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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

271–280 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#271
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does RDS not do this to their customers? This alone would make me seriously consider taking my business away from GCP.

Absolutely not. I'm sure it's happened but I have never personally seen an RDS instance go down, in over 10 years consulting and building in AWS. Google Cloud SQL was going down for multiple minutes every month for one of my clients, and their support just said there was nothing they could do about it. That cost Google cloud at least a million dollars in revenue over the next few years as this was a fast growing startup.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#272

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.

Of course there's an API for creating and resizing instances. The issue is there are quotas that cap how many CPUs you can have, and increasing that is a manual process.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one here: https://calculator.aws/ If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if you want to be sure you're not going to run int…

I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're wil…

My experience with AWS customer support was not so good. At the time I had very little knowledge about what I was doing so I can't recount all the details here, but the short version is I had a wildcard cert tied up with a resource that wasn't mine (something on Amazon's side was referencing it) so I could not delete the cert which prevented me from doing something with the associated domain name. AWS has no mechanism AFAIK to report a bug in their system, so I had to pay for developer support (which was expensive to me at the time). Even then, the issue was never actually resolved for me. I think I actually switched to a totally different domain name just to get around it. Here's a support thread where people are having the same issue:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=249559

I use GCP now. I find their tooling and UX to be about 100% better and will not use AWS in the future if I can avoid it.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#274
Everyone's needs are different. To me GCP is easier to get started with.

I don't want white glove service where they try to architect my architecture for me. Pushing me into cloud specific features (like everything in Lambdas stitched together with API Gateways). I don't need that level of help.

Also, of the three startups where I have heavily used AWS (personally "owned" the AWS infra), I never had that level of service offered. The only time I've had that "we'll help you architect it" service from AWS was at a startup that used GCP, and there were high level (CEO and CTO) discussions with AWS about partnerships. Then AWS wanted to help us architect (with Lambdas and API Gateways).

For me, GCP is way easier. Their products are more complete products. They work together out of the box. They are optimized for the 90% use case to just work. It is far easier to get a really good complete architecture working with GCP. Using their products push you to industry standard ways of writing and packaging applications (12-factor, Docker containers, etc.).

The startups I've seen build on AWS often have very bad setups. Hand rolled and poorly managed EC2 messes. Bad logging and monitoring because AWS doesn't have good logging and monitoring. Having to manage everything themselves because AWS doesn't/didn't have good managed platforms (Elastic Beanstalk has enough problems that people don't use it, and EKS barely counts as a managed service).

I've seen multiple startup with hand configured EC2 instances, running some generic web service. These systems create huge burdens and risks as the company grows. The app then grows and becomes locked into the special snowflake hand configured mess. One company I joined couldn't deploy for 6 months because their last deployment (a manual process) took 7 hours of downtime. When I see those systems I wish they started on Heroku or GCP App Engine (2nd gen). They would be way better off with a fully automated platform and 12-factor apps. Once you grow and hire people with infrastructure expertise you can take that clean 12-factor app and move it somewhere else. Non-experts trying to use AWS results in scary things.

GCP gives you that easy on-ramp. You can start with App Engine. If you need something a bit more custom, you can use Cloud Run (same basic tech as App Engine v2 but with Docker containers). If you need to move to something even more customizable for growing special needs, you can use GKE for a fully managed Kubernetes. With all those services you can write normal apps that use environment variables and log to stdout/stderr. All three give you logs in an easy to use logging platform. All three give you metrics in an easy to use monitoring/metrics/dashboard platform.

At every level GCP is easier. Cloud Pub/Sub is easier than SNS+SQS, Amazon Kinesis, or Amazon MSK (Kafka). It is multi-region and just works and scales. GCP VPCs and networking are easier because GCP VPCs are global (not regional), and subnets are regional (not zonal). No need to stitch VPCs together. GCP even has Shared VPCs so you can have a single address space shared across multiple projects (GCP projects == AW accounts). GCP authentication is simple and sane, even across multiple projects, no federation and role assumption needed. GCP IAM is far easier than AWS IAM. Cloud Datastore provides a really simple yet powerful NoSQL store, totally simple, no tunables, just works and scales, and even has some multi-region options available. Want a multi-region consistent database that spans large geographic regions? Amazon doesn't have an option, GCP has Spanner. Want a multi-region consistent blob/file store? Amazon doesn't have an option (S3 is single region), GCP offers GCS in multi-region, dual-region options that provide consistent multi-region file storage. Do you have some weird old app that writes to disk, and you would like it to be able to survive a zone failure? AWS EBS is single zone, GCP persistent disks can be regional, and because subnets are regional that means an instance in another zone can take over the disk and the IP.

For me, GCP is way easier to get started with. And will result in a better system in the medium term. In the long term, when you have thousands of engineers and experts in infrastructure engineering, it probably doesn't matter.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Google's support offerings. But when I worked for a startup that was on AWS, here's what we'd do: 1.) Try to figure things out ourselves 2.) If we can't figure it out, subscribe to AWS Support. 3.) Get question answered and then turn off the support plan. You'll have your support plan for the rest of the month and pay a prorated amount for the days during which you had support. It's quick and cheap…

You can do the same with GCP

Last I checked GCP has a minimum one month billing for support. Then again, we're talking about $100/mo here, saving half of that pays for how many minutes of engineer time?

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#277

I still don't understand why startups go through the hassle of using cloud, trying to get customer support for unknown and half-baked cloud products and spending enormous money - rather than focusing on building the ACTUAL product? just go rent some VMs/bare-metal and focus on building your product, everything non-product related is just a waste of time, money, and effort. it looks almost as if engineers forgot how t…

Because startup credits are free money?

Also, the basics on all major clouds are pretty baked at this point.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#278
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does RDS not do this to their customers? This alone would make me seriously consider taking my business away from GCP.

Absolutely not. I'm sure it's happened but I have never personally seen an RDS instance go down, in over 10 years consulting and building in AWS. Google Cloud SQL was going down for multiple minutes every month for one of my clients, and their support just said there was nothing they could do about it. That cost Google cloud at least a million dollars in revenue over the next few years as this was a fast growing star…

I’ve been a long time Azure user, their SQL Azure product was very glitchy and had constant outages (“just add retries!”), it’s gotten better in the last year or so, but it was totally unacceptable.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#279
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you need very high throughput I can appreciate this advice. Generally though, cloudsql-proxy is fast enough for most use-cases.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#280
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From GCP docs [0]: Effect of ToS violations Google-wide disabled account In some cases a Google-wide account (which covers access to a variety of Google products like Google Photos, Google Play, Google Drive, and GCP) will be disabled for violations of a Google ToS, egregious policy violations, or as required by law. Owners of disabled Google accounts will not be able to access their Google Cloud resources until the…

> To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on Google Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than one owner to all resources. As long as there is at least one active owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the one of the owners being disabled. When even Google themselves is recommending gaming their system since they can't guarantee it won't screw you over, that should be a warning sign.

Having more than one owner is just basic common sense though. What if the single owner is hit by a literal bus?
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