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I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

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Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#21

Post by danielmarkbruce »

skadamat wrote: post #13

My biggest challenge with GCP is that I'm still not convinced Google cares that much about this division. They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau. Also, I'm still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren't linked to advertising. Google Search, Gma…

I used to work in GCP. They are definitely committed to it. Search, Android, Google Cloud, YouTube - definitely committed.

It's the random little things they build too many of and hence close down. They never really understood branding. Slapping Google on everything doesn't help, it hurts. Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#22

Post by Ameo »

My two cents, GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:

- Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless/containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic).

- BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the details yourself. Billing can be either extremely cheap or rather expensive depending on what you're doing, though.

- GCS Archive Storage. 1/3 the cost of glacier for storage ($0.0012/GB/Month lol), but more for retrieval. Has none of the annoyances of Glacier (you can download your files instantly, upload using normal APIs). Perfect for extremely cheap backups.

- Cloud Spanner. I've not had a reason to use this yet myself, but there really aren't any comparable offerings that I know of.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#23

Post by alphalima »

skadamat wrote: post #13

My biggest challenge with GCP is that I'm still not convinced Google cares that much about this division. They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau. Also, I'm still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren't linked to advertising. Google Search, Gma…

Yes, especially around Looker. It's so strange/non-cloud. The 0-users 0-usage price is $5,000 per month.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#24

Post by splix »

notfried wrote: post #7

I don't buy the article's argument around the "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google". Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and/or reliability, unable to compete on p…

It can create problems from a different angle, though. Google might lock your account for no reason for a week, without any explanation. If that happens, it's your problem if you lose your whole business after a week of downtime. Since it's Google, you can't even contact support.

This has happened to me a couple of times. Once, my account was locked for a day because their system flagged one of my servers for suspicious traffic. They locked all my servers, databases, and everything else, not just that one server. Another time, they locked a different project for a week. It actually took me a week to find a human who could unlock it; otherwise, it could have been even longer. I still don't know the reason for the lock.

So the main problem is that Google don't care about GCP at all, and threat paid customers in same way as free users (i.e., hostile to both)

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#25

Post by nerdjon »

s-xyz wrote: post #14

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of…

For a fairly simple setup AWS automates a lot of things. If I just want an EC2 instance and a database, the VPC already exists and there is now even a button on an RDS that says something like "connect to ec2" which sets up the security groups on both for you.

However the argument against using GCP has already been stated in this thread multiple times.

- Will it exist in 3-5 years. Google has a reputation for a reason.

- Will the cost increase in the next year. Google (including google cloud) has a reputation for a reason.

- Here we have seen time and time again problems reaching support with Google Cloud.

Meanwhile my personal AWS account that I spend maybe $5 a month on... I emailed support about a billing problem and got a response about a day later.

I would not risk my job by using Google Cloud and being at the whims of Google being Google. The last thing I want is to have to go to my leadership and explain why the cost is going up or why suddenly we need to spend a bunch of engineering effort because google is discontinuing something.

If I really didn't want to support AWS/Amazon (which is fair) I would go Azure long before going GCloud. Hell I might be convinced to go IBM but thankfully I don't have to make that decision with Azure.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#26

Post by Eridrus »

HideousKojima wrote: post #18
s-xyz wrote: post #14

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of…

> cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. Confidence that it will continue to exist in the next 3-10 years?

What odds would you like to bet that GCP is going to be gone in 10 years?

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#27

Post by PaulHoule »

I did a shootout of a number of cloud visual recognition APIs. All of them took less then 20 minutes to have a demo running except for GCP which rudely required me to install special software to log in which trashed the Python installation on my machine and overall took an order of magnitude more time than all the others... No thanks.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#28

Post by s-xyz »

shell0x wrote: post #15
craigmcnamara wrote: post #6

I find the GCP documentation to be lacking compared to AWS. Specifically while using GCP with Terraform I hit more frustrating nonsense error messages with little to no google hits or undocumented behavior around IAM config compared to my experience doing similar things on AWS.

100%. My experience has been the same. The docs have their shortcomings and I ended up reading through so many Github issues and random blog posts trying to resolve the issues. From a documentation perspective, AWS is still the best.

Wow I would literally say the opposite. I even use GCP docs as an example for my engineers on how to write proper docs, and did several workshops using the GCP docs as reference. Happy to share the presentation if interested.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#29

Post by JSavageOne »

Ameo wrote: post #22

My two cents, GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering: - Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless/containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic). - BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the deta…

Yes Google Cloud Run is my go-to for all my side projects, and AWS doesn't have anything equivalent. Never saw any reason to use AWS for that reason as Google has everything else I'd need. And if I just want a cheap VPS, would prefer to use something cheaper like Linode or Digital Ocean.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#30

Post by apetresc »

splix wrote: post #24
notfried wrote: post #7

I don't buy the article's argument around the "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google". Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and/or reliability, unable to compete on p…

It can create problems from a different angle, though. Google might lock your account for no reason for a week, without any explanation. If that happens, it's your problem if you lose your whole business after a week of downtime. Since it's Google, you can't even contact support. This has happened to me a couple of times. Once, my account was locked for a day because their system flagged one of my servers for suspici…

GCP doesn't really have the Google problem of lacking support contacts. I've managed relationships with GCP for a couple of different companies now (from startup to mid-size enterprise), and in all cases I had multiple dedicated account reps that I could not only get on a phone, but frequently met with in person.

Maybe the story is different for very very small fish, but I had decent experiences with support even at the ~20-person company spending ~5k/month level.

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