another YC backed company. We based our startup on GCP infra. They have great tech (for the most part) but I regret it so deeply for two reasons: Support or desire to help customers is non-existent. For any questions, they want us to upgrade to paid support and pay them at least 10% more every month for that (we ask like 1-2 questions a year). What? We are already paying you thousands of…

> I have to assume AWS is better.

Did you know that the grass is always greener on the other side?

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#205
post #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.

I helped a major user of GCP migrate off the platform to AWS for this exact reason. Totally insane that they still do this when AWS has had a rock solid offering in the form of RDS for like 10 years now.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#206
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to work at Google on Cloud, and am now an AWS customer. Have used both clouds extensively.

My comments are mostly backed up by my experience at startups and are not colored by my experience at Google (too different a beast).

GCP is great for teams that are also using GSuite because you can set permissions at the level of a Google Group and have them propagate to individual members. You can, of course, also create groups in AWS but they don't have the same semantics of Google Groups and don't cover the wide range of use cases that Google Groups does.

The AWS scopes -> policies -> roles -> resources chain of abstractions is less natural conceptually than GCP's GSuite accounts + service accounts with attached scopes per project.

Also the fact that each managed service (GCE, GKE, Cloud Builder) has its own service account that you can attach scopes to is really nice. GCP service accounts just feel more discoverable than AWS IAM roles - I think it's because the number of AWS pre-built roles is so overwhelming.

Just some thoughts off the top of my head.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#207

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 mentioned this a couple of times, but Google's CS is non-existent. That's #1 issue holding me back from trying any of GCP offerings.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#208
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".

We got hella (official size) AWS credits by using Carta to manage our captable/409a.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#209

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…

Google Cloud, AWS, MS Auzra are made to lock you into their system. I guess if fine if you are ok with it and you don't have an experienced systemadmin/dev op on hand.

There are plenty of cloud agnostic platform out there that does VPS, load balancers. digital ocean, linode, etc.

If you want to be green there is also the Advania they use geothermal energy. And since it is in iceland better data protection policy than US companies.

I'm not affiliated with any one of them, it is just from year of cloud provider hopping.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#210

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'm not a rep, and I don't know anything about your use, but I'm 100% ready to learn about it and see if any of the stuff I know can be helpful to you and your team. Sorry this has been your ride to-date :( miles@sada.com
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