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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

321–330 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#321
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…

Support has been very good for us. Their support pricing model changed from percentage of your bill to a fixed cost per support user

https://cloud.google.com/support

For most organizations role based production plan is good enough

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#322
post #35
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…

Google will suspend entire accounts even if you have more than one owner. A few years back, our business credit card was somehow stolen and used to buy Google Adwords. We disputed the charge with our bank. A day or two later, at 4am local time, our GCP account was suspended for fraud (presumably because the same, stolen, card was attached to that account). All instances were stopped and our service was brought to a h…

Googler, opinions are my own.

We actually created a portal where you can report unknown charges to Google directly; https://payments.google.com/payments/unauthorizedtransaction...

Credit card companies tell you to work with a company before issuing a chargeback, as chargebacks are a last resort. The above form helps you keep you account active without being swept up in the chargeback process.

It's something we all want to keep improving. I'm hoping as SCA (strong customer authentication) rolls out across europe and maybe other countries pick it up, it should cut down on issues like this.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't RDS and Aurora two different things?

Aurora is one of the DB things you can launch in RDS.

Thanks for clarifying. I'd associated RDS with the non-Aurora offerings of Mysql and Postgres. Judging by upstream version compatibility it appears Aurora is more heavily forked than their non-Aurora siblings.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know what the difference is but the number of hops is probably a contributing factor to the decrease in speed. There could be some translation layer happening when going from the CloudSQL instances private IP to public IP with some security checks that slow it down. I didn't have to worry about the 'ease of connecting' when using CloudSQL as all my GCP services are in the same VPC. Also, private ip i…

Is it speed of establishing a connection or does it affect pooled connections? What database engine are you using? We abandoned cloudsqlproxy partially because the sidecar in Kubernetes caused random disconnects, but also because it just had bizarre network errors sometimes. (That was mostly when connecting from outside GCP though.)

We are using PHP and thus no connection pools at all. This definitely doesn't help us with speed. With public IP there was some mystery point that just slowed everything to a crawl.

MySQL for our DB.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#326
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…

Interestingly, we don't have any of these problems with MySQL. We have several read-replicas on our DBs and things have been stable.

I will guess that you are much higher scale than us.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#327

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…

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, that's a pretty horrible experience. Weird too since AFAIK recruiter/recruiting coordinatiors comp tied in some way to shepherding the successful candidates through the hiring process.

Me and a friend of mine interviewed in Nov and passed HC in Dec 2019 as well (different recruiters between the two of us). Our experience was different from yours: Immediate timely followups from the recruiting coordinators, team-matched and hired in the same month. Hopefully our experience is more common...

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Aurora just for this reason. RDS is just a great product. Doesn't even need the cloud sql proxy equivalent since you can just install the authenticator into the database.

Aren't RDS and Aurora two different things?

> Aren't RDS and Aurora two different things?

NO, RDS includes non-Aurora versions of many DBs, plus MySQL and Postgres-compatible Aurora servers, plus MySQL and Postgres compatible Aurora Serverless.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#329
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…

Eh. It’s similar in AWS-land. Basic business hours support is $29/month or 3% of your service spend, whichever is greater. 24/7 is $100/mo or 10%, which also includes outage assistance. I’ve also worked for places with enterprise support ($15,000/mo or 10%) but of you’re bringing in millions per month it’s definitely worth it. The AWS personal health dashboard is also pretty reliable. The public status page is the so…

Even in the "millions per month" company realm, I've often felt that AWS treated us like a cash cow to some extent.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#330

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…

To be fair, BigQuery is probably their best product since Search so I can see why they try to milk it. It capitalises on what Google's best at, distributed systems engineering, while avoiding what Google's worst at, API design (by instead using SQL, which wasn't invented by Google). I say that as a customer who otherwise has little positive to say about Google.
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