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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)

#51

Post by Eridrus »

judge2020 wrote: post #47
Eridrus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they do want to kill it, I can see them giving as little as a 5 year window before everything is shut down. Odds? Nobody's a fortune teller, but it was still being subsidized by ads with 3B loss in its FY22[0 p. 70], only increasing 100M in profit despite cloud revenue growing from 19B to 26B overall [0 p. 66]. They're either going to need to increase costs or add more "killer" products with large margins if they…

At what odds are you willing to make a bet on this? Do you think there's a 20% chance it's gone in 5 years? Do you think it's 5%? Do you think it's 30%?

People keep saying things will be shut down and I think they should put their money where their mouth is.

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

#52

Post by mdaniel »

non-slimey link: https://nandovillalba.scribe.rip/why-i-think-gcp-is-better-t...

and, as an AWS-er having to now support GCP, I violently and emphatically disagree with this:

> The experience of GCP on the other hand is more like collecting the car keys and driving off from the parking lot, with the option of dismantling and customising the car if you wish, but the default is a fully built functioning car with cohesive parts so you can quickly achieve your objectives, which is driving around, not assemble the car.

Oh, really? I invite the GCP newcomer to click on https://console.cloud.google.com/ create a new Project, and then run $(gcloud functions list) or, as the sibling comment pointed out, $(gcloud run jobs list) and watch it cheerfully tell you that you must turn on those services for each and every Project. And not just cloudfunctions.googleapis.com or run.googleapis.com, it's for damn near everything a sane person would want to use cloud computing for

I reiterate: you cannot turn on those APIs for your GCP "account," you must do it for each and every Project you create

Oh, you're the Super Admin for your Google account? Well, be sure you grant yourself the resourcemanager.projectCreator Role because as super admin you don't automatically have it

A reasonable person may retort that these are "secure by design" by opt-ing-in to surface area and permissions that one wishes to have, but as compared to "create AWS Account, start using ELB like it ain't no thing and I have AdministratorAccess granting me * permissions" -- let's not start talking about collecting car keys and driving off the lot

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

#53

Post by latchkey »

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…

Cloud Functions, Cloud Tasks and Cloud SQL Postgres are fantastic too. Very low cost that scales with you and essentially zero lockin.

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

#54

Post by mdaniel »

div_zero wrote: post #36
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.

I'm a technical writing manager on GCP, and we are actively working on improving Terraform documentation. Thank you for bringing up two significant problems with using TF on GCP. If you are willing (and of course have the time), we would love to hear other issues you - or anyone else who reads this thread - are having with TF documentation on GCP as we try and make things better.

Given: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3...

how would any reasonable person know what https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... to enable without (a) trying it and squinting at the error message (b) clicking on the API documentation https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest/v2/projects...> then realizing it, also, does not mention run.googleapis.com, click on "supported service endpoints" https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#rest_endpoi...> and only then learning about https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#service:-ru...

Repeat for https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... although in both cases I guess the astute reader may have spotted the run.googleapis.com in the forbidden service labels and cloudidentity.googleapis.com in the example

Since, to the best of my knowledge those bindings are auto generated https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules#magic-m...>, I would hypothesize it is not insurmountable drop in the seemingly existing declaration of APIs required: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d... https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d...

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

#55

Post by seanthemon »

Eridrus wrote: post #51
judge2020 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they do want to kill it, I can see them giving as little as a 5 year window before everything is shut down. Odds? Nobody's a fortune teller, but it was still being subsidized by ads with 3B loss in its FY22[0 p. 70], only increasing 100M in profit despite cloud revenue growing from 19B to 26B overall [0 p. 66]. They're either going to need to increase costs or add more "killer" products with large margins if they…

At what odds are you willing to make a bet on this? Do you think there's a 20% chance it's gone in 5 years? Do you think it's 5%? Do you think it's 30%? People keep saying things will be shut down and I think they should put their money where their mouth is.

What an oddly aggressive comment - perhaps the problem isn't prediction but extrapolation of past experiences with Google, would you not agree that it gives you a sliver of worry that they may cut the service off?

You seem very intense about Google's offering, maybe you feel attacked by the points made in the thread, but the way you're approaching this discussion is very strange.

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

#56

Post by splix »

apetresc wrote: post #30
splix wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

After the last incident (with a week of downtime) I learned that they have a paid support, which you have to sign up in advance so it didn't work for us at that moment.

Now we signed up for it, though I still not sure how it works and how I supposed to contact them in case of an emergency. All I see they charge us something for that support agreement, hope I will never need it.

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

#57

Post by latchkey »

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…

> Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure.

AppEngine is going on, checks notes, 15 years now.

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

#58

Post by latchkey »

adrr wrote: post #43
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.

Google's support is the worst. Have an issue like those random nonsense error messages, good luck getting it resolved. AWS is complete the opposite. I had an issue Aurora Postgres and got to chat with the product manager of the product. Google could have the best products on the market but no one is going to use them if the support isn't there. I was sad when Looker got bought by google. I remember having issues with…

> Google's support is the worst.

5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.

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

#59

Post by acdha »

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…

> However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling.

You get that on AWS, too. The difference in my experience has been that once you’re out of a narrow range of features you’re more likely to hit something which is builtin on AWS but has a GCP ticket from 5 years ago with no progress. If you have any kind of security compliance requirements that gets brutal on GCP since you have to take on running an entire service to get that one missing feature.

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

#60

Post by mdaniel »

latchkey wrote: post #58
adrr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's support is the worst. Have an issue like those random nonsense error messages, good luck getting it resolved. AWS is complete the opposite. I had an issue Aurora Postgres and got to chat with the product manager of the product. Google could have the best products on the market but no one is going to use them if the support isn't there. I was sad when Looker got bought by google. I remember having issues with…

> Google's support is the worst. 5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.

Well, AIUI "reach the front page of HN" was always the only cited way of getting any help with a Google problem, so in that way this is a derivative of that scenario
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