TLDR >>> The initial `GCP` onboarding call was entirely about how much money I was planning on spending with google (as opposed to the Amazon call where they wanted to help me architect my service)
Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
281–290 of 394 posts
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the beauty of it is that you don't realize it's happening. You just use more, and more, and more of their services...
No, I don't, and I advise other people not to. The baseline dozen-or-so services are awesome (EC2, RDS, S3, etc.). The massive number of newer services are propriety, often buggy, and poorly documented. I don't use any AWS services introduced past 2015 or so.
Well I am actually in the same camp as you then :)
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#283It'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…
Couldn't agree more. I am on both DO and Linode for many years and I have had an amazing experience. Not affiliated with any of them, just a happy customer.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#284I've used GCP to great success (with some speedbumps) at 3 companies I've worked for (small and large) over the last 5-6 years. I have a lot of learnings from the experiences to pass on, and one of the key ones is this: work with a reseller. If you've lurked on HN over the past decade you'll have seen tons of stories about how bad Google's customer support is. I don't think GCP's support is anywhere near as terrible…
Thanks for the tip. What I don’t understand is why GCP can’t get customer support right but resellers can. You’d think Google would have more resources than a reseller to provide better service. Is it the size of the company? Company culture?
Google is squarely a product company. They make products, they manage them as products, and users are a function of marketing, product performance, and support. Professional services firms are customer companies. They have no product other than solving business problems for their customers. Its likely that a VP at a reseller could name their top 15 clients and their relative spend from memory, whereas a Google VP could spout off 15 metrics that drive their division, but not have much awareness about customer spend or what’s driving it within their business.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#285Earlier 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 haven't looked, so the number after the dollar sign might be going up or down.
But if it is not going down by more than inflation then the cost is basically going up.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency?
It's a full-company culture problem where ~everyone has personal responsibility. Behavioral properties are end-to-end, like speed, security, customer success, uptime, etc. Everyone and everything on the hotpath for that has to be on board, as just one violator means nobody is achieving it. Operationally, part of achieving that means company norms, such as when collaborating, planning, executing, etc. It's 100% fine n…
I tried explaining this to some Azure product teams, and they gave me a blank stare in return.
Sure, you can have zone-redundant Azure SQL Databases, but not Azure App Service!
You can have zonal Azure App Service, but with a different network model than the default, so it's a breaking change for some apps.
It's as if nobody has actually sat down at Microsoft to build something similar to what their customers are building. It's all just tech demos, "get your blog hosted in 5 easy steps", and crap like that. Nobody at Microsoft has ever built anything of substance with the majority of their own platform.
It was the same story with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It was hot garbage when it was first released, but Microsoft kept telling all their partners to prefer it over the legacy GDI+. People tried and failed to write GUIs in it. When after many years Microsoft finally tried to convert Visual Studio to WPF -- the first time they had used their own framework for one of their own apps -- magically the core issues were fixed and WPF become viable for real apps.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
AFAIK that's a "feature", not a bug. They throttle concurrent requests and return a different error code compared to the on-premises SQL Server.
I just watched a load test hit that issue, the developers cranked up the traffic until the response times were measured in minutes. At that point Azure SQL started throwing errors related to too many concurrent queries.
Compared to just locking up or timing out, it's probably better.
See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/re...
And: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/re...
E.g.: the 4-CPU pool has only 210 Max concurrent workers per pool, but if you think about it, that's over 50 queries running at once per CPU core, which is nuts!
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or support helpfully suggests that you file a suggestion in the public Azure feedback forums.
Yeah... just like the other 5 dupes of the same suggestion with hundreds of upvotes that the product teams have dutifully ignored because it only matters to customers.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like my experience with their recruiting. Nov 2019 - interviews Dec 2019 - passed hiring committee Dec to June 2020 - emailed recruiter every two weeks never heard back June 2020 - cold email from recruiter “here is your offer letter to join Google! Let's talk team match.” Needless to say I did not accept that job. This was for a software engineer role. (edited to add line breaks)
Wow. Not even a call from the Recruiter to walk you through the offer letter?
They called me eventually were kind on the call. But the whole communication issues leading up to that really ruined it for me. I was initially quite excited too. I have no idea if this is common or if my recruiter was especially bad. Reading the parent comment made me think of the similarity.
Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
#290Earlier 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.
What about running it as a sidecar in the backend pods?