241–250 of 394 posts
Where is Azure here?
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'd be more interested in how easy it is to use a credit card and get a service off the ground. What is the relative quality of the products on offer by either vendor?
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…
The overly commercial approach by the GCP rep is so short sighted but not uncommon. I recently worked on a project which had a potential vendor spend in the millions if not tens of millions when it went to production and scaled. Without exception, all of the vendors we spoke with early doors were horrible. Only interested in qualifying the size of the opportunity and when it would sign, not giving us access to the ri…
But the sales rep knows that their job isn’t strictly needed, because the customer can sign up and use services without talking to anyone. They only exist to upsell services.
There’s almost no intersection between what a customer wants and what the salesperson provides, so why wouldn’t it be a bad experience for everyone?
Microsoft is not without their faults and I know a few sprinkles of comments in this thread have definitely highlighted issues I know people have had with them, but in the whole I have to say this:
- my previous company switched from AWS to Azure and had significant savings, their sticker price is not the price you pay, and we were not spending millions to get deep discounts either (they were more interested in us being in a contract instead which makers some sense)
- the support we dealt with was really good for the most part, I felt it was pretty comparable to AWS
- they have really good uptime for the services we used (blob storage, cosmos DB, mssql and postgres, container hosting)
Biggest downside though is they seemed to always be going through SDK changes. I think this had a lot more to do with migrating everything to .NET core though, still was very annoying. Their non .NET sdks were a bit more stable though.
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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!
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You need to see GCP as its own brand with its own support team and policies (though they are impacted by some shared technical infrastructure and associated policies). I cannot say whether these are good or bad, only that they are distinct for GCP. Experiences with support or lack of support concerning other Google product areas and divisions, especially those not designed for businesses really don't apply if you kno…
I use a lot of Google products. All of them I pay for, except search. It is true there are individuals that shine, but across the board, Google sucks at support. It starts at the top with what kind of company they want to be, and goes from there. They do not like humans.
You should have seen the extent to which the rest of the team and I tried to resolve customer issues.
Random App Engine app getting 500s calling an Open ID endpoint (the service wasn't strictly speaking managed by GCP). I absolutely could not reproduce this and had no other reports, but I knew it was happening for the customer. I examined everything that could be different... After 2 weeks I finally got it: The customer app was running in a different data center compared to where I was testing. Calls to the API endpoint were timing out internally (pretty aggressive timeout interval). It turns out the Open ID service wasn't running in the same data center region. That should not have been the case but occurred because the internal BigTable service had to be upgraded in a particular region and hence all App Engine apps in that region were moved to another one - a fairly seamless process. The Open ID service unfortunately wasn't provisioned in that region (it's not a dependency of App Engine). Once I identified the issue it was a matter of telling the on call SRE about it who then spun up Open ID in that region and thereby resolved the issues in a matter of 5 minutes.
Often a new support case meant discovering platform limitations - for example running into BigTable anti patterns because App Engine Datastore allocated IDs sequentially by default. That could cause poor read / write performance, in part due to automatic sharding behavior of BigTable. We later switched to snowflake IDs.
And then there were lots of Java folks used to Classpath scanning (default behavior of Spring Framework?) which for larger projects caused App Engine container startup to exceed the allowed time limit. That became a user education issue for which we then had to write an in depth article.
Good times :)
I absolutely hated dealing with billing inquiries though... so difficult to map someone's code to billable operations. Some SDK methods were of course utilizing multiple billable operations. Determining SLA violation refunds was much easier.
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And yet Google Cloud has some great features that AFAIK AWS still hasn't, presumably due to different priorities. Like regional disks [1] or live migration of compute between hosts if problems are detected with the host. 1. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks#repds
> live migration of compute between hosts When would you ever want to rely on this? Seems to me like you should have two hosts in the first place.
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…
So why is Google this way? They already have a terrible reputation for their non-existent support. Never thought they'd treat actual companies this way though. It makes no sense...