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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)

#61

Post by jeffbee »

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

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.

Python inside and outside of Google is a disaster. They broke their own API last year with a release of their own project.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/2uFuNdeK9xXSwY9w7c...

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

#62

Post by idunno246 »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #21
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.

i dont doubt gcp will continue existing. but individual services/products/apis/pricing break way too frequently, and the response from google is deal with it. small companies dont really notice it, and how anti-customer it is, but when once a month youre dealing with some firefight because gcp decided to change something its tiring, since at a big company it means tracking down ten different teams. ive not experienced anywhere near the churn in aws

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

#63

Post by gorjusborg »

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 had the same gripe when I worked with GCP. Their stuff is exotic, and had weird behaviors in corners, but the docs didn't give you enough context to steer away from them.

However, over the last 5 years or so, AWS docs have gotten worse.

So I guess now that they are both bad I can't complain?

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

#64

Post by nologic01 »

would GCP (or AWS for that matter) survive on their own? What does the relation with the parent company provide and what does it demand in return?

From a business model perspective both these two entities are an aberration in how far they are from their corporate umbrella.

Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc are more natural players in this domain but DigitalOcean shows you don't need to be bigtech to carve a niche.

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

#65

Post by gnfargbl »

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…

My company spends maybe $4k/mo with GCP, and I have absolutely no idea who my "dedicated account rep" is. I did have someone contact me way back when, but after finding out we aren't VC funded they literally ghosted me.

I don't really enjoy being on GCP for that reason, but I need it for BigQuery, so...

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by siquick »

JSavageOne wrote: post #29
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.

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

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

#68

Post by danielmarkbruce »

idunno246 wrote: post #62
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i dont doubt gcp will continue existing. but individual services/products/apis/pricing break way too frequently, and the response from google is deal with it. small companies dont really notice it, and how anti-customer it is, but when once a month youre dealing with some firefight because gcp decided to change something its tiring, since at a big company it means tracking down ten different teams. ive not experience…

Yep, it's a fair criticism.

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

#69

Post by HideousKojima »

Eridrus wrote: post #26
HideousKojima wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If it can't get profitable (or at least within $1B/year of profitable, or have some sort of major loss leader value to Google) then I'd give it 90% likelihood they they announce a shutdown within 10 years.

Whether or not they'll continue to lose billions a year for Google I can't say.

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

#70

Post by r3trohack3r »

latchkey wrote: post #53
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.

Has Cloud Functions solved their logging issues yet?

Last I checked, the lifetime of the function was bound to the lifetime of the request. So you have to fully flush your logs to their log ingress service before you respond to a request, otherwise GCP will suspend the function and eat your logs.

Originally, this resulted in me having - to my surprise - very few logs coming from my functions.

Once I discovered what was going on, it resulted in me having to increase the latency of responding to the request while I waited for logging to flush to GCP's log ingress service.

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