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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

351–360 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#351

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)

I know why. HR received so many resumes which they don't do any additional effort, do they receive compensation for each hire, no. Most of them are not FTE.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#352
post #271

Earlier 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…

Do y'all just like, ignore SLO's? Cloud SQL has a 99.95% SLO, going down for multiple minutes every month is within that. No smoke and mirrors here, there are ways to mitigate it but it's not Google messing around with expectations. HA doesn't mean 100% uptime.

Does that include or exclude "maintenance windows".

AWS tells you when your maintenance window for an RDS instance will be and you can delay/reschedule as needed.

I wouldn't consider a maintenance window as "downtime". That 99.95 applies to all the time outside the window.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#353
Think where the 3 major cloud operators come from:

AWS: Eat-your-own-dogfood, consumer company

Google: Eyeballs are our product, cloud,apps,services is a side-effect of our underlying ad business

Microsoft: Developer first, keep people in our ecosystem, make it easy to adopt, hard to get out of.

Google has good technical product inside GCP, nice fancy stuff like Spanner, etc. All spun out of their own requirements and needs, which is a scalable, invisible, processing engine. Their ad business has two sets of people, ad buyers that bid for their business and don't have alternatives, and anonymous viewers that google sells back to the ad buyers. They're rent-seekers that clip the ticket coming and going, using their search as the lock-in.

No wonder they have trouble setting up a true B2B or B2C business. They're not built for it.

Both AWS and Microsoft are at least either B2B or B2C and understand that it's not clipping the ticket, it's making margin over the cost of supply of goods and services.

Microsoft has even learnt the lesson of losing your lock-in advantage of the desktop.

Google has lost that fundamental trust to be able to both operate as a rent-seeker in the ad business while also delivering actual goods and services as a B2B/B2C business.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#354
post #271

Earlier 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…

Do y'all just like, ignore SLO's? Cloud SQL has a 99.95% SLO, going down for multiple minutes every month is within that. No smoke and mirrors here, there are ways to mitigate it but it's not Google messing around with expectations. HA doesn't mean 100% uptime.

It’s worth noting that the dreaded maintenance everyone is talking about here is not part of the SLA:

“Downtime as part of Scheduled Maintenance will not be counted towards any Downtime Period.” - https://cloud.google.com/sql/sla

I’ve never seen an SLO document for CloudSQL though so the SLOs may be slightly higher internally?

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#355

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…

How does AWS lock you more than DO? Because they have a more comprehensive offering?

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#356
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 cre…

Gone deep on IAM in AWS, attempted a similar thing on GCP later for another project, was very surprised how weak GCP IAM was.

Top of mind things I found weak/weird: - Basically can’t do least privilege, only want a role to read messages from one pubsub queue? Nope not possible - IAM policies seem bolted on, legacy roles seem much better fit in the ecosystem, but they suck obvs. - different gcp resources have somewhere between very coarse grain to just acceptable iam operations. Might just be GCS that lets you do proper least privileges policies like you would do in AWS.

I was very surprised how bad it was, AWS IAM is some black magic shit that is deeply impressive and often taken for granted, even GCP can’t replicate.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#357

Earlier 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? I haven't worked inside AWS or GCP, but I've never seen product get everything they want, especially around maintenance/downtime. If "less downtime" is on the roadmap but engineering is cons…

> that'll be really really hard and take a long time It probably is hard and intensive. Engineering shouldn't lie and promise that it will be easier. Product has to take that engineering estimate and determine whether to work uptime or some sexy feature (and sexy features usually win because of perverse incentives). Moreover, I have a hard time believing this for a couple reasons: first of all, I've scarcely met engi…

Sounds familiar. Product and sales areas of the business look at immediate revenues - and hopefully profit - but are always more keen to do that at the cost of increasing technical debt within the engineering side of the business. Unless sales see a real impact to technical debt, they will always choose the short-term approach.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#358

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…

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 still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but I don't encourage folks to use GCP the way that I used to.

I trust virtually anyone's security over Google's. I've never had issues with AWS. I've consistently run into serious Google security failures. Google has airtight security for its own data, but not for its customers.

Examples range from Chromebook and Android security update policies (tons of expired machines on the public internet, in the case of Android, usually without people knowing), to pay-for-security on GSuite, to really difficult-to-audit Google Drive security (there's no convenient way to track and audit what was shared with whom or where data went), to just a ton of other things.

I've never seen Amazon be callous with my data. I've seen Google do things that even nineties "we don't need security" Microsoft wouldn't have imagined....

The only people I know who really trust Google security worked for or are close to people who worked at Google. There's a reality-distortion field based on how much Google invests in its own security that people fail to notice very basic failures, like millions of expired Android devices, or a lack of audit logs if someone physically accesses your machine to rifle through your gmail....

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#359
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probabl…

I’ve experienced that too, but these errors were literally “server is currently unavailable” and downtime.

Ps: if you’re working on a production load system, and has decent traffic, lean towards premium/business critical tiers for true HA

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#360

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…

The reason why the account managers change this way is because of so called territory or account realignment. These are sales terms but ultimately it means don't sit on one client for too long. Salesforce does this every single year, last week I received an email from 6th or 7th account manager since I started using them. The story is always the same: they get in touch,try to understand your business,ask questions,and see if they can spot something that previous guy missed. I hate it. However, this seems to be working on their end,as the sales keep growing...go figure.
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